As usual, we have assembled a list of book-length translations from Chinese into English over the year. Congratulations to all authors and translators! This year’s list is longer than ever, and several books have won international prizes. Your additions, comments, corrections to this list are welcome - please leave a comment below and we’ll update the list. This is our fifth annual list; previous lists are here: 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015...........
In 2015 and 2016, Paper Republic were honourable runners-up. Asymptote won in 2015, Words without Borders in 2016. Anyone can nominate any group/collective/organization...so to put in your nominations, see below.
The London Book Fair and UK Publishers Association are seeking entries from non-UK organisations for The Literary Translation Initiative Award at the LBF International Excellence Awards. Closing date is 15 December 2016.
Organisations that have succeeded in raising the profile of literature in translation, promoting literary translators, and encouraging new translators and translated works should apply/be nominated.
Who is eligible? Any company or organisation operating outside the UK, whose scope of achievement is outside the UK.
This is a great opportunity to follow in some illustrious footsteps, to be recognised by your peers and get some good publicity for your company. The shortlist for the awards will be unveiled in February and the winner announced at a gala awards event on Tuesday 14 March, during LBF.
To enter or learn more about the awards go to www.londonbookfair.co.uk/awards
The Chinese name of the grant (《上海翻译出版促进计划》翻译资助) translates more literally as the "Shanghai Translation Publishing Promotion Scheme translation grant". The terms and conditions can be found here. Details of the winners of 2016 Shanghai Translation Grant can be found here.
You may never know for sure
After this gust of wind,
There isn't going to be more…
Of course, the wind blows.
What I meant to ask is this:
What has a gust of wind done to your hair?
Has it knocked you down on the ground?
Or has it uprooted you in the mid air,
crushed your bones and made
your liver, stomach, intestine and lung
stormed down like bullets
hard hitting on that roof top?
Bring up the name Xue Yiwei in China and millions and millions of people, from professors to factory workers, know exactly who you are talking about. He is one of the country's best known and most celebrated writers. His novels and short story collections are bestsellers: contemporary classics. Ha Jin, the award-winning Chinese American writer has called Xue Yiwei a "maverick ...who stays alone and aloof, far from the restive crowds back in his homeland." Far indeed.
At China Reading, about 70 per cent of our revenue is from e-reading via mobile apps and websites. The company owns nine e-reading platforms with a combined 600 million registered readers. They pay for VIP chapters after reading some parts free of charge. We share the income with authors. We had 4 million contract authors last year and more than 10,000 writers are joining the ranks annually. We pay around 80 million yuan (HK$90 million) a month in copyright fees to the authors. Popular writers could earn as much as 500,000 yuan a month.
To understand the dynamics of Sino-African cultural exchanges better we did a survey of Chinese literature available in translation across Africa.
The results are far from exhaustive. They suggest that the strategy has had limited success. But they also highlight isolated cases that exemplify the potential for mutual enrichment.
The research suggests that the translation of Chinese literature in Africa primarily fulfils a ceremonial and diplomatic function. The ceremonies around book donations to African libraries are a key example. Much more needs to be done to generate meaningful cultural interaction and exchange.
By the River: Seven Contemporary Chinese Novellas is now available from Oklahoma University Press. Co-edited by Charles A. Laughlin, Liu Hongtao and Jonathan Stalling, this is the first collection to present novellas by multiple contemporary authors, and includes an introductory essay on the novella in China by Laughlin with Liu Hongtao. The stories are Jiang Yun's "The Beloved Tree" (蒋韵，《心爱的树》, Laughlin), Xu Zechen's "Voice Change" (徐则臣，《苍声》，Laughlin), Han Shaogong's "Mountain Songs from the Heavens" (韩少功，《山歌天上来》，Lucas Klein), Chi Zijian's "A Flurry of Blessings" (迟子建，《福翩翩》，Eleanor Goodman), Fang Fang's "Love and its Lack are Emblazoned on the Heart" (方方，《有爱无爱都是铭心刻骨》，Goodman), Li Tie's "Safety Bulletin" (李铁，《安全简报》，Laughlin), and Wang Anyi's "The Sanctimonious Cobbler" (王安忆，《骄傲的皮匠》，Andrea Lingenfelter). More details are available in the Amazon.com listing.
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
. . . 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”
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):
