Our News, Your News
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.
More…
By Red Chan.
Abstract: This article portrays contemporary Chinese literature in English through the lens of literary anthologies. It outlines how the corpus of about 60 English anthologies of contemporary Chinese literary works can be understood collectively in a context of social change, whereas the yardstick of literary assessment follows very much a traditionalist approach that literature should reflect social truths. By addressing particular anthologists’ discourse of their compilation, this paper argues that the first badge of Chinese–English translation was produced more for ideological ends than aesthetic purposes. Translation was used more as a functional tool that propagates the anthologist’s or the publisher’s ideological agenda. It was rather unusual to see that non-literary experts were actively producing literary translations as a gateway to understand China. Whilst the wholesale presentation of Chinese authors in the post-Mao era through anthologies does create a quantitative presence in English, it is unclear whether such anthologies have made a significant impact on extending the Anglophone readers’ interest in (contemporary) Chinese literature.
By Chaohua Wang
Abstract: Wang Lixiong’s Yellow Peril(1991) represents the return of political fiction of the future not seen in China for decades. Chan Koonchung’s The Fat Years (2009) brings the imagination to a full dystopian vision. Reading the two novels side by side, this paper argues that Chinese fiction of the future in the early 1990s responded to the country’s struggle for direction when the bloody crackdown of the Tiananmen protest wiped out collective idealism in society. In the twenty-first century, such fiction is written in response to China’s rapid rise as one of the world’s superpowers, bringing to domestic society a seemingly stabilised order that has deprived it of intellectual vision.
This book is an ambitious study of images of children in Chinese literature from the 1980s and 1990s. Analyzing miscellaneous literary works, Kate Foster argues cogently that the image of the child plays a very important role in (transformations of adult identity in the late 20th century. It should be noted that the texts studied were written mainly for adults, not for children; this book is not about childrens literature, but rather about the child image in adult literature...
Last year I found myself at an International Publishing Conference in Central, Hong Kong. I used my limited Chinese to talk to a woman who used her limited English about book recommendations. We knocked each other out with one question: What should I read that was written in your country?
After noting that “People use the term ‘dissident writer’ in a very confused way,” Eric Abrahamsen goes on to say (as paraphrased in Christopher Beam’s New Yorker article) that “Dissidents like Woeser, Tohti, and Liu Xiaobo, he added, are jailed for their political activities, not their creative writing.”
(by Jemimah Steinfeld, for CNN, June 10, 2015)
"Let's have a talk" by Xia Jia in Nature 522, 122 (04 June 2015)
Xia Jia is a sci-fi writer in China. Her fiction has appeared in English translation in venues such as Clarkesworld and The Year's Best SF. This is her first story written in English and was edited by Ken Liu, a translator and speculative-fiction author whose works have appeared in F&SF, Asimov's, Tor.com and other venues.
Shelly Bryant argues that literary translators need the same skills as actors who imitate the voices and mannerisms of others.
The problem, from what I could tell, was that publishers didn’t seem to know what American readers wanted. After the opening ceremony, the two Chinese officials, Wu and Cui, gave deputy U.S. Trade Representative Robert Holleyman a tour of the pavilion, showing him around the display shelves while a gaggle of Chinese media trailed behind. They paused to point out such books as Xi’s autobiography (largely a collection of speeches), an academic work called “Why and How the CPC Works in China,” and another book, titled “Confessions of Japanese War Criminals for Carrying Out Aggressions Against China.” The American nodded politely. If anyone present saw a connection between the overtly propagandistic nature of the books being promoted and disappointing sales outside the mainland, they didn’t let on, but the tour did seem to suggest that suppressing independent voices wasn’t just bad for writers, but bad for business.
With guest authors Dorothy Tse and Murong Xuecun. See website for details.
Roughly translated as "Ten-Mile Peach Blossom of Three Lifetimes," the film is an adaptation of an online fantasy novel that revolves around the complicated world and romance of a female fox spirit who is 140,000 years old and a male black dragon spirit who is 50,000 years old. Since its release on one of China's biggest literature websites in 2008, the novel has reached an overwhelming popularity among young girls.
[Sansheng Sanshi Shili Taohua - by Tangqi Gongzi]
China will have to get used to that small scale abroad; back home their numbers are enviable. Commercial Press’s literature subsidiary had 400 new titles last year alone. Every book by their No. 1 author, Jia Pingwa, garners sales in excess of 400,000 copies, while Cao Wenxuan’s series of kids’ books have sold eight million copies. Cao’s Bronze and Sunflower, published this year will be his first in English. (A bestseller in Canada can be somewhere north of 5,000 copies.)
By Helen Wang, June 5, '15
Featuring authors Ye Zhaoyan, Qian Zhongshu, Ding Jie, Xu Zechen, Pang Yuliang, Tao Wenyu and Han Dong.
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In brief opening remarks, Li Yan explained his interest in promoting Chinese culture abroad, asserted how big and successful Chinese publishing houses are, and that children’s publishing is a priority. The majority of the time went to Patricia Giff and Cao Wenxuan.
What is it like to grapple with Chinese state censorship? On May 29, Foreign Policy sat down with Bao Pu, Guo Xiaolu, and Hao Qun, better known by his pen name Murong Xuecun, in FP‘s Washington, D.C. office. Bao Pu is the founder of New Century Press, a Hong Kong publisher, and a political commentator and activist. Guo Xiaolu is a novelist and filmmaker in the U.K. Murong Xuecun is a Beijing-based author who has spoken and written about the Chinese censorship regime. (The three were in town as part of a trip organized by the New York-based PEN American Center focused on freedom of speech in China.)
Who will be the influential voices of the Chinese literary world this year? CREATIVE ASIA asks Dave Haysom, joint managing editor of Beijing-based literary magazine Pathlight, which authors he thinks we should be reading.
A Yi, Cao Wenxuan, Ge Fei, Sun Yisheng, Wu Ming-yi and Yan Ge
(By Marysia Juszczakiewicz, of Peony):
The goal when looking for material in China is the same as in the West: to find stories of universal appeal. But there are issues of translation to contend with as well. Chinese is a powerfully visual written language, and the conventions of narrative structure and characterisation differ greatly from the West, so finding stories that bridge that cultural gap take a little more digging. ... Currently, the success of a Chinese novel is determined by the number of translation rights sold, rather than the number of copies sold in English.
I don’t miss China’s smog and dust; still less the injustices that I witnessed. But I loved the energy, the curiosity and friendliness of strangers, and the knowledge I lapped up on everything from Maoist model operas to dinosaurs. I miss cold noodles, scalding xiao long bao soup dumplings and fresh tanghulu (a superior take on toffee apples). At least Laoganma’s addictive chilli black bean sauce is available in the UK. I’ll miss strolling down the hutongs on summer days, skating on frozen lakes in winter, and watching the sun rise over a snow-dusted, crumbling stretch of the Great Wall after a long scrabble uphill through the darkness. China’s rich literary history remains easily accessible, as does the endless linguistic inventiveness and subversive wit of internet users, but its other cultural treasures are now a long-haul flight away: Sichuan’s lush valleys, Gansu’s desert, and Beijing’s ginkgo trees and beautiful azure-winged magpies. And no, new year will not be the same without those free firework displays.
当苏童、毕飞宇、阿乙三位作家陆续来到安排好的签赠活动现场时，发现不但没有排队等待的读者，连笔都没有两杆。
于是在场的几个作家开始自娱自乐起来，互相拿书给对方签字，然后取笑对方提笔忘字。忘了是谁吐槽了一句“门可罗雀”，苏童接口，“哪里是门可罗雀，一只雀都没有！”
As part of the 2015 BookExpo America's Global Market Forum initiative, China's Guest of Honor program, will showcase more than 20 of China's best-known poets and authors in more than a dozen events, co-organized by Paper Republic, at the BEA and around New York City. From poetry readings, to literary exchanges with New York writers, to screenings of films adapted from Chinese fiction, the event lineup promises front-row exposure to the best of China's literary culture. During BEA, from May 27 to 30, visitors will be able to see established names such as Su Tong (Raise the Red Lantern) and Mai Jia (Decoded), alongside up-and-coming writers like writers like A Yi (A Perfect Crime).
. . . post-1949 China has a long history of rooting out “spiritual pollution” in the arts. Could it be guilty of recycling its toxic products south of the border?
NEW YORK, NY, May 27, 2015 (Marketwired via COMTEX) -- BookExpo America (Jacob Javits Center) - At the largest publishing event in North America, BookExpo America (BEA), OverDrive will host a reception and present the Blue Sky Awards to publishers with top selling Chinese language adult and children's eBooks. Hundreds of US, Canadian and international public libraries and schools now offer their Chinese readers instant access to thousands of new Chinese language eBook titles in every category (for example, see San Francisco Public Library eBook collection at http://sfpl.lib.overdrive.com/Chinese.htm).
According to the jury, Can Xue’s (“tsan shway”) The Last Lover (published by Yale University Press) was the most radical and uncompromising of this year’s finalists, pushing the novel form into bold new territory. Journeying through a dreamworld as strange yet disquietingly familiar as Kafka’s Amerika, The Last Lover proves radiantly original. If Orientalists describe an East that exists only in the Western imagination, Can Xue describes its shadow, offering a beguiling dream of a Chinese West. Annelise Finegan Wasmoen’s translation succeeds in crafting a powerful English voice for a writer of singular imagination and insight.
Individuals, Flash Fiction by Lao Ma, review by Michael Rank:
"If brevity is the soul of wit, Chinese short story writer Lao Ma 劳马 is a modern-day Voltaire or Oscar Wilde. The book packs 55 wry and satirical stories into 178 pages, each one of them reflecting the ambitions and venalities of Chinese academics and bureaucrats caustically but not viciously, and all too recognisably."
Three writers - Mo Yan, Mai Jia and Tie Ning - are in South America with Li Keqiang.
Michel Hockx, director of the University of London's SOAS China Institute, said the writers had more of a role to play in cultural exchanges than boosting China's soft power. "These three writers are involved not so much because of what they write, but because of their positions in the official Chinese Writers Association," Hockx said. "Tie Ning is chairwoman, Mo Yan is one of the vice-chairs, and Mai Jia is chair of the Zhejiang provincial branch of the association."
Anthony C. Yu, a scholar of religion and literature best known for his landmark translation of the Chinese epic The Journey to the West, died May 12 after a brief illness. He was 76.
Good advice from Charles Laughlin
Adapted from Perry Link’s introduction to Eileen Chang’s Naked Earth, to be published on June 16 by New York Review Books.
In the opening of the Song dynasty classic The Washing Away of Wrongs, published in 1247 and considered the world’s earliest documentation of forensic science, author and coroner Song Ci explains that the whole point of an accurate autopsy of an unnatural death is to “xiyuan zewu,” or “wash away wrongs and oblige others.”
A marvelous look at how here in the 21st century, China's aggrieved are “carrying the corpse to protest” (抬尸抗议), and why the police are in turn employing “qiangshi” (抢尸) or “snatching the corpse。“
Translated by Jane Weizhen Pan and Martin Merz.
The Locus Science Fiction Foundation has announced the top five finalists in each category of the 2015 Locus Awards.
Winners will be announced during the Locus Awards Weekend in Seattle WA, June 26-28, 2015.
Chinese poet Wang Guozhen, who was quoted by President Xi Jinping in his public speech, passed away in Beijing on Sunday...
“There’s no mountain higher than a man, and no road longer than his feet,” Xi had quoted from one of Wang’s poems during a speech at the 2013 APEC CEOs’ summit in Indonesia, to emphasize China’s determination on economic reform.
By Eric Abrahamsen, May 4, '15
As part of the Best Translated Book Award project, recently announced on the Three Percent site, they're publishing short essays on the various books and the reasons for their nomination. There are four Chinese-language books on the longlist, and I'll update this post with links to the essays as they're posted. As of April 11, we've got:
- Nomination essay by judge Monica Carter on why Qiu Miaojin's Last Words from Montmartre, translated by Ari Larissa Heinrich, should win.
- Nomination essay by ??? on why Hsia Yü's poetry collection Salsa, translated by Steve Bradbury should win.
- Nomination essay by guest critic Christine Palauon why Dorothy Tse's Snow and Shadow, translated by Nicky Harman, should win.
- Nomination essay by ??? on why Can Xue's The Last Lover, translated by Annelise Finegan Wasmoen should win.
The winner of the PEN/Ralph Manheim Medal is chosen by the members of the PEN America Translation Committee, who are dedicated to highlighting the art of literary translation and advocating on behalf of translators. As the committee's citation states, “Burton Watson is the inventor of classical East Asian poetry for our time.” Among other writers, Watson has translated the works of Chuang Tzu, Han-shan, Su Tung-P'o, and Po Chü-i.
Credited with making many classical Chinese and Japanese works accessible to the English-reading public for the first time, Watson’s translations also span a wide array of genres, from poetry and prose to histories and sacred texts. The committee's citation continues, “For decades his anthologies and his scholarly introductions have defined classical East Asian literature for students and readers in North America, and we have reason to expect more: even at his advanced age, he still translates nearly daily.”
The story is engrossing too. With Bronze and Sunflower battling to survive and thrive, the stakes could not be higher. As a result, Cao is able to weave in some sophisticated observations about the realities of poverty. He also powerfully portrays the experience of living in a place where services like health care and education are seen as privileges and not rights – thought-provoking stuff for children in many parts of the English-speaking world, who may be more used to grumbling about than begging to go to school.
By Helen Wang, April 27, '15
Here's the My BEA Show Planner of events listed under the heading "Global Market Forum: China".
New York, 27-29 May 2015:
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Although set in rural China during the Cultural Revolution Bronze and Sunflower has a timeless quality about it; yes, there are references to Cadre schools (a feature of the Cultural Revolution) but nevertheless it felt as if this story could have been set in almost any time period. It has a folktale-like quality in its focus on simple everyday events and challenges. The ingenuity of Bronze, the determination of his entire family to provide the best they can for Sunflower, and the fierce love between adoptive brother and sister are moving and enchanting.
We learn who wrote the "legal thriller," who reviewed it, and who copy edited the review.
Guess whose name is never mentioned?
In 1988, the final year of China’s post-Mao, pre-Tiananmen “Culture Fever,” the Shanghai Literature and Art Publishing House organized a conference in honor of two women writers. One was the realist Wang Anyi; the other was the unclassifiable Can Xue, whose first full-length novel had just been published to the same controversial reception as her earlier short work. Her oblique, nightmarish fictions had quickly gained notoriety, and once it became known that a woman was writing behind the pseudonym, criticism had turned personal. The author was said to be too individualistic, or simply too deranged, for significant achievement; her work was called neurotic and scopophilic, “the delirium of a paranoid woman.” Against such charges any author might have taken a conference as an opportunity for self-defense, but it is a mark of Can Xue’s slyness that she chose to do so in the form of a fiction. Addressing her audience, she announced the happy news that in preparation for her lecture, a “male colleague” had given her guidance and even chosen her topic: she would be speaking on “Masculinity and the Golden Age of Literary Criticism.”
Despite a spate of articles in Hong Kong newspapers bemoaning the effects of piracy on the domestic comics and animation industry, the original manhua empire of Tony “Jademan” Wong Yuk-long 黃玉郎 seems to have been rebuilt somewhat since it’s magnificent rise and fall in the early 1990s, with the sale of a 40% stake in his new company, Jade Dynasty, to Pegasus Entertainment Holdings Ltd 天馬娛樂控股有限公司 for HK $60 million (US$7.74 million) in 2013. Nevertheless, the deal is striking similar to the sale of Marvel to Disney, pointing to increasing interest in comics as entertainment properties that can be turned into profitable films.
Books from Taiwan is a new initiative funded by the Taiwanese Ministry of Culture to introduce fiction and non-fiction to foreign publishers and readers alike. On this website you will find information about authors and books, along with who to contact in order to license translation rights. All titles featured are eligible for the National Museum of Taiwan Literature’s Translation and Publication Grants Program.
“What is so attractive about Wang Xiaoni’s poems as translated into English by Eleanor Goodman is her quiet, loving, meditative distance to the mostly anonymous and lonely heroes she clearly knows well. And her attitude to time, which she keeps dragging out of its anchored localities (and barely marked history) to extend and connect, or fuse with specific spaces that she also enlarges in size and scope. Moments prolong into a century or a life, imaginary beasts meld with real animals, description becomes an act of meditation. In a few lines, a village can take on the dimension of a vast landscape – and yet still remain that particular village. And while Xiaoni’s characters may not speak, they seem to have a real insight into our experience and lives. In a way nothing much happens in her magic lyricism: the wind blows, the ocean rises, people work or move from one place to another, or wait, or just leave some place, and they have souls (which behave like shadows); someone on a journey sees them, through the window, between one landscape and another, and it’s difficult to know why all this is so moving. Reading her, I found myself repeating Auden’s phrase “About suffering they were never wrong, / The old Masters.” Wang Xiaoni is a terrific contemporary poet gracefully extending the great classical Chinese tradition.”
By Lucas Klein, April 13, '15
Or they get translated better, if not more—at least in 2014. Now that prize season is upon us, we get a chance to see which, if any, Chinese writers in translation are making an impression on the judges. This year, with Best Translated Book Award fiction longlist nominations for Can Xue 残雪, Qiu Miaojin 邱妙津, and Dorothy Tse 謝曉虹, a Best Translated Book Award longlisting in poetry for Hsia Yü 夏宇, a Griffin Prize shortlisting for Wang Xiaoni 王小妮, and a Newman Prize for Chinese Literature for Chu T’ien-wen朱天文, two points pop out: all nominees are women, and of the six a stark majority are from outside the PRC—which means some would call them “sinophone,” a potentially broader category than just “Chinese.”*
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CEFC China Perspectives 2015/1 Special Feature:
Editorial - by Wang Chaohua and Song Mingwei
After 1989: The New Wave of Chinese Science Fiction by Song Mingwei
Blanks to be Filled: Public-Making and the Censorship of Jia Pingwa’s Decadent Capital by Thomas Chen
Dreamers and Nightmares: Political novels by Wang Lixiong and Chan Koonchung by Wang Chaohua
Society and Utopia in Liu Cixin by Adrian Thieret
Review of Jeffrey C. Kinkley's Visions of Dystopia in China’s New Historical Novels by Yinde Zhang
Essay by Ken Liu, in i09, 10 April 2015
When early science fiction novels were first translated into Chinese, the translators took a lot of liberties with the material, reinventing Jules Verne for Chinese readers. Author Ken Liu (The Grace of Kings) explains how this helped inspire him, in turn, to reinvent Chinese traditions for Western fantasy readers.
"This raises the question of what translation is. I’m afraid it is something quite different from what the person on the street takes it to be. It is not code-switching. Let’s take a tiny example, chosen at random, from David Roy’s translation of the immense sixteenth-century Chinese novel Chin P’ing Mei, or The Plum in the Golden Vase, written during the Ming dynasty, the final volume of which has recently appeared. Here the doughty female protagonist, Golden Lotus, is waiting in a garden for her latest lover, who is also her son-in-law. To tease her, the son-in-law hides under a raspberry trellis, then jumps out as she passes by and throws his arms around her..."
Yu Hua shares his thoughts on China’s wealth gap.
Asia House, London, 11 May
PEN-supported novelist A Yi joins Adam Brookes, author of Night Heron, and Paul French, author of Midnight in Peking, to discuss whether Asia is the perfect setting for the modern day thriller. A highly entertaining and adrenalin filled night, where the lines between fact and fiction will blur – not to be missed!
A Yi’s novel A Perfect Crime (translated by Anna Holmwood) is out with Oneworld on 7th May 2015.
Congratulations to Dorothy Tse and translator Nicky Harman (Snow and Shadow),
and to Can Xue and translator Annelise Finegan Wasmoen (The Last Lover).
Every two years, the International Board on Books for Young People (IBBY) chooses outstanding books for and about children and young people with disabilities. This biennial selection draws attention to books published around the world, in an extensive variety of languages and formats, that address special needs and situations and which encourage inclusion at every level.
Books selected as 2015 outstanding titles are featured in a print catalogue that will be launched at this year’s Bologna Children's Book Fair in Italy on March 30th. The 2015 catalogue will also be digitized and available online.
On March 20th in the Macedonian Academy of Sciences and Arts in Skopje, the Managing Board of the Struga Poetry Evenings officially announced that the Chinese poet Bei Dao is the laureate of the “Golden Wreath” of the Struga Poetry Evenings of 2015. With this award, he joins the list of the greatest poetic names of the second half of the twentieth and the twenty-first century: Wystan Hugh Auden, Eugenio Montale, Léopold Sédar Senghor, Rafael Alberti, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Ted Hughes, Joseph Brodsky, Allen Ginsberg, Tomas Tranströmer, Ko Un, and has become the 50th laureate of this most prestigious world achievement of poetic work.
The word frog in Chinese is 蛙 (wā), while the word for child is 娃 (wá). Frogs are omnipresent in the text and haunt Gugu, a village obstetrician who rabidly enacts China’s infamous family planning policy and is thus responsible for thousands of abortions. The beauty of the metaphor lies in the ambiguity between these two similar sounding words. If we substitute the word frog for child, then the constant references to frogs throughout becomes haunting.
At one point in the novel, Gugu, returning after a night of drinking with friends, is chased by frogs. In the English translation, she is initially unsettled by the sound of croaking reverberating “as if the cries of infants” before eventually being chased by “an incalculable number of frogs.” But in Chinese, both the cries of frogs and children are also 哇 (wā). So in the Chinese original, this paragraph hangs on the inflections of these three wa sounds. If we see Gugu as chased by the ghostly wails of the children she has aborted, as opposed to the mere croaks of frogs, then the scene takes on the gravity and weight appropriate for a Nobel Prize winner. The way the meanings interweave due to their similar pronunciation is ethereal and translucent — and entirely lost in the English translation.
By David Haysom, March 26, '15
On Monday the translation aficionados of Beijing descended on iQiYi to hear author Sun Yisheng discuss his story《猴者》("Apery" née "Monkey Business") with translator Nicky Harman and Pathlight editors Eric Abrahamsen and Dave Haysom. Raw first drafts were exposed, ancient linguistic enmities unearthed, and the democratic process defiantly spurned. A big thank you to everyone who came, to all the people at the Bookworm and iQiYi for hosting us (and resolving our inevitable technical crises), to Lacey for the seamless interpretation, and to Karmia for the photos!
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