By Eric Abrahamsen, October 13, '15
I'm very nearly late with this, but Diao Dou will be at the Free Word Centre in London today, October 12th, at 7pm, talking about his new collection, Points of Origin, translated by Brendan O'Kane and published by Comma Press.
This link is the place to get all the information about the event – take a look, and attend if you can!
CONGRATULATIONS!
The American Literary Translators Association (ALTA) has just published its 2015 NTA shortlists in Poetry and Prose. Winners to be announced at the annual ALTA conference, in Tucson, AZ, Oct. 28-31, 2015.
Given China’s Nobel complex, it’s always interesting to see how the media reports on the newest winners. Year after year, those trouble-makers in Stockholm put the spotlight on the wrong sort of people, such as China’s own Liu Xiaobo (now serving time in a Chinese prison), Gao Xingjian — the China-born-and-raised author the state refuses to recognize as Chinese — and foreigners such as dissident writer Herta Müller, who wrote about the gulags.
So what is China’s media saying about Belarus’ 斯韦特兰娜·阿列克谢耶维奇 (Svetlana Alexievich)? It’s still early days, and we can expect more reportage and commentary soon. But that’s what makes the initial pronouncements significant; the state’s cultural spin doctors may not yet be sure how politically correct — or incorrect — she is.
Includes links to free excerpts from her Boys in Zinc, Voices from Chernobyl and The Wondrous Deer of the Eternal Hunt.
Ms Bryant became well-known on the local literary scene after she translated local writer and Cultural Medallion winner Chew Kok Chang's short stories about Singaporeans' experiences abroad in Other Cities, Other Lives for Epigram Books in 2013, followed by In Time, Out Of Place, a collection of travel stories by You Jin, another Cultural Medallion winner, earlier this year. They came after her successful translations of three novels by Chinese writer Sheng Keyi, namely Northern Girls and Fields Of White for Penguin Books, and Death Fugue for Giramondo Books.
The Bookworm bookstore chain has launched a literary magazine, a new writer’s prize and will begin publishing English translations of Chinese novels next year.
By Helen Wang, October 6, '15
Chad W Post and two interns have been adding the author's gender to his database of translated fiction published for the first time in the US between 2008 and 2014. Here's the weblink to Chad's report.
Total figures: 2471 fiction translations, of which 657 were written by women, and 39 by both men and women. Percentage of female authors: 26.6%.
For poetry collections, it’s 169/571 collections by women (29.6%).
For China it's 76 male authors, 21 female authors (20%)
By David Haysom, October 3, '15
Yan — one of China’s most celebrated authors — gave a talk entitled “Literature and Censorship in Contemporary China” Friday at the John Hope Franklin Center.... “Politics determines everything, so our language and literature is determined by politics,” he said.
Chinese Literature Today Book Series, 10 December 2015. Edited by Ou Ning and Austin Woerner.
A while back I stumbled upon a short Chinese news item about a newly discovered handwritten manuscript of the Kyrgyz Epic of Manas (玛纳斯史诗) in Xinjiang. This centuries-old trilogy in verse recounts the exploits of the legendary hero Manas, and his son and grandson in their struggle to resist external enemies and unite the Kyrgyz people. Along with heroic tales such as Dede Korkut and the Epic of Köroğlu, Manas is considered one of the great Turkic epic poems.
Blog post by Alan Baumler: "It is a nice story that touches on lots of things in modern Chinese society. One thing about it that I liked as a historian is that while it does a nice jobs of showing (and resenting) class distinction there is a certain nostalgia to Third Space, where people are together and it is more 热闹 and you can get stinky dofu (not available in First Space.) Hao is not the first to note how class distinctions are also time distinctions, with the poor stuck in the past, but it is a good example."
Translated by Lawrence A. Walker, published online 21 Sept 2015
By Bruce Humes, September 18, '15
Over the last few years, the veil has been partially lifted on what has been China’s long-running and most coveted literary set of awards for the novel, the Mao Dun Literature Prize, which is awarded once every four years. You can bone up on the scandals behind this and other awards here if you like.
The Beijing Daily has just published an interesting article (茅奖销售) which details “before and after” sales figures, queries authors on how winning the award has affected their work, and concludes with a brief overview of 1982-2015 winning titles by literary critic Bai Ye (白烨).
Sales of Funeral of a Muslim (穆斯林的葬礼, 霍达著), Huo Da’s classic saga of a Hui family in Beijing that spans the turbulent years of the Japanese invasion, World War II and part of the Cultural Revolution, have now topped three million copies, according to a press conference held in the capital on September 11.
Considered globally, moreover, Confucius, Laozi and, to a lesser extent, the other major ancient Chinese philosophers have been enormously influential — probably more influential in East Asia than Socrates, Plato and Aristotle have been in the West.
BBC Radio4 - Open Book - podcast (from 26:52, lasts about three minutes). He mentions Yu Xiuhua, Jin Yuchong, Lu Yao, Mo Yan, Yu Hua, Ma Yuan, Hong Fen, Sun Ganlu.
Ezra Pound’s “The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter” is a translation and was part of the redefinition of Chinese poetry and Chinese culture in English in the early twentieth century. The Love Poems of Marichiko were an attempt at an imagined empathy with a cultural other, the poems narrating a passion with an unknown lover that dissolves boundaries as the passion dissolves as well. And the Araki Yasusada phenomenon undermined our prevailing notions of authorship to expose and critique the cultural double standards at work in the American poetry industry.
Yi-Fen Chou, on the other hand, looks motivated by a desire to take advantage of the prevailing notions of authorship and our double standards in the American poetry industry. And this is why I’m thinking of Ronald Reagan.
…
The Reagan era was when American poetry of all stripes turned inward, as if mirroring not only the government’s xenophobia, but its configuring of trade into a neo-liberal assertion of American dominance, now called globalization ... The lack of interest in engaging with the culture he names and his use of a minority name to get published make him "Yi-Fen Chou" the poetic equivalent of the domestic and international policies of the Reagan presidency.
Hudson, who is white, wrote in his bio for the anthology that he chose the Chinese-sounding nom de plume after The Bees was rejected by 40 different journals when submitted under his real name. He figured that the poem might have a better shot at publication if it was written by somebody else.
. . . But Hudson’s critics said the literary bait-and-switch was fraudulent and racist.
“When you’re doing this from a position of entitlement, you’re appropriating an ethnic identity that’s one, imaginary, and two, doesn’t have access to the literary world,” poet and Chapman University professor Victoria Chang said.
In Fantasy & Science Fiction, 26 March 2015.
In fact, since 2014 many publishers and state bodies have been hard at work helping to extend China’s reach into West Asia, the Middle East and North Africa via various publications projects. Here’s a quick list for reference . . .
Xu Yunfeng (pen-name She Congge) is one of the hottest names in the digital serialisation of fiction – where chapters are posted online under a pay-as-you-read system. And his fans don't like to be kept waiting.
I was invited to the “2015 Sino-foreign Literature Translation & Publishing Workshop” (2015 中外文学翻译研修班) that just ended in Beijing, but didn’t make it. It looks like it was a major happening with more than 50 translation and publishing professionals attending from 30+ countries.
I suggested beforehand to the organizers that they discuss how to increase the overseas profile of China’s non-Han authors, and apparently they did . . .
Liu offers a view into creating visions of the future and addresses how he feels about being a pioneer in the development of science fiction in China. A translated excerpt of an interview he recently gave to Caixin follows.
Hui Faye Xiao' s Family Revolution: Marital Strife in Contemporary Chinese Literature and Visual Culture. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2014. 224 pp. $75.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-295-99349-2; $30.00 (paper), ISBN 978-0-295-99350-8.
Reviewed by Ping Zhu (University of Oklahoma) Published on H-Asia (August, 2015) Commissioned by Douglas Slaymaker
The China Bookworm Literary Award was initiated in January 2015 to select a previously unpublished novel by a mainland Chinese writer. Entries for the award came from both published and unpublished writers across the country and covered a broad range of topics and styles. The judging panel for the award was made up of three distinguished literary figures – Guo Xiaolu (A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers, I Am China), Karen Ma (Excess Baggage) and Eric Abrahamsen (Pathlight Magazine) – all of whom have worked with both Chinese- and English-language literature, as well as literary translations.
1st prize: Wang Zhezhu's The Train That Came to Its End
2nd prize: Li Ziyue’s I Am in the Red Chamber, You are on the Journey to the West
3rd prize: Lin Weipan’s When A Cloud Meets A Sheet of Paper
The 50-year-old was surprised to find the expanded edition of his collection of essays－A Dictionary of Xinjiang－sold out in months after it was published in October 2014, and that Shanghai Literature and Art Publishing House had to reprint more copies for this year's book fair in the city.
In A Dictionary, Shen uses 111 entries to represent his experience and understanding of the region's history, geography, plants, animals, landscapes, products, arts and literature.
Eleanor Goodman, an American poet and Sinologist, says Shen has genuinely represented the "spiritual geography" of innermost Asia. Her selected translation of the book also won her a literary award in 2013 by the US magazine Ninth Letter.
By Eric Abrahamsen, August 24, '15
Congrats to Liu Cixin and Ken Liu, whose joint product volume one of The Three Body Problem just won the 2015 Hugo Award in the novel category. This book just won't stop!
Includes links to excerpts and/or introductions to short stories, novels and a bit of poetry whose themes touch on cultures of the Evenki, Hui, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Manchu, Mongolian, Lisu, Miao, Oirat, Seediq, Tibetan, Uyghur, Xiongnu and Yi peoples. Many of the pieces, but not all, were penned by writers of these non-Han ethnicities. For the most part, the original is in Chinese and the translation is in English. But I've also included a handful of renditions into French, Spanish and Japanese.
By Jeffrey Wasserstrom. "What if Yu Hua had become the first Chinese author, still based in China, to win a Nobel Prize for Literature? And, secondly, was Mark Twain a dissident?
I’ve been pondering this pair of questions about two of my favorite authors since November 2012..."
Ha Jin is much more an immigrant who has found his place in the United States than an exile or a dissident. He has written a novel of very high standard but he warns us for the future: "To be a professional writer, it’s like becoming an athlete. You have to perform constantly, you have to jump higher and higher although you know that’s impossible."
Three state-level visits in last twelve months have created an atmosphere of positive enterprise. ... But is the Indian publishing industry paying heed? If the participation in national book fairs an indication, no: the sole Chinese presence at the 2015 New Delhi book fair was one Bob Song, president of Royal Collins, China. Meanwhile, the Beijing International Book Fair saw an average of only 3-5 Indian publishers in each of the last five years. Where is the trade happening, if at all?
By Eric Abrahamsen, August 20, '15
As Bruce has already noted, Paper Republic is helping the Beijing International Book Fair plan a series of literary events during the book fair in Beijing next week. It's a relatively small affair, but we've had fun with it, and I think have some very nice events on the way.
Do note: These events are aimed at a Chinese-speaking audience, and most will not cater to English-speakers!
You can see the full event schedule, plus our awesome posters (designed by Sun Xiaoxi, about whom more later), at this link.
Events we're particularly excited about include a few with Alan Lee, illustrator of The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, a conversation between Enrique Vila-Matas and Ge Fei, a writing workshop with Simon Van Booy, and a discussion about the future of publishing in China with folks from Guoren and Douban. But there's a lot going on in there, check out the link!
Lastly, one event that didn't make it into the official schedule, but which I'm very enthusiastic about, is a talk with author and poet Wang Xiaoni and editor Li Jing, about Wang's short story collection 1966. That's happening Sunday, August 30th, at 3pm, at the One Way Street Aiqinhai location, and shouldn't be missed.
By Avery Fischer Udagawa, Bangkok Last month I attended Asian Festival of Children’s Content (AFCC) 2015 as a delegate. I enjoyed exploring Chinese literature for children, as China was the country of focus.
Organised by The Select Centre in partnership with Writers' Centre Norwich, the Translators Lab provides excellent tutelage in a supportive environment. Whether you are tackling literary translation for the first time, or you have already started but want extra guidance, this 8-week course is for you. It will run from 12 Sep – 2 Nov, 2015.
By Bruce Humes, August 19, '15
Nice to see that the BIBF (Aug 26-29) has fairly attractive Chinese and English sections to its new-look web site, both of which – congrats! – are already up and functioning here.
But as I glanced through it, it reminded me of my first trip to the New China in 1981. When my father and I went for breakfast with our tour group at Shanghai’s Old Jinjiang Hotel, we were immediately forced to choose: Chinese cuisine at this table, Western at the other. Naturally, I dragged him along with me to the Chinese table — after all, it was my first meal in China! But when I tried to order a cup of coffee for my father, the waiter snapped: “If you want coffee, sit at the Western table!”
By Bruce Humes, August 14, '15
I have noticed that many of the promising new books about China's ethnic minorities -- their history, culture, and even award-winning short stories and novels by ethnic authors -- to which I call attention in my blog are just about impossible to track down and purchase. They are publicized in a press release duly carried word-for-word on certain politically correct web sites, and then fall off the radar.
A Manchu grad student in Beijing explained it to me thus:
在中国，有些书出版就不是为了阅读，或者说不是为了买给市场为大家提供阅读的。
Two modern masters of the surreal discuss the power of literary absurdism in this one-off event. Diao Dou is arguably China’s most daring contemporary satirist, writing poetry, short stories and novels. His first collection in English, Point of Origin, is a stunning display of high wire literary acrobatics.
Entitled 萨满神歌 (lit., sacred songs of the shaman), they offer praise mainly to mothers, and the spirits of mountains and rivers. Such songs are passed on orally and rarely written down.
Shaman and their lyrics do occasionally appear in 21st-century Chinese fiction, however. For example, here are three novels . . .
Author: Jeffrey C. Kinkley
Reviewer: Nathaniel Isaacson
Jeffrey C. Kinkley, Visions of Dystopia in China's New Historical Novels, New York: Columbia University Press, 2014. ISBN 978-0-231-16768-0.
We are thrilled to announce that our Summer 2015 issue (Asia and Australia, a Shared Hemisphere) has been released! Free preview articles (including a peek inside the hearts and minds of agents at a Philippine call center, and an essay that struggles with Indonesia's tumultuous political history) and our editorial are here.
List of 21 titles from 2012. Time for an update?
In this ongoing series about the translation of Chinese literature, we invited some Sinologists to share with us their observations about how Chinese literature is received in their countries, their opinions on the promotion of Chinese literature and their stories during their translation. In this article, we invited Annelous Stiggelbout to talk over these issues.
Reeson Education is looking for a Chinese Teacher for one of our client schools in South-West London. This is a part-time, permanent position of Chinese A (Literature) to teach in the IB Diploma and IB MYP programmes. As an international school, there are a number of native Mandarin speakers who wish to study Chinese literature as part of their IB Diploma.
Jeremy Tiang awarded NEA Literary Translation Fellowship to translate Taiwanese writer Lo Yi-Chin's novel Far Away.
By Eric Abrahamsen, August 5, '15
The Beijing International Book Fair, which takes place annually at the end of August, has always been primarily a publishing event – domestic and international publishing houses trading their wares. This year, with the help of Paper Republic, the BIBF is growing an additional limb: the Literary Salons, a small, reader-focused literary festival taking place alongside the publishing event.
Between August 22nd and 30th, Chinese and international writers will appear in more than a dozen literary events within Beijing, most taking place at the One Way Street Space.
We'll be announcing a full schedule in the next week or so, but expect to see Enrique Vila-Matas in conversation with Ge Fei, Alan Lee discussing his illustrations for The Lord of the Rings, Feng Tang reading poetry, and much more. Stay tuned!
Xinhua: The organizers of one of China's top literary awards have set up a team to supervise the judging process and make sure it is fair and free of corruption . . .
A farmer in northeast China's Heilongjiang Province has written a novel based on oral accounts by forced laborers in the notorious Japanese army Unit 731 in Harbin, the provincial capital. Ju Bingnan, 64, spent six years writing the 800,000-word work named "Heibao," the name of Unit 731 before 1942. It was a top-secret biological and chemical warfare research base at the center of Japan's biological warfare in China and Southeast Asia during WWII. Ju donated his books to the district government of Pingfang, where the remains of Unit 731 are located, last week, as a gift ahead of the upcoming anniversary of the end of WWII.
New essay by Dorothy Tse, translated by Michael Day
By Helen Wang, July 31, '15
"One of Livings’ interesting techniques is switching point of view at multiple junctures within his stories, often just for a sentence or two, so that the reader slips out of a protagonist’s thoughts for an instant and sees him or her from the outside, as others might. The habit is at first disorienting, but, slowly, the disorientation gains a strength. By the end of the collection, it feels like an artistic credo of sorts: a belief in seeing things from all angles." -- Review by Jonathan Lee in The Guardian, 16 July 2015
