Nicky Harman

Literary translator.

London, UK

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Nicky Harman lives in the UK and works as a literary translator as well as giving occasional talks and running workshops on translation. She has just (December 2011) completed a three-month stint as the London Free Word Centre’s Translator-in-Residence.

Upcoming Work:

two short stories for Comma Press "Tales from Ten Cities" series, by Han Dong and Ding Liying, 2012

Novel by Yan Geling, Flowers of Nanjing as filmed by Zhang Yimou, to be published by Chatto and Windus, January 2012

Anthology of poems by Han Dong, to be published by Zephyr Press, January 2012

Published Translations:

Prize-winning novel Gold Mountain Blues/Jin Shan by Zhang Ling, published by Penguin Canada and Atlantic Books (UK).

Short stories for Ou Ning's Shenzhen & Hong Kong Bi-city Biennale of Urbanism/Architecture, 2009, and literary magazine Chutzpah, 2010 and 2011.

Message from Unknown Chinese Mothers (Author: Xinran), Chatto & Windus, 2010.

China Witness (author: Xinran), oral history Co-translator with Esther Tyldesley and Julia Lovell. Chatto & Windus , 2008.

Banished! (author: Han Dong) (《扎根韩东), novel. University of Hawai’i Press, 2009. Won a PEN Translation Fund Award (2006) for this work. Longlisted for Man Asian Literary Prize, 2008.

‘Long Corridor, Short Song’ (author: Zi Ren, in To Pierce the Material Screen: An Anthology of 20th Century HK Literature, to be pub. Renditions, Hong Kong 2008); (《长廊的短调梓人) short story.

China Along the Yellow River (author: Prof. Cao Jinqing, pub. Routledge Curzon, December 2004); (《黄河边的中国曹锦清) sociology of rural China.

K – The Art of Love (author: Hong Ying, pub. Marion Boyars, 2002); (《K》 虹影) novel.

Research publications:

What's that got to do with anything? Coherence and the translation of relative clauses from Chinese. In Journal of Specialised Translation (www.jostrans.org) issue 13, January 2010

Foreign Culture, Foreign Style: a Translator’s View of Modern Chinese Fiction. In Perspectives: Studies in Translatology 14(1): 13-31. (2006).

Beyond Paper Dictionaries: Mining the Web for Technical Terminology in Chinese (available from http://isg.urv.es/cttt/cttt/research.html, or on request from NH).

Visiting Fellow at the Research Centre for Translation at Chinese University Hong Kong, April 2006. Visiting Scholar, Fudan University and Beijing University, China, 2008.

 

Nicky's sample translations:

 

August 2008

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New fiction, new translated fiction

Richard Lea at the Guardian newspaper (UK) has some new "Original Writing" on China in the Books online section.
On 25 August 2008: China reflected: Hari Kunzru kicks off a series of new short stories by Chinese and British writers with the tale of some very partisan pandas. Those of us who attended the Moganshan Literary Translation workshops in March 2008 will find that Hari (who also attended as a visiting writer) has set his lovely and funny story in a place which uncannily resembles Moganshan!

And two weeks earlier, on 11 August, my translated excerpt from Jia Pingwa's new novel Happy (Gaoxing) appeared. Lets hope that features like this attract publishers' attention...

By Nicky Harman, August 26, 10:56a.m.

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Excerpt from Han Dong's Banished! 《扎根》

Han Dong's book 《扎根》 (published in 2009 as Banished!, was long-listed for the 2008 Man Asian Literary Prize.
There were a number of things which convinced me I wanted to translate Banished! I liked the fact you can read the novel at different levels. He describes village life carefully, sometimes lovingly, but there is an underlying sense of political tension. There is humor, often scatological, but the depiction towards the end of the book of Tao, the frustrated writer, is bitter and painful. The language is occasionally lyrical but usually appears quite plain; then again, there are parts which are enigmatic to say the least, especially when they come from the unnamed ‘I’ voice. The emotional relationships are understated, but there is real warmth in the adults’ protectiveness of the child, young Tao, and the latter’s feelings for his father. I hope that this excerpt at least gives a flavor of some of these qualities.

More…

By Nicky Harman, August 1, 10:01a.m.

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