Our News, Your News
By Bruce Humes, October 2, '13
In Nobel Win, Ho Ai Li of Singapore’s Straits Times notes that Mo Yan’s Nobel Prize—regardless of how his own writing is perceived abroad—is helping to spark interest in translated Chinese fiction. Since most of us won’t be able to get beyond the pay wall, I’ve selected three choice quotes from the article below. But pls resist the temptation to re-tweet Eric’s words on your Weibo account, as we’d hate to see his visa renewal application denied next time round . . .
More…
A good question. I also think that the Chinese know much more about America and the West than you know about China. In China, in the early eighties, a group of young writers studied western literature quite deeply, and these western classics opened their field of vision. They produced quite a number of good works. Can Xue was one among them. The group are all born in fifties or sixties—a very idealistic group. That was a literary era full of hope. But since the nineties, almost everybody in this group has changed their mind. They felt that they had had enough the West, and now want to return to their own tradition, which is much greater than the Western tradition. So their works, except a very few writers, have become more and more traditional, more and more readable. People welcomed this great regression. But I think this returning is the death of a language and a soul. Because our own cultural tradition has not got enough strength to support a new writing, the only way to develop it is by blood transfusion. I think as a Chinese writer, I should criticize my culture severely, only having done so, I get the possibility to develop it.
As for my own writing, the readers in China think that I’m very difficult but unique among Chinese writers. I dare say, no fiction writers in China has studied the Western literature and Western philosophy so exhaustively like Can Xue.
French ambassador to China Sylvie Bermann presented the knights badge of the Order of Arts and Letters to Wang Anyi, a renowned Chinese author, in Shanghai, east China, September 26, 2013.
“THE CHINESE THINK, act, and feel almost exactly like us; and we soon find that we are perfectly like them, except that all they do is more clear, pure, and decorous, than with us,” Goethe is reported to have enthusiastically declared after reading a Chinese novel.
Is it possible to have a different view on China from India? Might we read Chinese literature neither out of eagerness for an exotic difference nor to come away amazed at a common humanity, but rather with the awareness of certain cultural, historical and social affinities and a curiosity about how their writers and ours interpret them in fiction? Given these affinities, could we approach Chinese literature more organically and not, following the Western model, as one more instance of ‘otherness’ to be annexed to the compendium of world literature?
By Bruce Humes, September 28, '13
To help the nation recover the revolutionary spirit, a new – lightly edited for political correctness, or annotated perhaps? – version of Mao's Little Red Book will reportedly hit the shelves soon (Revamp):
The new version is due for release in November, just before the 120th anniversary of Mao's birth. Its chief editor, Chen Yu – a senior colonel at the Academy of Military Science – describes it as a voluntary initiative. "We just want to edit the book, as other scholars work on the Analects of Confucius… We don't have a complicated political purpose," said Chen.
Sounds innocent enough . . .
Narrated in the first person by the aged wife of the last chieftain of an Evenki clan, Chi Zijian's Last Quarter of the Moon is a moving tale of the decline of reindeer-herding nomads in the sparsely populated, richly forested mountains that border on Russia.
Over the last three centuries, three waves of outsiders have encroached upon the Evenki’s isolated way of life: the Russians, whose warring and plundering eventually pushed the Evenki down from Siberia across to the southern (“right”) bank of the Argun River, the tributary of the Amur that defines the Sino-Russian border; the Japanese, who forcibly recruit them into the ranks of the Manchukuo Army; and the Han Chinese of the People’s Republic, who fell the forests that are crucial to the survival of reindeer, outlaw hunting, and eventually coerce the Evenki to leave the mountains for life in a “civilized” permanent settlement.
For links to reviews of the English novel in French, Spanish, English and Chinese, as well as an interview with the translator and an excerpt from the novel, visit Evenki Odyssey.
By Lucas Klein, September 21, '13
By now you've probably seen Flavorwire's 50 Works of Fiction in Translation That Every English Speaker Should Read. I found it presumptuously titled, annoyingly laid out, and repetitively repetitive in its tastemaking, but at least it covers the standards, some works I've been meaning to read, and some books I'm glad to be introduced to (I get annoyed by the privileging of fiction over other literary genres, but novels serve at least to limit the selection criteria).
But evidently Jason Diamond, who compiled the list, doesn't believe the fiction of the world's longest-standing civilization, its most populous country, and a rising power on the global stage (with two Nobel literature laureates in the last fifteen years) deserves to be read by every English speaker. Among the fifty novels listed, with many repeats of Russian, Spanish, French, and German, not a single one was written in Chinese or by a Chinese writer.
Subtitles is broken into three “chapters,” the first takes a direct look at official Communist Party banners that hang in the side streets of Shanghai’s poorest neighborhoods – the bureaucratic slogans become menacing gashes amidst crumbling homes, empty alleys and the promise of worse to come. In his second chapter, Leleu riffs on the government’s use of banners by fabricating his own, printing alternative slogans on them and hanging them himself. Photographs in the third and final chapter show blank red banners strung up in rural settings, a silent cry from nature far away from the political noise of urban China.
As I read through this story for the first time, and reached the point where A Yi compares the relationship between urban and rural Chinese to that between blacks and whites in America, I felt that twinge of quiet mortification you get whenever someone outside your culture wanders in and starts cheerfully man-handling its most sensitive parts. There are certain social issues that exist more concretely as a set of rules for how to talk about them than they do as issues themselves, and when someone who doesn’t know the rules goes barging in, generally all you can do is wince a little and hope it will be over soon.
In February the South China Morning Post ran a review I called “horribly written” and said made me feel “embarrassed to say I like the translations in a book that could inspire such homely homilies.”
Here’s another stupid review of contemporary Chinese poetry in the SCMP, of I Can Almost See the Clouds of Dust 我几乎看到滚滚尘埃 by Yu Xiang 宇向, translated by Fiona Sze-Lorrain.
. . . renewed interest in defining what constitutes a “good” literary translation comes in the wake of the awarding of the 2012 Nobel Prize for Literature to China’s Mo Yan (莫言). Chinese translation professionals—and government officials keen on expanding the country’s soft power overseas—are searching for lessons to be drawn from Mo Yan’s resounding success.
One key lesson could be that China’s customary academic emphasis on word-for-word translation, in the belief it yields the greatest accuracy, doesn’t actually fly, marketing-wise. The article points out that Mo Yan’s English translator, Howard Goldblatt, edited freely as he translated (连译带改) Mo Yan’s Garlic Ballads (天堂蒜薹之歌), and that the German publisher chose to base its translation on the English too.
In China is Focusing on the Fringes published by The Guardian in March this year, literary translator Nicky Harman presciently pointed out that “independent–minded Chinese writers are becoming seriously interested in the geographical fringes of ‘China proper’, drawing on its people, their traditions and conflicts at work.” And as you can see in the table below, foreign publishers are interested . . .
The China International Translation Contest 2013 organizing committee has chosen 30 award-winning pieces of contemporary Chinese short stories from renowned writers including Jia Pingwa, Wang Anyi and Nobel prize winner Mo Yan.
...
Participants are required to choose one of the 30 stories to translate into English, French, Russian, Spanish, or Arabic and submit their works before Feb. 28, 2014.
...
The top prize for each language will be 5,000 U.S. dollars.
Tibetan writer Alai’s novel The Song of Gesar, translated from Chinese by Howard Goldblatt and Sylvia Lin, explores what’s in the hearts of both humans and deities. It’s an epic story from Tibet, told by generations of bards, and now in a written format by Alai; the author of a number of novels and collections of poetry and short stories (besides Gesar, only his novel Red Poppies seems available in English).
...
Such passages make the reader (and the characters) wonder whether the gods actually care about humans. Will they help humans or do they expect humans to sort things out on their own? What actually would be best for people? And what are the deities up to anyway? As this might show, The Song of Gesar is part of Canongate’s brilliant Myths series (which also includes work by Ali Smith, Klas Östergren, and Margaret Atwood, among many other important writers), and it’s a vital addition, as this is the first time the Tibetan story has appeared in English.
By Canaan Morse, September 4, '13
"Human shadows flicker to and fro over the double-paned windows, followed by threads of tiny lights that run across the glass like hairline cracks, then vanish instantly. When the train arrives at a station, the windows all light up, admitting the shadows of those without. Yet the light dispersed into the train car washes out the view of things inside..."
Wang Anyi, In The Belly of the Fog
More…
By Canaan Morse, September 3, '13
Yep! We're finally on the 140-character social media scene. Have a question? Tweet at us @PathlightMag.
Just updated as of Thursday Sep 12th. Now includes list of Chinese authors who'll be there, including Su Tong (苏童), best-selling children's book author Yang Hongying (杨红樱), poet Xi Chuan (西川) . . .
We are delighted to announce the winners of the 2013 Science Fiction and Fantasy Translation Awards (for works published in 2012) ... The jury has additionally elected to award three honorable mentions in each category.
Long Form Winner
Atlas: The Archaeology of an Imaginary City by Kai-cheung Dung, translated from the Chinese by Anders Hansson, Bonnie S. McDougall, and the author (Columbia University Press)
Short Form Honorable Mentions
“A Hundred Ghosts Parade Tonight” by Xia Jia, translated from the Chinese by Ken Liu (Clarkesworld #65)
In Niche Literary Reader, Liu Jun (刘浚) introduces Uyghur short story writer Alat Asem (阿拉提·阿斯木), one of a handful of writers widely published in both Chinese and his native Uyghur . . .
But these approaches prompt the question: Has China left its golden age of reading forever behind?
Today's China is far different from the closed society in the 1980s, then convalescing from decades of devastating political movements and hungry for intellectual nourishment. It is difficult to imagine that the reading renaissance during that period, kindled by this hunger, would return today. Amid the grim outlook of China's book industry, however, a curious case has emerged: Last December, the Chinese version of the first part of James Joyce's 1939 novel Finnegans Wake was published after an English professor in a Shanghai university spent eight grueling years translating it. The book became an unexpected hit, with its first run of 8,000 copies sold out in a month.
Yet The Republic of Wine had a catalysing effect on Mo Yan’s career. It made him believe that he could write large, ambitious novels of the sort that many in his generation – Yu Hua, Su Tong, Wang Anyi – would write in the 1990s and 2000s. Big Breasts and Wide Hips, a family saga that runs from the turn of the 20th century up to the early post-Mao period, confirms that this capacity was beyond him. Rather than evading death and atrocity, as Mo Yan’s critics claim, the novel is overburdened by them. Filled, like a classical Chinese novel, with a huge network of characters from many families, Big Breasts and Wide Hips gets into narrative difficulty keeping up with them all against the churning historical background.
On the flip side, the richly homophonic nature of spoken Chinese opens up endless possibilities for punning, which has often been used, along with parody and double entendre, to satirize the hypocrisy of official speech and to dodge the effects of widespread censorship. For all the comic relief offered by occasional acts of resistance, however, Link is understandably pre-occupied with what the long-term effects on public culture might be of several generations of Chinese living and breathing a language so severely twisted and constrained by the machinations of a repressive one-party state. While he does not underestimate the difficulty of recognizing, let alone breaking free of a tainted or impoverished language, he sees cause for guarded optimism in the opportunities for greater freedom of experimentation and self-expression that technology has made available in recent years.
“Cat Country,” considered by some to be the first Chinese science-fiction novel, is out next month in a new edition as part of Penguin China’s Modern Classics series. A second Lao She book, “Mr. Ma and Son,” first published in 1929, is also being made available in English this month for the first time in many years. Both are part of Penguin’s bet that there is a growing market for English translations of Chinese literature.
“Cat Country” is a dystopian story that reads like a hybrid of George Orwell’s “Animal Farm” and “1984,” a thinly veiled condemnation of Chinese society that predicts a world of corruption, violence and xenophobia.
As I often remind readers, the publishing 'business' (and its models) are entirely beyond my understanding, but ... holy shit, this can't be the way things are done, can it? We're talking about Chinese here, not some obscure language spoken by a few million, or a few tens of millions of people. And there are publishing professionals relying on ... the Italian version ? (And shelling out $60,000 on the basis of that .....)
What's particularly interesting here is (the claim) that:
The novel by Shanghai author Xiao Bai sold only moderately well in China, but it has the elements that appeal to Western readers.
Yes, it isn't even a particularly successful Chinese novel -- but, apparently, perceived to be a Western-reader-friendly one. Yes, clearly this book sold (to US publishers, etc.) not on the basis of its Chinese success or qualities, but on the basis of its Italian success.
Award-winning novelist David Mitchell is using the Douban Read platform, part of Douban, which is one of China’s biggest online cultural communities, to launch a translation contest for two of his short stories today (1 August 2013).
The contest is the first stage of a new collaborative research project led by Nesta, working with Douban Read, the Arts and Humanities Research Council, British Council and The Literary Platform. The translation contest is designed to generate qualitative and quantitative research to better understand the Chinese market for British writing.
By Nicky Harman, August 1, '13
Free Word London ("a global meeting place for literature, argument and free thinking") are offering two places on its Translators in Residence programme for 2014. Any languages can be offered by interested applicants. More information, including deadline for application, available here: http://www.freewordonline.com/info/work-for-us/
Chinese literature, politics and commentary…
My friend Qingzhou went to Sichuan on a business trip, and on May 12, 2008, he was buried under a small four-story building. Before he realized he was in an earthquake, he assumed the building was swaying because he’d drunk too much. He’d downed nearly a litre at noon, but it was worth it—he’d closed the deal. He felt himself collapsing drunkenly, his body listing to one side, all his movements in slow motion. It wasn’t the way the news described it later, the whole world transformed—bang!—in an instant. His last thoughts before he blacked out were: This is some booze. When it puts you down, the whole world comes rattling down with you.
Wind Says, a polyphonic composition that includes translated poems on facing pages with the original Chinese, excerpts twenty-five years of Bai Hua's work. Also included in this volume are an interview from 2010 between the poet and his translator, and an exceptional translator's 'prelude' written as a zuihitsu of cuts and observations across time, honoring the tone and promise of Bai's work even as it reveals the brightness of Fiona Sze-Lorrain's own engagement with his work as a poet herself. The title of the book succinctly characterizes Bai's style—restless, murmuring, with an impressionistic brevity of image—and also displays Sze-Lorrain's translating prowess. The title is just as metrically and syntactically immediate as the original Chinese, precisely because the absence of a preceding article—"Wind Says"—makes it ungrammatical while still sounding idiomatically acute.
A review of a stage version of Monkey: A Journey to the West performed at the Lincoln Center Festival in New York:
As portrayed by the impishly funny Mr. Wang, wearing a yellow track suit and a floppy tail, Monkey exudes animal spirits that are more or less untameable. When the Buddha himself intervenes in Monkey’s fate, stretching forth a giant blue hand to tamp down his unruly excesses, this ornery creature has the nerve to urinate in his palm, for which he pays a heavy price. Even at his lowest points, he finds the energy to keep scratching away at his crotch and emitting the high-pitched oo-oo-ing and ah-ah-ing that signify monkeyhood. . .
The Association for the Recognition of Excellence in SF & F Translation (ARESFFT) is delighted to announce the finalists for the 2013 Science Fiction and Fantasy Translation Awards (for works published in 2012). There are two categories: Long Form and Short Form.
Long Form
Atlas: The Archaeology of an Imaginary City by Kai-cheung Dung, translated from the Chinese by Anders Hansson, Bonnie S. McDougall, and the author (Columbia University Press).
Short Form
“The Flower of Shazui” by Chen Qiufan, translated from the Chinese by Ken Liu (Interzone #243).
“A Hundred Ghosts Parade Tonight” by Xia Jia, translated from the Chinese by Ken Liu (Clarkesworld #65).
When I moved to Beijing, in 2005, to write, I was accustomed to hearing the story of China’s transformation told in vast, sweeping strokes—involving one fifth of humanity, and great pivots of politics and economics. But, over the next eight years, some of the deepest changes in the lives around me have been intimate and perceptual, buried in daily rhythms that are easy to overlook. ..... in my years in China, I have been seized most of all by the sense that the national narrative, once an ensemble performance, is splintering into a billion stories.
A blog post by Mindy Zhang on the Poetry International Rotterdam website, in which discusses her changes to "routine strategies in translation practice."
While Ezra Pound and other pioneer poet-translators were able to “make it new” by transforming the old Chinese formal poetry into free verse, what can we do as contemporaries of the Chinese New Poetry which is already free verse? To make new something already supposedly new is a challenge.
By selling nearly 1 million hard copies and 500,000 ebooks of his latest novel in just five months, Jia Pingwa reasserted his status in the top echelons of Chinese contemporary authors.
"Dai Deng" is the story of how a female university graduate became a local official in a northwest China town. There, the graduate names herself Dai Deng, which means "carrying a lamp," and works hard to settle disputes between local residents, though mostly in vain.
[...]
He knows that many critics and readers are skeptical about the importance of examining China's rural culture, which the country's rapid urban development is leaving in a precarious state. But Jia maintained that rural residents still account for half of China's 1.3 billion population and they deserve attention and respect from both authors and readers.
"Mega-cities like Beijing and Shanghai and numerous poor counties together form the reality of China. They are like two sides of a coin, and I choose to address the dark side," he said.
Call for Papers
Translation Studies
We welcome papers on translation studies, with a particular interest on the translation of American texts into Chinese and of Chinese texts into English for American readers. What kind of literature may result if these world powers become conversant in each other's literatures? What are the challenges, imbalances, and theoretical issues confronting transnational/ translational exchange in general? We are looking for papers that connect translation to issues of power and cultural identity, as well as papers that address translation from other angles, both practical and theoretical.
Submission period: ENDS December 31, 2012.
By Canaan Morse, June 14, '13
I just got back from my temporary cubicle space at the operations headquarters of the Rotterdam – ArtsBeijing.com International PoetrySync Festival, an online event held concurrently here in Beijing and at the International Poetry Festival Rotterdam, which is going on as I type.
More…
In a country of 1.3 billion people, gaining national recognition is no easy feat. Rather than looking back to past literary classics, or exhuming the revolutionary memories of an older generation, Chinese novelists today write about the increasingly capitalistic and consumer-centred world they see and experience. These ten novels reflect the state of contemporary China today.
Would you like to be in a magazine that has published new translations of
Shen Congwen, Liao Yiwu, Xi Chuan and Yang Mu, presented a Sinophone "20
under 40," and interviewed Yiyun Li, Hsia Yü and, for the upcoming issue,
Can Xue? Would you like your work seen and judged by our contributing
editor Howard Goldblatt (fiction) and Bei Dao's current translator Eliot
Weinberger (poetry)? Most importantly, is there an untranslated or
little-translated writer that you are desperately, maddeningly determined
to bring to the attention of the English-speaking world?
Then submit to "Close Approximations," Asymptote's first ever contest for
emerging translators! Thanks to your generous support of our IndieGogo
campaign, we can make it worth your while: the winner of each category
will receive 1,000 USD, as well as the opportunity to publish with
Asymptote.
So polish up that desk drawer full of worked-over and scribbled-on
manuscripts. The deadline is September 1st, 2013.
Last weekend, within yodeling distance of the Italian Alps, the Ostana Prize for Writing in the Mother Tongue celebrated new literature penned in some of the world’s most endangered languages . . .
By Eric Abrahamsen, June 6, '13
The Spring 2013 issue of Pathlight is out the door! This issue,
featured loosely around "The Future", features several works of
science fiction by some of China's best sci-fi writers, including Liu
Cixin, Chen Qiufan and Hao Jingfang, and an overview of the genre by
Wu Yan and Xing He.
There's also a dreamscape by Can Xue, a rural romp (and fascinating
Q&A) by Han Shaogong, and a poetry section curated by Yi Sha,
featuring China's youngest generation of poets.
See a full table of contents at the link above. This issue is
available as a digital download on both Amazon and the iTunes
bookstore.
It is kind of stunning that given the size of China, the insane number of writers who live there, and the general interest in what’s going on in the country on the whole, there were only 16 works by Chinese writers translated into English and published here in 2012. One can trot out all the normal reasons to explain why this might be the case, but the biggest in my mind is the utter lack of awareness among U.S. editors as to what’s going on in Chinese literature these days.
Which is why I’m going to be reading more issues of Pathlight ...
A Beijing auction house says it has no plans to withdraw an acclaimed scholar's letters and manuscripts from sale despite protests from his 102-year-old widow and legal experts.
On June 21, the Sungari International Auction Co Ltd is selling 66 letters Qian Zhongshu wrote to a family friend.
The sale also includes the original copy of "Six Chapters from My Life 'Downunder,'" featuring his wife's memoir of their life in Henan Province during the "cultural revolution (1966-1976)," and letters from his daughter, Qian Yuan, to the friend.
Yang Jiang, the writer's widow, said her husband made some controversial remarks in the letters that it would be inappropriate to publish. He insinuates that two famous literary figures, Lu Xun and Mao Dun, were unfaithful to their wives and that a couple, both famous translators, had not interpreted a Chinese classic well.
SS: Did similar good fortune play a role in leading you toward Mo Yan?
HG: During a research fellowship year in Manchuria, I read a deeply affecting story of his. Soon after that, I ran into a friend who’d signed up half a dozen young writers, planning to publish story collections of each in English. Unrealistic. I saw he’d included Mo Yan, so I talked him into “releasing” him to me. No one told Mo Yan, of course. The following year, a friend sent me a copy of what would become in English The Garlic Ballads, and I was hooked. I wrote to Mo Yan, care of the now-notorious Writers Association, asking for permission to translate and locate a publisher. He had no idea who I was, but was happy to find a broader readership for his work. Before that happened, however, I read and fell in love with Red Sorghum, got his permission to switch, and, well, it was a good beginning.
On May 11, 2013, you ordered the termination of all my microblogs on Sina Weibo, Tencent, Sohu and Netease, deleting every single entry I ever posted...
On Thursday, May 23, 6-8pm, at Hong Kong’s Bookazine Landmark Prince’s, join publisher Graham Earnshaw, editor Tom Carter and authors Nury Vittachi, Bruce Humes and Pete Spurrier to discuss their new anthology, Unsavory Elements: Stories of Foreigners on the Loose in China, an unprecedented collection of true tales from 28 laowai writers—including Mark Kitto, Peter Hessler and Simon Winchester—about their experiences living in the 21st-century Middle Kingdom.
PEN Translates! is English PEN’s new grants scheme for translation. Launched in 2012 at the London Book Fair, this unique new fund is open to submissions from all UK-based publishers. Building on the success of English PEN’s Writers in Translation programme, we are committed to supporting: Works of outstanding literary merit, Strong and innovative publishing projects, Diverse writing from around the world.
PEN Translates! will fund up to 75% of translation costs for selected projects. When a publisher’s annual turnover is less than £100,000 we will consider supporting up to 100% of translation costs.
I feel lots of people are prejudiced against sci fi. They think that if you’re a certain age and still read sci fi, that’s immature and unrealistic, like you are letting your fantasies run wild. So I think that prejudice is a problem. But now that Three Body (三体) [by Liu Cixin] has been publically praised, I hope that is slowly changing people’s opinion.
Lucas Klein brings the poems into an English that feels lively and forceful, apparent in both the lineated and the prose poems, all of which sound intriguingly new and yet spoken by a familiar friend. He has not made these poems American, but rather allowed us to hear Xi Chuan’s poetics and ideas in an American idiom, in an English that is alive with personality. Klein’s knowledge of Chinese culture and history allows references to appear without explanation or odd framing. Rather, he translates the impulse of the poems so that we might eavesdrop on one of the more important conversations about national identity happening in poetry.
By Nicky Harman, April 23, '13
Here is a fascinating podcast on translating and subtitling and working with Chinese directors from That's Beijing. With Brendan O'Kane and Linda Jaivin.
By Eric Abrahamsen, April 23, '13
More than a year after we began publishing Pathlight magazine, we're very pleased to announce that it is now available around the world as an e-book. The most recent issue, featuring exclusive Mo Yan content, can be found in three places:
-
On Amazon
-
On the Apple iBookstore
-
As an annual subscription for university libraries. If you think your university might be interested in a subscription, please ask your librarian to find us in the EBSCO catalog. If your institution doesn't use EBSCO, you can email us about it directly.
Apologies for the US-centric links above – if you live in a country with its own domestic Amazon/iTunes store, the magazine will also be available on the local variant of that platform. Future issues will continue to be made available through these channels.
The entire point of a project like Pathlight is that it be available to as wide a readership as possible, and that hasn't quite been the case over the past year, to put it mildly. On behalf of our authors and our translators (and ourselves!), we're celebrating right now.
