Our News, Your News
By Nicky Harman, May 23, '14
Great interview on BBC World Service "Fifth Floor"
From the Beeb: "Chan Koon Chung is a Chinese author who writes about ethnicity, sex, and other provocative issues in China. His latest novel has been banned, although like other writers who delve into taboo subjects he remains free to live and continue writing from within China. The book is called The Unbearable Dreamworld of Champa the Driver, and to talk about its themes we've bring together Vincent Ni from BBC Chinese and Juliana Liu who is based in Hong Kong."
With @nivincent, @julianaliu on @BBC5thfloor http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p01z6f5z.
But please! #namethetranslator
Xibe is a Tungusic tongue closely related to Manchu, and there are still a handful of writers using the language today . . .
By Nicky Harman, May 21, '14
2014 Translation Database at Three Percent is an inspiring list in lots of languages. Any books not on the list? Contact: chad.post@rochester.edu and he'll add them.
The phenomenal success of He Ma’s The Tibet Code (《藏地密码》, 何马著)—reportedly over 3m volumes sold—has spawned a host of thrillers and mysteries driven by a similar fascination with Tibetan history, religion and relics.
But Tibet is certainly not the only area of the People’s Republic rich in non-Han culture and history with strong potential for such fiction. Two novels by former journalist Jueluo Kanglin, including the newly launched 罗布泊秘境 (literally, The Mysterious Realm of Lop Nur), are bound to raise Xinjiang’s profile among aficionados of the “exploration thriller” genre . . .
Comic book adaptations of the the Jin Ping Mei 金瓶梅, a notoriously pornographic vernacular Chinese novel believed to date from the late sixteenth century.
Xu Zechen’s slim 2008 novel /Running Through Beijing/, recently translated into an English version published by Two Lines Press (2014), transported me back to that city and all its colorful inhabitants. The novel captures the taste and tension of Beijing better than any I’ve ever read. I felt the grit from Beijing’s frequent sandstorms sting my eyes. I savored on my tongue again the spicy mutton of a hotpot joint. Readers will internalize the restlessness and loneliness of young strivers. And Eric Abrahamsen’s translation is so deft, it’s hard to remember that it wasn’t originally written in English. He especially executes slang-filled dialogue with pizzazz.
Burton Watson is not the poet-translator largely ignorant of Chinese as Pound or Rexroth were. Since the 1970s, he has lived mostly in Japan; nearing ninety, he still spends hours each morning and evening on translation work. Born in 1925, he was first exposed to Asian languages growing up in New Rochelle, New York, when workers at the laundry his father went to gave him lychee nuts, jasmine tea, and illustrated Chinese magazines; later a high school drop-out in the Navy stationed in the South Pacific, he picked up some Japanese to help him on shore leave. After being discharged, he studied at Columbia University, both as an undergrad and for his PhD (completed in 1956), under L. Carrington Goodrich and Chi-chen Wang, and was later a colleague of C. T. Hsia there.
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His translations aim at readers looking for an introduction to Chinese literature rather than at specialists who want to test a fellow academic’s mettle via footnotes and bibliographies. Yet even as the scholar in him acknowledges that he can offer nothing but “one of a variety of tentative interpretations,” the translator in him nevertheless finds ways to make us, in Eliot’s words, “believe that through this translation we really at last get the original.”
By Bruce Humes, May 14, '14
“ Dreams are so good. Why do we have to make them a reality? ”
What’s a young Tibetan stud to do for a living nowadays in a tourist hotspot like Lhasa? And what happens when his childhood dream—to hang out in the capital of a country called China—comes true?
In the just-published The Unbearable Dreamworld of Champa the Driver, author Chan Koonchung takes us on a rocky road from Lhasa to Beijing. Along the way he paints disturbing vignettes. An apartheid-in-the-making. The eerie death wish of a would-be self-immolator. The Kafkaesque “black jails” where provincial petitioners who dare air their grievances to the Beijing Mandarins are brutalized, then sent home.
If they’re lucky, that is.
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Founded in 2010, the Duorina awards (朵日纳文学奖) aim to promote Mongolian literacy in the wider sense by rewarding those writing in the language, translating into or out of it, or writing about Mongolian literature in Mandarin.
Late in March 2014 the awards were handed out in Beijing, the capital of the Yuan Dynasty ruled by the Mongols, when it was known as Dadu (大都). Some 154 works were submitted for the competition, and among the 109 which were actually judged, 79 were in Mongolian and 30 in Mandarin.
China’s culture apparatchiks are getting serious about bringing Chinese-literature-in-translation to the masses near you. Here are 3 trends detailed in an article (作家 “走出去” 新谋略) reprinted from China Publishing and Media Daily . . .
The name and works of Ai Weiwei have been removed from a show in Shanghai, "15 Years Chinese Contemporary Art Award," about the history of Chinese contemporary art because of pressure from government cultural officials.
Mr. Sigg [former Swiss Ambassador to China] said he was angered to learn minutes before the opening of the show that museum workers had removed Mr. Ai’s name from the lists of winners and jury members painted on a wall.
He said he had considered stopping the show, but without any way to negotiate with Shanghai Municipal Bureau of Culture officials and minutes to go before the start, he instead chose to register his complaints in his opening comments. His mention that one artist couldn’t be included was not translated, he said.
. . . “Kangba” (康巴) refers to parts of Sichuan, Yunnan, Tibet and Qinghai where the Kangba dialect of Tibetan is widely spoken, as well as to the people and their culture. This region was a “hub” of the ancient Tea Horse Road (茶马古道), and (reputed) birthplace of the King Gesar epic (格萨尔史诗) and Kangding love songs (康定情歌) . . .
Meanwhile, the editors at China’s very official Nationalities Literature Magazine (民族文学), which appears in Mandarin, Kazakh, Korean, Mongolian, Tibetan and Uyghur, have undertaken an innovative series of intensive “editing training courses” (改稿班) that bring together the magazine’s editors with minority writers and their translators. . .
"We're buying your country," suggests Pat Johnson.
By Eric Abrahamsen, April 22, '14
The following review of Hong Ying's Daughter of the River, by Karen Ma, first ran on the NPR website
Hong Ying's autobiography, Daughter of the River, is doubly astonishing. First, it's an account of the Cultural Revolution that's not written by an intellectual. There's a certain genre of Chinese memoir that looks at upheaval under Mao through an elite lens, and I have to admit, I've been growing tired of those books. But Hong Ying comes from a very different background indeed.
I saw her speak at a literary festival in Jaipur, India in 2011, where she told the audience how she grew up along the Yangtze River in the slums of Chongqing — China's largest and most crowded city — and survived the great famines and Mao's failed political campaigns as a bastard child in abject poverty. I bought her memoir immediately. Her speech had touched me — but her book blew me away.
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“在我看来，中国传统文学的结构与写作方式对当代作家的影响还是很大的。譬如说，中国小说可能一上来就花几页纸描述一个地方，这对英文读者来说，会立即让他们失去耐心。”葛浩文说，尽管作家没有为读者写作的义务，更没有为国外读者写作的义务，他们可以只为自己而写，但基于中国文学“走出去”的强烈意愿和努力，写作就不能无视一些长期以来形成的、国际公认的对小说的标准。
Instead of requesting [sic] the work to a translator, Kim suggests the author of the work, if he or she has the ability to write fluently in both languages, translate his or her own work into the second language.
This process called self-translation is not exactly a translation process but a re-writing and re-interpretation of the work into a different language, closer to “dual-writing” which means writing in two languages. This method gives special right to the author to not translate the work literally but create another version of the work with more freedom.
That's why he [Göran Malmqvist] believes sinologists should not only engage in academic research but also in translation; and for himself: "It's to allow people from my country to appreciate the Chinese literature I like."
Unfortunately, he says, there are as many poor translators as there are good writers in China.
"What makes me angry, really angry," he cries, eyes blazing, "is when an excellent piece of Chinese literature is badly translated. It's better not to translate it than have it badly translated. That is an unforgivable offence to any author. It should be stopped.
"Often translations are done by incompetent translators who happen to know English, or German, or French. But a lot of them have no interest and no competence in literature. That is a great pity."
There are notable exceptions such as the late British sinologist David Hawkes' rendition of Cao Xueqin's epic novel The Story of the Stone, which he regards as a rare gem of translated Chinese literature.
“You have to be willing to do things for free at first,” said Tobler. “It’s only after you’ve got the editor’s interest that you might get a contract. If you’re starting out as a literary translator and you can’t be bothered to translate some extracts, well then, you’re not passionate enough! Getting into literary translation, every hour is not going to pay financially. You get into it because you love literary translation and then down the line it all works out.
SUNDAY 13 April, 16.00 - BBC Radio 4 Open Book, featuring contempoary Chinese literature with Nicky Harman, Karen Ma and Eric Abrahamsen (and available as a podcast afterwards)
The attitude of the Japanese government toward its nation’s history infuriates Chinese people. But the Chinese government also needs to reflect on its own record. We keep warning Japan that it runs the risk of repeating its mistakes if it will not face up to its history of aggression. Surely there is a lesson for us to learn, as well . . .
By Nicky Harman, April 4, '14
Monday 23rd- Friday 27th June 2014. Details here
By Nicky Harman, March 30, '14
Beijinger Dave Haysom has uploaded a new story, ‘The Magician on the Footbridge’, by Wu Ming-yi here.
By Nicky Harman, March 30, '14
Asian Review of Books' Peter Gordon has just reviewed Snow and Shadow, short stories by Dorothy Tse, translated by me. Great, thought-provoking review.
The author Xu Zechen was unknown to me, but he comes with something of a pedigree. He is editor at People’s Literature magazine and was selected for the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program.
And this is a fine novel. One need not know or care more about Beijing to appreciate the humanity of its characters nor to be propelled through the story than one needs to know or care about the St. Petersburg of Dostoevsky. The foreignness of the setting and situation rapidly fades into the subconscious. I suspect, although one never knows, that the translator Eric Abrahamsen is to thank for at least of some of this. Abrahamsen has, through simplicity of language and use of terms like “the rat bastard” managed to retain a slight foreignness of tone, while delivering a fluent English text.
It’s a cliché to say that a novel deserves to be read. But if Running Through Beijing is read, it is likely to be enjoyed.
Chinese comics, or manhua 漫畫, as they are known in Chinese, are hard to pin down, in large part because the term ‘manhua’ is used in so many different and often contradictory contexts.
TheTranslation Slam (part of the Bookworm Literature Festival and Jue music and art festival) exploits the issues of translation by pitting two translators against each other to decipher a difficult Chinese text and recreate it in English. The event is wonderfully unique, and wholly appropriate for a city like Beijing where countless people are caught between the worlds of Mandarin and English every day.
Over a decade after it was first published in China, best-selling author Mai Jia's maiden work Decoded finally hit Europe and the US on Monday. After winning him numerous awards in China and setting up sales for his follow up novel In the Dark, this novel is now winning him acclaim on an international level.
The Story of the Stone (or Dream of the Red Chamber), a Chinese novel by Cao Xueqin and continued by Gao E, tells of an amazing garden, of a young man’s choice between two beautiful women, of his journey toward enlightenment, and of the moral and financial decline of a powerful family. Published in 1792, it depicts virtually every facet of life in eighteenth-century China—and has influenced culture in China ever since.
Part 1 of this volume, “Materials,” provides information and resources that will help teachers and students begin and pursue their study of Stone. The essays that constitute part 2, “Approaches,” introduce major topics to be covered in the classroom: Chinese religion, medicine, history, traditions of poetry, material culture, sexual mores, servants, Stone in film and on television, and the formidable challenges of translation into English that were faced by David Hawkes and then by John Minford.
I recently found out that one of the first and only manhua to be translated into English and published in North America was edited to remove anti-Caucasian racism. In the first issue of the original version of Chinese Hero 中 華英雄, created by Ma Wing-shing (馬榮成) which was published in the early 1980s in 《金報》 [Golden Daily?] , the protagonist’s parents are killed by ‘foreign devils‘ 洋鬼子...
What about literary critiquing in China? Is there any?
Abrahamsen: Yes, but not that anyone takes it very seriously. It’s like a lot of aspects of Chinese society, where there’s this whole thing in place that looks like it’s supposed to be the thing it is, but isn’t. There are book fairs, review sections in newspapers and magazines and there are people writing reviews, and there’s this whole, critical thing out there, but it’s hollow. Most of it’s paid advertisement by the publishers. No reader takes that stuff seriously, it doesn’t sell books, it’s not information.
Morse: Think of it as abstract Potemkin villages.
By Canaan Morse, March 14, '14
(Top: Peter Behr, Stephen Nashef, Edward Ragg. Bottom: Emily Stranger, Yuan Yang.)
Last month we made an open call for poets to participate in a curated community event at the Bookworm Literary Festival, and the response was exceptional. Please consider this our official thank you to all who answered. The curators of Poetry Night in Beijing -- Canaan Morse, Helen Wing and Eleanor Goodman -- read nearly 200 poems before finally (painstakingly) choosing five writers whose works resonated with them in style and substance.
Please keep in mind that the process of evaluating art is imperfect and the final decisions are always subjective. Nonetheless, we'd like to congratulate our featured poets who will be reading this Sunday at 8 pm at the Bookworm:
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By Bruce Humes, March 14, '14
As the number of Chinese novels translated into English annually rises into the teens, here's a figure to contemplate:
" . . . 781 Japanese novels were translated and published in South Korea in 2012," according to Takayuki Iwasaki in Japan's Literati Impervious to Politics.
The wait is over. Listed below are the twenty-five titles on this year’s Best Translated Book Award Fiction Longlist.
Most Asian literature—with the exception of works by authors belonging to an anglophone elite that is increasingly globalized—will come to readers via translation. Without translators, then, most writing from China, Japan, Korea, Indonesia, India, Pakistan, the Arab World—just to name places from which translations have recently appeared in the Asia Review of Books—would be entirely inaccessible English-language readers.
But translations are most often noted when they are clunky or when the translation appears directly via footnotes.
So we invited five experts covering different languages, countries and parts of the process to discuss translations, translators and the role they play in bringing Asian literature to English-speaking readers:
Julia Lovell, Lucas Klein, Sophie Lewis, Arunava Sinha, and Marcia Lynx Qualey
When the avant-garde writer Mu Shiying 穆時英 was assassinated in 1940, China lost one of its greatest modernist writers while Shanghai lost its most detailed chronicler of the city's Jazz-Age nightlife. Mu's highly original stream-of-consciousness approach to short story writing deserves to be re-examined and re-read. As Andrew Field argues, Mu advanced modern Chinese writing beyond the vernacular expression of May Fourth giants Lu Xun and Lao She to reveal even more starkly the alienation of a city trapped between the forces of civilization and barbarism in the 1930s.
Mu Shiying: China's Lost Modernist includes translations of six short stories, four of which have not appeared before in English. Each story focuses on Mu's key obsessions: the pleasurable yet anxiety-ridden social and sexual relationships in the modern city, and the decadent maelstrom of consumption and leisure epitomized by the dance hall and nightclub. In his introduction, Field situates Mu's work within the transnational and hedonistic environment of inter-war Shanghai, the city's entertainment economy, as well as his place within the wider arena of Jazz-Age literature from Berlin, Paris, Tokyo and New York.
Our reading period for the Summer/Fall Issue, published in June of each year, runs from February 1-April 30.
The Guardian has this piece on Margaret Atwood's February 18 2014 Sebald Lecture, Atwood in Translationland.
There's also a blurb re said lecture here,on the British Centre for Literary Translation website.
The lecture was recorded and will be available on YouTube at some point.
"...the choices that bedevil the writer bedevil the translator 10 times over. If a writer has a bad day, you can say, 'At least I don't have to do a freaking translation.'"
“I could have [the] chance to read only the books of Orhan Pamuk as he was the only Turkish writer whose books have been translated into Chinese. And Turkish readers most probably only read my book” . . .
By Canaan Morse, February 12, '14
This post was so popular on the Pathlight Facebook page, we figured we'd put it up here.
We're very grateful to Kendall Tyson for reviewing these ten books by Chinese authors in translation, including Pathlight: New Chinese Writing contributing authors Chen Qiufan, Chi Zijian, Bai Hua, and Mai Jia.
We're also a little disappointed that he failed to mention that the books WERE all masterful translations, and who those translators were. Let us update the list:
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THE WASTE TIDE, by Chen Qiufan, translated by Nebula Award-winner Ken Liu;
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CAT COUNTRY, by Lao She, translated by William Lyell;
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SEARCH FOR THE BURIED BOMBER, by Xu Lei, translated by Gabriel Ascher;
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THE MATCHMAKER, THE APPRENTICE, AND THE FOOTBALL FAN, by Zhu Wen, translated by Julia Lovell;
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FOR A SONG AND A HUNDRED SONGS, by Liao Yiwu, translated by Huang Wenguang;
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WIND SAYS, by Bai Hua, translated by Fiona Sze-Lorrain;
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THE LAST QUARTER OF THE MOON, by Chi Zijian, translated by Bruce Humes;
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TONGWAN CITY, by Gao Jianqun, translated by Eric Mu;
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DECODED, by Mai Jia, translated by Olivia Milburn and Christopher Payne;
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MR. MA AND SON, by Lao She, translated by William Dolby.
Congratulations to both translators and authors!
