By Nicky Harman, November 20, '16
Remember that page squirreled away on the P R home page, called: FAQ for Translators?
Well, it's been updated here
Thanks to Dongmei for supplying some handy information on signing with a Chinese publisher.
By Helen Wang, November 19, '16
Yan Ge 颜歌 will be at the China Changing event at the Southbank Centre, London, on 16 December.
Here, Martina Codeluppi introduces a Young Adult story by Yan Ge, writes about her experience of translating Yan Ge's work into Italian, and interviews Yan Ge and translator Nicky Harman, who has translated Yan Ge's work into English.
For Chinese authors, the question of writing on the city is extremely important. There are many other writers like me who were born in the countryside and moved to big cities. I left my hometown at sixteen, I lived for twenty years in Shanghai, and then I lived for sixteen years in Beijing. Authors like us have spent most of our lives in cities. This is a question I put to my students on a regular basis, and many of them have said our fundamental experiences are still tied to the countryside. But I had one student who gave me a different answer that’s particularly correct—he said that fundamentally China has always been built around rural value systems, and therefore cities are still unfamiliar to us. We don’t understand them. Writing The Invisibility Cloak, I made a point of going to southern Beijing, walking around the streets, memorizing the images, the scenes, understanding what went where, and what was there. I was inspired by a great critic who pointed out if you’re going to write about the city, you have to write about a specific place—you can’t write purely on the basis of your imagination alone.
Zhang Xinxin's artwork - the banner image for the new blog "Chinese books for young readers" - appears without permission or acknowledgement (or even a caption) in Wen yi bao's 《文艺报》feature on the state of China's children's book publishing, "How much gold in the 'Golden Decade'?" #picturesmeanbusiness
By Eric Abrahamsen, November 16, '16
We've put together a little video retrospective of last August's Beijing International Book Fair Literary Salons, you can see the video below.
It's a bit bittersweet, coming soon after the Bookworm Literary Festival announced its own difficulties. These are hard times for art and culture in China, and we hope to see them back on their feet soon!
Questions from both Chinese and non-Chinese audience members inspired robust debate, proving that the job of a literary translator – especially from Chinese to English – is certainly no walk in the park.
By David Haysom, November 10, '16
Megacity Fictions aims to investigate how writers and artists are responding to vast cityscapes which mutate and spread at unparalleled rates, often displaying extremes of global wealth and poverty; vertical towers built on new economic wealth surrounded by sprawls of immigrant slums. Submissions in creative non-fiction, fiction, ficto-critical writing and photography, exploring particular megacities, or the concept of massive urban hubs in general, are all invited.
If you're interested in submitting work or volunteering your services as a translator then you can get in touch by email (megacityfictions@gmail.com), or via the form at the Megacity Fictions page here.
Metropolises such as Shanghai, Beijing and Guangzhou are all fairly well represented in fiction... but what about the likes of Wuhan and Tianjin? Any ideas?
Martina Codeluppi on Ha Jin's A Free Life" and Ma Jian's The Dark Road". In English, with abstract in French.
With the success of Cixin Liu’s Three-Body trilogy, and the launch of Ken Liu’s Invisible Planets this week, the interest in Chinese Science Fiction is bound to grow. This short history of the long march of Chinese SF provides an insider’s account of the many forces that have shaped, sustained, and led to its emergence as a new global phenomenon.
Beyond the simple exaggerations of rapid urbanization, there are elements of the fantastical in The Explosion Chronicles. As Yan explains in an afterword, his approach is not one of realism but of mythorealism, the: "product of contemporary China's incomprehensible absurdity". He suggests the only way of conveying and representing it is through this mythorealism, and it is a fairly effective approach.
My suspicion is that there are a lot of people out there like me — people who are being held back not so much by the difficulty of learning Chinese, as by the difficulty of finding things to read in Chinese, so that we can actually get the practice we need to become (and stay) functionally literate.
Ignorance and apathy are self-perpetuating, of course: The less one reads in Chinese, the harder it is to pick up a book or story to read casually.
[...]
Setting aside, for the moment, questions of censorship and literary merit (which seem to, somewhat conveniently, to do double duty as pitches for dissident lit), genre fiction—particularly short fiction—provides interesting examples of ‘marginal’ or ‘weird’ literature: the queer, the dystopian, the creepy.
The trick is finding it.
By David Haysom, October 29, '16
December 6th: Poetry Translation Centre – Translation Workshop at the Free Word Centre
December 12th: Dragonworld – Speed bookclubbing at the Free Word Centre
December 16th: China Changing Festival at the Southbank Centre
There are many things you can’t write about in China. Anything that challenges the official accounts of Mao Zedong and other prominent Communist Party officials is forbidden. So, too, are works that touch on the Great Famine, the Cultural Revolution or the Tiananmen Square massacre.
记者：您觉得，对于德国读者来说，最难以接受的是什么？在翻译过程中，您是怎么处理的？
林小发：德国读者最难接受的应该是关于佛教和道教的内容，因为这对于大部分读者来说是比较陌生的。比如说，“修行”这个词，对中国读者来说很普通的概念，德国读者却不能直接理解。但是我没有作任何删减，也没有做内容调整，而是做了适量的注解，帮助读者理解。另外，就是译文和原版的风格要尽可能的接近，这也包括行文的流畅程度以及诗词的韵律等。因此，我读了大量的德国经典作品来修炼自己的德语文笔，其中歌德的作品对我帮助很大。
. . . one American student argued that tianxia was a synonym for the word “imperialism,” as to him it implied ultimate subjugation to a stronger political entity. For Western readers who may often regard the nation-state as the foundation of modern international politics, the deeper nuances of tianxia can therefore be rather difficult to grasp.
“A warm, delightful book set in the countryside of China during the Cultural Revolution. Strong, well-drawn relationships, tough enough to survive anything, are at the heart of the story and carry the reader through great hardship. I only wish I had been able to go to school on the back of a buffalo! …The descriptions of Chinese life are totally authentic, and the novel is inspirational and moving”
By David Haysom, October 21, '16
Yes, China also noticed that Bob Dylan received the Nobel Prize for Literature.
It is akin to Cui Jian [崔健] receiving the prize, argues Zhang Yiwu [张颐武], a professor at Peking University. “This year’s Nobel Prize for Literature was a complete surprise, an unexpectedly novel approach – a Black Swan, even. Yes, Bob Dylan has been a global megastar of music since the 1960s, and he influenced the new social movements of the era. But it’s a bold move for a prize that has been a staid presence in the literary landscape for so many years. It’s certainly innovative. In the age of the internet, anything’s possible.”
[…]
Chen Xiaoming [陈晓明], another literary critic, has also remarked on the unexpectedness of the award. “Perhaps this is something to do with the personal tastes of the committee,” he suggests, “a moment of nostalgia. Or perhaps reading his biography reminded them of their own youths, like some kind of performance art. Or another possibility is that this is their way of encouraging people to pay less attention to the prize, to stop treating it with such reverance. You’re all expected us to give it to Adonis, well okay then, we’ll give it to Bob Dylan.”
—translated from 诺贝尔文学奖颁给音乐人 为什么是鲍勃·迪伦？
Here are a selection of responses from Chinese authors (collected from Weixin and Weibo by the Paper Republic team):
Last week’s Chinese Sci-Fi event at the London Literature festival was irresistible: I love science fiction and have a keen interest in the Far East. The star here was Cixin Liu, whose 2008 Hugo-awarded novel The Three-Body Problem is a huge best-seller in China and, since its English translation (Head of Zeus, 2015), beyond. (See Nature’s interview with its translator, sci-fi writer Ken Liu, here.) Liu’s fellow panellist was Xiaolu Guo, the award-winning, genre-defying Chinese novelist and filmmaker now living in Britain, whose works include the 2014 I Am China and 2012 UFO In Her Eyes.
By David Haysom, October 20, '16
Following a brief period of dormancy, Read Paper Republic will be reanimated next Thursday (just in time for Halloween!) with a limited run of six new tales in which death is merely the beginning of the story. Every week, one of these stories – populated with ghosts, memories, and otherworldly reincarnations – will be appearing right here, and they will be completely free to read.
We also have some upcoming events happening in London which we'll be announcing soon – watch this space...
"What young parents want their children to take away from stories needs to fit in with the increased diversity, equality, and confidence demanded of us today."
- Chen Jingnan, director and editor, Shanghai Education Television Station
By Bruce Humes, October 18, '16
Two events of interest, including one (2nd below) with Paper Republic's very secretive Eric Abrahamsen:
By Helen Wang, October 17, '16
Maybe it's time to check the Links page on this website? (scroll down to the bottom of your screen - if you're using a big screen, it's on bottom left)
"A rip-roaring Swiftian satire from a contemporary Chinese master"
The Explosion Chronicles. By Yan Lianke. Translated by Carlos Rojas. Grove Press; 457 pages; $26. To be published in Britain by Chatto & Windus in March 2017.
Anna Holmwood, who translated A Perfect Crime into English, says that the slim novel—which tells the story of a provincial high school student who murders his best friend in cold blood as his peers urgently prepare for the career-defining gaokao—reflects how Chinese authors are adapting modern Western literature to tell stories from their own modernizing society. “I think this is a story that puts the social and the individual into conflict to examine a very real problem in Chinese society: social exclusion,” says Holmwood. “I’m not sure if the story is taking a swing at traditionalism so much as throwing into focus what can happen when the individual becomes disassociated, or divorced, from social norms through discrimination and inequality. Chinese society is curiously scarred by its radical modernism as much as its traditionalism. The tensions between seemingly ‘traditional’ social norms and politicized social structures are fundamentally alienating for those who find themselves at the ‘bottom’ of society.”
Cao Wenxuan's acceptance speech at the Hans Christian Andersen Award ceremony in New Zealand, August 2016. Links to Chinese and English versions.
Join Xu Xi and Bino Realuyo to talk about Xu’s newly released novel That Man In Our Lives (C&R Press 2016). Bino and Xu will perform the book's prelude in a conversation on the transnational novel, metafiction, jazz and Bugs Bunny. Narrator, character, and oh yeah, real people themselves shapeshift in a conversation about the fate of the novel in the era of globalization and China’s ascendance.
Thursday, October 13, 2016 7:00pm
Asian American Writers' Workshop
112 W 27th Street
New York, New York 10001
The study will count and analyze the number, and diversity, of translated works published in the United States, focusing on factors including the languages and countries from which the works originate and the characteristics of the publishers publishing them. By focusing on these factors, the NBF hopes to translators, publishers, and readers with data on the availability and range of translated books in the American marketplace.
One of the world’s great poets, Bei Dao 北岛, was shocked when his son, then in first grade, brought home a poem he was to learn by heart for a Hong Kong schools competition... He resolved that day to create an anthology of poems for his son and other children, and this book is the result. 北岛选编《给孩子的诗》
By Eric Abrahamsen, October 7, '16
Ge Fei's new English novel, The Invisibility Cloak, translated by our own Canaan Morse, is out next week, published by The New York Review of Books Press next week. Ge Fei is visiting the Big Apple and environs, and those of you in Manhattan or Brooklyn have three chances to see him talk about his new book!
The first event is at Columbia University on October 12th (Wednesday) starting at 4pm, where Ge Fei will be joined by Canaan to discuss the book.
Then later that evening (October 12th, 7pm) Ge Fei appears at the Community Bookstore in Brooklyn, in conversation with Michael Barron.
Lastly, he'll be at the China Institute on the 13th (Thursday) at 6:30pm, with Zhang Xudong.
If you're in town, take the opportunity to see Ge Fei talk! He's a great writer, a great big brain, and a wonderful speaker.
