It's time once again for the Mao Dun literary prize, so dear to the official heart of the Chinese literary scene. Never mind that everyone whose opinion we respect snorts in disdain at the very mention of this prize (which is administered by the Writers Association) it's still a literary event.
To get the suspense out of the way, there were four winners of this year's prize, which considered full-length works of fiction published between 2002 and 2006: Jia Pingwa's Qinqiang (秦腔, Qin Opera), generally considered the 'big winner', Chi Zijian's E'erguna He You'an (额尔古纳河右岸, The Right Bank of the Arguna River), Zhou Daxin's Huguang Shanse (湖光山色, Pastorale) and Mai Jia's Ansuan (暗算, Plotting).
The official announcement of the prize is awfully Marxist (for once the low-hanging fruit can stay right where it is), but there have been other, more thoughtful responses on-line.
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By Eric Abrahamsen, October 30, 3:17p.m.
After what has felt like a long, long month of translating crap, I snuck over to a non-work-related short story this evening and chewed on the first paragraph. It's called 玻璃酿 — which might conceivably mean 'Glass Fermentation', or could have a particular meaning I'm unaware of — and it's something Zhao Song at the Heilan website recommended to me; you can read the original here.
The first sentence is pretty standard short-story-ese, but it presents greater challenges to translation than simply locating a dictionary with the word "open-cut coal seam" in it, and that alone is cause for celebration:
午后三点的光线延长了松针的阴影。
Roughly: the light of three in the afternoon lengthens or draws out the shadows of the pine needles. There's a nice balance and rhythm to the sentence: split in half, with the second half turning on the verb 延长 (lengthen). There's a parallelism between 光线 (light) and 阴影 (shadow), each set at the end of their respective possessive phrases. The sentence as a whole has a nice clumping rhythm which I can only describe as trochaic sextameter (I looked that up): 'DUM-dum DUM-dum da-DUM-dum, DUM-dum da-DUM-dum da-DUM-dum'. Here are some candidates:
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By Eric Abrahamsen, October 14, 11:36a.m.
The following is a translation of this Chinese article, which appeared a few weeks ago, about Yan Lianke's newest novel Fengyasong (Elegy and Academe), a satire of academia and university life in China. The book drew heavy fire from some quarters, particularly professors at the universities to which the book alludes. The fictional 'Qingyan University' within the book is an amalgamation of China's two top universities: Qinghua and Peking Univeristy (the latter was once called Yanjing University).
The book that offended Peking University
"I think the critics at Peking University are being too sensitive." Yan Lianke's eyes are bloodshot, his face sallow, he looks exhausted.
No sooner had Yan Lianke's novel Elegy and Academe been published by the Jiangsu People's Publishing House than it elicited intense counterattack from the faculty and students of Peking University. Sharply-worded posts appeared on the internet one after the other: "I'm livid: Yan Lianke slanders Peking University in Elegy and Academe", "I've burnt Yan Lianke's Elegy and Academe!". Criticisms of the book by some Peking University critics were also published in newspapers; they felt that Yan Lianke had used fiction to "cast aspersions on Peking University, slander the humanist traditions of higher education, and to wantonly demonize intellectuals at institutes of higher education."
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By Eric Abrahamsen, October 8, 9:29a.m.
The Newman Prize for Chinese Literature is a new prize for Chinese writing sponsored by the University of Oklahoma's Institute for US-China Issues. Mo Yan has won the inaugural round, which you can read about here. From the home page:
The Newman Prize for Chinese Literature is awarded biennially in recognition of outstanding achievement in prose or poetry that best captures the human condition, and is conferred solely on the basis of literary merit. Any living author writing in Chinese (residing anywhere) is eligible. The Prize consists of $10,000 and a plaque, and may serve to crown a lifetime’s achievement or to direct attention to a developing body of work. An international jury of distinguished experts will both nominate the candidates and select the winner, based on a transparent voting process.
By Eric Abrahamsen, October 2, 7:12a.m.
The Xinhua News Agency, as it is wont to do, brings us fresh cause to despair: the hot new literay trend is here, and it is 'writing groups' or 'bands' (写作组合), cabals of scribblers analogous to the boy-bands or girl-bands that dominate the pop music world. These writing groups are mostly in the under-twenty age-range, mostly writing in imitation of 'older' celebrity writers like Han Han. Apparently it all started in 2006, when Li Ze (李锋) at the World Knowledge Press (世界知识出版社) published Water Town (水城), a novel by a pair of girls then aged 18 and 19, who called themselves Jumping Orange Writing. They were followed by the three members of Girls' Studio (女生作坊) (the youngest of whom is 16), Lollipop (棒棒糖) (middle school students), and Unknown Quantity (未知数) (elementary school students). As the article cheerfully notes, many of these groups only ever publish one book, or break up without having published anything at all.
Is this curtains for serious Chinese literature? I've done plenty of hand-wringing myself in the past few years, but at a certain point, when pop culture has got its claws deep enough into literature, it seems likely that literature will pull a Trojan Horse, and start to transform pop culture from the inside out. Among all these scribbling teens there must be a few who, fifteen years from now, at the age of 29 or 30, will start to feel the itch of dissatisfaction and wonder if they shouldn't be trying for something a little deeper. From the melodramatic, sentimental mush that's being produced today, it's only a few short steps to a Chinese Dickens, and once you've got a Chinese Dickens, well… there's nowhere you can't go.
Wishful thinking, perhaps, but if these trends keep up I'm going to renounce all snooty puritanism, and whole-heartedly embrace this new era of sloppy literary love. Not actually read the books, mind you, just 'embrace the era'.
By Eric Abrahamsen, October 2, 5:28a.m.
