Our News, Your News
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!”
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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
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Novelist Susan Barker ("British, mixed-race English and Chinese, but linguistically and culturally British") responds to Chinese man in audience who comments that her book (which he hasn't read) "is an interesting perspective on China […] but just a Western perspective. You can never understand the Chinese.”
An unpublished English translation of the Chinese classic novel Dream of the Red Chamber by the writer and translator Lin Yutang (1895-1976) has been uncovered in Japan, Nankai University in Tianjin recently announced.
Chu Dongwei, founder and editor-in-chief of the print and online journal, is an associate professor at Guangdong University of Foreign Studies.
Chinese Literature and Culture, published three times a year, is devoted to translations of Chinese texts (works from the past or by contemporary authors), essays of cultural criticism and original writings－fiction or nonfiction－dealing with the China experience or life in Chinese communities around the world.
By Stefan Kielbasiewicz of York PEN.
The last part of the event "The Story of a Story" was recorded, and can be viewed on the Free Word Centre website
From the Writing Chinese project at Leeds University: "We asked our symposium speakers for their recommendations on Chinese fiction; here's what they came up with!"
By Bruce Humes, July 21, '15
As of July 22, at least 238 people have been detained or questioned since the nationwide clampdown on China's attorneys began, according to the Hong Kong-based China Human Rights Lawyer Concern Group, reports The Guardian.
That sounds worrisome indeed!
But I'm also interested in the adjective applied to describe the apparently futile efforts of critics of the crackdown as noted below:
China’s state-controlled media have rejected claims Beijing is waging a war against civil society. “Critics should first get the facts right, get to the bottom of the problem before embarrassing themselves in another unavailing episode of finger-pointing,” an editorial by Xinhua, Beijing’s official news agency, argued this week.
My question: What's the Chinese for "unavailing"? I assume the Xinhua news item was translated from the Chinese original.
I get the feeling this term may be appearing more often . . .
By Nicky Harman, July 16, '15
A key part of the READ PAPER REPUBLIC project, apart from publishing complete short stories every #TranslationThurs for a year, has been to make sure that people read them. So we linked up with two UK organisations with a special interest in literary translation and...fast-forward a few weeks ......produced a video of a discussion between writer Dorothy Tse, Dave Haysom (Pathlight and R P R editor) and me.
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Events to be held in Mandarin/Cantonese:
文学的山河— 从《额尔古纳河右岸》到《群山之巅》
日期: 7 月 17 日 (星期五)
时间: 上午 11:30 至下午13:00
地点: 香港书展 香港会议展览中心 会议室 S226-227
讲者: 迟子建
主持: 曾瀞漪
备注: 由於讲座反应热烈，已登记人士有可能被安排观看现场直播
名作家朗诵会
日期: 7 月 17 日 (星期五)
时间: 下午 4 时至下午 5 时 30 分
地点: 香港书展 香港会议展览中心 会议室 S221
讲者: 迟子建、九夜茴、周国平、余秀华、张怡微、王跃文、查建英、陈若曦、季季、简媜、夏曼?蓝波安
主持: 陈笺
登记报名: 登记
Congratulations to Annelise and Eric for their translations of Can Xue's The Last Lover and Xu Zechen's "Running Through Beijing*, respectively.
By Nicky Harman, July 15, '15
INTERNATIONAL TRANSLATION DAY, jointly organized by Free Word, English PEN, the British Library, takes place 2nd October 2015. For anyone within reach of London, there's a fine selection of talks and workshops.
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By Eric Abrahamsen, July 15, '15
To translate Nanjing writers!
The Nanjing municipal 文联 is teaming up with the Nanjing Municipal Publishing and Media Group to dump some money on the promotion of Nanjing arts and literature. There are many programs getting funding over the next three years, but one of them is particularly relevant to our interests: they're paying translators who successfully publish translations of works by writers in Nanjing.
Here's the link to the official application instructions.
The rules, as I understand them (and I could be wrong), are:
- You sign a contract with them before the deadline, which is the end of July, 2015, ie fifteen days from the date of this posting.
- Within three years of the signing, you translate and publish either one novel-length work, or two shorter works, by a Nanjing writer.
- They pay you either 180,000 RMB (one novel), or 150,000 RMB (two shorter works). Actually it looks like the fee is disbursed in yearly installments.
- Step four is usually "profit", but that's already happened in step three.
I'm not sure of the exact definition of a "Nanjing writer". I'm also not sure what happens if you translate the novel, and then no one agrees to publish it, which to be honest seems fairly likely. There are a few other terms and conditions, for which see the full explanation at the link above.
Update: I checked with them, and you don't need to have a novel publication contract in place to apply. They will be reviewing the applications, and making decisions based on likelihood of success, and it's enough that you find a publisher within the three-year term of the contract.
What is there to lose, comrades?
Writer Yap Koon Chan publishes 10 out-of-print books by Chinese writers who had some connection to early Singapore.
The 10 volumes comprise short stories, poems, plays, essays and a collection of newspaper columns published between 1930 and 1948. All contain references to Singapore as most were written here.
A Perfect Crime is one in a long line of novels of modern anomie, with a protagonist who decides on senseless murder as the only appropriate course of action that could possibly define him or give him some sort of purpose, but A Yi's contemporary Chinese spin on that familiar story is a solid variation on it -- and disturbingly convincing.
By Dongshin Chang (Routledge 2015)
Chapter 5 in The Modernist World ed by Allana Lindgren, Stephen Ross (Routledge, June 2015)
"The Modernist World is an accessible yet cutting edge volume which redraws the boundaries and connections among interdisciplinary and transnational modernisms. The 61 new essays address literature, visual arts, theatre, dance, architecture, music, film, and intellectual currents. The book also examines modernist histories and practices around the globe, including East and Southeast Asia, South Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, Australia and Oceania, Europe, Latin America, the Middle East and the Arab World, as well as the United States and Canada. A detailed introduction provides an overview of the scholarly terrain, and highlights different themes and concerns that emerge in the volume."
Jeffrey Wasserstrom interviews Carlos Rojas
Translators of foreign fiction often go unsung and unnoticed. A new incarnation of the Man Booker International Prize is to give . . .
Two new anti-corruption novels have reignited people's passion for the genre. A Camp by Tao Chun and The Song is Over, but Audiences Are Still There by Zhou Daxin both target corruptions within the military, a topic that few works have approached before.
What do you think it really means to be “Chinese?” How is it different from being, say, “American?”
Obviously, it’s more than just cheongsam dresses, the limestone karst scenery of Guilin, the canal cities of the Yangtze delta like Wuzhen, conical hats, Lao-tzu and the Tao Te Ching, kung fu and all these symbols. Because Americans use the same symbols when they film movies like Transformers or Mission Impossible in Shanghai.
As I understand it, to be Chinese you have to include the contemporary ideology of China today—Chinese people’s way of thinking, their philosophical outlook on life, their way of looking at the world. More specifically, it appears in the choices that characters make in a work, in their attitude towards new things. It can affect the entire thrust of a story.
...the recent popular seminars held for Taiwan writer Chen Xue's two books [Lovers in the Maze and Lessons in Love] just published in the Chinese mainland that delve into her experiences in same-sex relationships. Each seminar has been so packed that many people have been forced to crowd outside the entrances to try and listen in on these talks that start off discussing her books and love in general, but eventually turn to the topic of same-sex relationships.
“I wanted to create a new world that draws inspiration clearly from East Asia, but isn’t China. That’s the only way I can let people see the story anew. I’m very interested in foundational narratives. Foundational narratives in the West are things like the Iliad and the Odyssey, Beowulf, Paradise Lost. These are very important epic stories which become the foundation on which new works comment and elaborate and are in conversation with. In the Chinese literary tradition, the same role is played by stories like Romance of the Three Kingdoms or the Chu-Han Contention, which is a source for The Grace of Kings. But I didn’t want to retell a story, rather I wanted to reimagine this very old important foundation narrative of the Chinese literary tradition in a brand new literary framework that I constructed myself out of my status as inheritor of both Western and Chinese literary traditions.”
From the early 1960,s until he passed away in 2015, William Dolby beaverishly translated and researched Classical Chinese drama, poetry and literature, and above and beyond his world reneowned work of A History of Chinese Drama he silently produced an unknown mountain of superb works titled the "Chinese Culture Series".
Guest editing the poetry in this issue, and selecting a lot of translation for it, hasn't really given me any insight into which of those theories are right and which are wrong — each seems like it has its own appropriate place and time, with none deserving endless primacy. What I realized instead was about the feeling, the sensation of translating contemporary literature — something that’s related to the sensation of conversation.
Among one of the first batches of young Orochen (鄂伦春, aka Oroqen) chosen to receive a formal Chinese-language education in Zhalantun in 1948, E’erdenggua (额尔登挂) was just 17 at the time. She had never been outside her village on the banks of Chuo’er River (绰尔河畔) in Inner Mongolia, and didn’t speak a word of Chinese. Now 84, she was profiled recently in Zhongguo Minzu Bao (老人的鄂伦春文化情缘) . . .
By Kerry Brown. "This exceptionalism clearly carries dangers of its own. And a stupendous antidote to it can be found by paying attention to the figure who, of all those in the 20th century with a claim to being deeply versed in both "traditionally European" and "traditionally Chinese" cultures, surely has the best claim of all: Qian Zhongshu."
For years Chinese authors in China have been writing books that get banned, with no dramatic repercussions. Yan Lianke’s examinations of the cult of Mao and tragic episodes from China’s Communist history are given a wide berth by publishers on the mainland, appearing in Taiwan and Hong Kong instead. But his novels do get published here, he goes about unmolested, and he has a prestigious position at one of China’s best universities. Sheng Keyi and Chan Koonchung have both written fiction touching on the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square crackdown without, by their own accounts, so much as a slap on the wrist.
多年来，中国作者一直在撰写会遭禁的书籍，但并没有引发激烈反应。阎连科对毛泽东受到的个人崇拜，以及中国共产党历史中的悲惨事件进行了检视，大陆出版商纷纷对这些内容敬而远之，于是这些作品后来在台湾和香港出版了。但他的小说还能在这里得到出版，他在生活中也没有受到骚扰，而且他还在中国最好的一所大学里拥有颇有声望的职位。盛可以和陈冠中都写过涉及天安门广场镇压事件后续情况的小说，但据他们自己的讲述，他们甚至没有收到任何警告。
China unveiled its premier Encyclopedia of Chinese Intangible Cultural Heritage (中国非物质文化遗产, 史诗卷) on June 12, reports China Daily. This is the first of three volumes, and is dedicated to three great oral epics of the Tibetans, Mongols and Kyrgyz, respectively: King Gesar, Jangar and Manas . . .
Representatives of five of China’s northwestern provinces met June 15 in Xining to discuss how to benefit from the “Silk Road Fragrant Book Project” (丝路书香工程). This is a global publishing initiative, given the stamp of approval by China’s Ministry of Propaganda, which is designed to stimulate the mutual translation and publication of great literary, historical and cultural works that are grounded in the cultures of countries along the ancient Silk Road . . .
Winners include Decoded by Mai Jia (tr Olivia Milburn and Christopher Payne) and The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin (tr Ken Liu)
By Eric Abrahamsen, June 12, '15
I suspect that some of you out there have, from time to time,
wondered: “but what do you people at Paper Republic actually do all
day long? Surely you can’t survive by snarky literary judgments alone?
Also, can’t you make your website look a little less ’My First HTML’?”
I am here with a resolution to one of your questions, at least: what
we do all day is to get Chinese literature into English, and though
actual readable texts have been in scant supply on the site, that will
change starting a week from today. June 18th we’ll be launching
something called “Read Paper Republic”, where we’ll present one
complete free-to-view short story, essay, or poem on the site itself,
both as a webpage and a download, once a week.
We’ll be kicking off with an original translation of a story by A Yi,
translated by Michelle Deeter. Our editorial team consists of Dave
Haysom here in Beijing and Nicky Harman and Helen Wang in the UK.
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