Our News, Your News
By Bruce Humes, December 25, '15
Once again, we are reminded that poetry matters in China. And, equally interesting, that translation of poetry matters.
Feng Tang, author of Beijing, Beijing (北京北京 冯唐著), has apparently crossed the lines of decency with his new translation of verse by China's favorite foreign poet, Rabindranath Tagore. Just in case the world didn't know about this travesty, the Party's English mouthpiece, China Daily, has published an essay, Lust in Translation, about the “testosterone-driven” translator's very personal take on the work of this Bengali poet.
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Letter from Charles A Laughlin, vis MCLC
Dear Colleagues:
I have a visiting scholar named Hua Meng here from Tongji University in Shanghai, who is doing survey work on the impact of modern and contemporary Chinese literature in the US (in translation, mostly). He has been surveying groups around UVA but needs more respondents, so if you could pass these three short surveys along to your students or others who might be interested and willing to complete them, we would greatly appreciate it. He will likely be publishing his results within the year (in Chinese), and I will let you know when he does. I have looked over and helped him revise these surveys, and I can see they will only take a few minutes to fill out. Thank you for your support!
https://zh.surveymonkey.com/r/XWS55PW
https://zh.surveymonkey.com/r/XSC259B
https://zh.surveymonkey.com/r/XS62D8L
Asymptote Journal editor-in-chief, Lee Yew Leong, conducted a Skype interview with Nicky Harman, one of the founders of this new initiative, Read Paper Republic, to find out more.
Great piece by Dave Haysom in China Dialogue - read it in English or Chinese (隐士与蝴蝶：自然写作在中国的回潮)
By Helen Wang, December 4, '15
Programme below. Contact elisabeth DOT forster AT history.ox.ac.uk for further details.
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By Helen Wang, December 1, '15
For the last three years we have produced a list of Chinese to English translations (books only) published over the year. Here is our list for 2015. As always, if we’ve missed any, please add them below. (Previous lists are here: 2012, 2013, 2014). We have also added most of these titles to our list on Goodreads.
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By David Haysom, November 30, '15
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Judging by the recent past, we can expect that some of these works — now that they are available in China’s national language — will gradually begin to appear in magazines specializing in Chinese literature in English translation, such as Pathlight. Up until now, English renditions of non-Han writers tended to focus on Tibetan, Uyghur and Mongolian originals.
This news item also includes links to collections of fiction translated from the Uyghur, Kazakh and Tibetan into Chinese.
Quotes Sheng Keyi, Murong Xuecun, Harvey Thomlinson and others - and illustrates the red pen on Sheng Keyi's work.
The Chen Bochui Award, first given in 1981, was opened up to international publishers in 2014. The award aims to promote excellence in children's publishing, as well as cultural diversity... Chen Bochui, who died in 1997, is said to be considered the father of modern children’s literature in China. He translated Pushkin's Children's Tales, The Wizard of Oz and Don Quixote into Chinese for the first time in the 1940s, and donated his life savings to establish a children’s literature award... The awards were made just ahead of the Shanghai International Children's Book Fair, which opens 13 Nov.
By Bruce Humes, November 12, '15
As Sheng Keyi writes in today's New York Times (Still No Dignity):
The Chinese Communist Party leadership announced on Oct. 29 the end of the one-child policy, to be replaced with a law that allows married couples to have two children. But dropping the one-child policy will not end the government’s control of women’s bodies. We still will not have the final say when it comes to our reproductive rights.
Clearly, the battle for those rights won't be won in a day.
In the meantime, let's make a list of Chinese fiction (both untranslated and translated) that touches on various aspects of China's Big Brother Family Planning Program over the decades. Mo Yan's Frog should be on the list, but that's an easy one. I wonder: Are there any novels or short fictional pieces out there about what it's like to live in China if you were a child born sans production permit, and therefore can't get a national ID?
“越是面向世界，就越要自觉地扎根中国。一个作家，为自己的土地和人民写作，就是为人类写作。” 铁凝举例道，莫言获得诺贝尔文学奖、刘慈欣以《三体》获雨果奖最佳长篇小说奖，最近，格非的《江南三部曲》、王蒙的《这边风景》、李佩甫的《生命册》、金宇澄的《繁花》和苏童的《黄雀记》获得第九届茅盾文学奖……这些都证明，那些满怀文化自觉，深深扎根于中国大地的作家，广阔的世界在他们面前次第展开。
Formerly the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award
Lecture by Julia Lovell, Oxford, 5 Nov
In recent years, a neo-Maoist revival has gained some purchase in China, driven both by elite politics (Bo Xilai, Xi Jinping) and by grassroots nostalgia. It is easy to point out the inconsistencies and weaknesses in this political project: the hypocrisy of national leaders who mouth Maoist slogans such as the “mass line” while sending their offspring to Oxford and Harvard; the intellectual shallowness of young neo-Maoists who devoutly quote Mao’s words without reference to their historical consequences. This talk will focus on a more intellectually challenging champion of Maoism: Zhang Chengzhi (b, 1948). Poet, novelist, essayist, archaeologist and ethnographer, Zhang is an unusually complicated and controversial figure in contemporary Chinese culture. Allegedly the inventor of the term ‘Red Guard’ in the context of the Cultural Revolution, he has remained an unapologetic defender of Mao and of the ‘Red Guard spirit’ through the post-Mao decades. In 1987, Zhang converted to an impoverished and ascetic sect of Chinese Islam, the Jahriyya （哲赫忍耶）in Gansu, and since the 2000s he has become one of China’s most prominent spokesmen for global Islam. This talk will explore how Zhang reconciles his zeal for the Cultural Revolution and for Mao, on the one hand, with his Pan-Islamism on the other. Although Zhang’s stance suffers from undoubted contradictions and shortcomings, his career and beliefs demand serious consideration: for the way in which they grapple both with the legacy of Maoism and with the contemporary trajectories of global Islam, drawing on decades of engagement with the geographical, political, cultural and religious complexity of China.
Julia Lovell is reader in modern Chinese history and literature at Birkbeck College, University of London. She is the author of three books on modern China, most recently The Opium War: Drugs, Dreams and the Making of China (2011), which won the 2012 Jan Michalski Prize Her several translations of modern Chinese fiction include Han Shaogong’s A Dictionary of Maqiao (winner of 2011 Newman Prize for Chinese Literature) and Lu Xun’s The Real Story of Ah-Q, and Other Tales of China. She is currently working on a global history of Maoism, and on a new, abridged translation of Journey to the West.
Something Crosses My Mind offers up the refreshing voice of a poet forging her own path, neither shunning the political nor dwelling in the lyrical but gently and resolutely exploring her world in her writing,” write the judges of the Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize, Lucas Klein, Janet Poole, and Stephen Snyder.
He not only translated several of Tolstoy’s classic novels such as Anna Karenina into Chinese, he was also honored by Russia with the prestigious Maxim Gorky Literature Prize in 1987.
But as usual in obituaries for China’s “cultural workers,” the problematic 1960-1976 period is glossed over. An exception is Guangming Daily’s more forthright — and much more detailed — account (草婴：一辈子一件事). A few revealing factoids from the Chinese text:
What a relief! Now we know that even President Xi Jinping’s speeches must be finely airbrushed before they’re ready for mass consumption. In A Year After Xi’s Landmark Speech on the Arts, Some Things Get Left Out, we learn that his infamous October 2014 closed-door speech to Art Workers of the Nation has finally been released in Chinese — almost one year later — for perusal by China’s man-in-the-street:
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%)
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By David Haysom, October 3, '15
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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).
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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.
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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!
