Our News, Your News
By Canaan Morse, February 22, '13
Only a thought, which seems to me worthy of being aired:
After all these years, I find it harder to read Chinese literature while I am here in China than when I am elsewhere. China’s living social context actively limits my freedom to read. By this I mean the ability of the reader to remove himself and the work from a social context that tells him what he ought to think, so that the text may rise from the water of the reader’s emotions and present itself again as something with independent tensile strength. Now, I don't know that separation is particularly valued now; a straw poll of my memories suggests that more emphasis is placed on engagement with foreign cultural contexts, both for readers and writers, and especially as regards mainland China. I also don’t wish to presume that freedom to read and freedom to write are the same thing, but they are connected, and when I consider how much easier it is for me to enjoy Chinese literature when I am away from the country and its excessive, falsified cultural dick-waving, I wonder how right those people are who point fingers at Ma Jian, Ha Jin and the other diaspora writers to criticize them for “not knowing what’s going on in China now.”
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First things first: this is a book of amazing, beautiful poetry, and you should read it.
In translating Xi Chuan’s Notes on the Mosquito: Selected Poems (New Directions, 2012), Lucas Klein has given readers access to a bilingual journey through more than two decades of Xi Chuan’s evolution as a writer, a person, and a historian. The poems collected and rendered in Notes on the Mosquito range from evocative lyric verse about shepherds and loneliness to historical essays that consider the “New Qing History.” (It is a striking range, and one that was quite unexpected for this reader and historian.) In our conversation, Lucas was generous enough to explain many aspects of his process and approach as a translator, and to read a number of the translated poems collected in the volume. We talked about several aspects of his work, including both practical issues and more conceptual questions about the linking of history and poetry in the writing of a poet and a reader’s approach to the resulting work. It was a pleasure, and I hope you enjoy listening.
Translated by Hongling Zhang and Jason Sommer. Mentioned in The New Yorker's "Briefly Noted" section.
Translated by Zhang Hongling and Jason Sommer. Launched in the UK this month and getting good reviews.
这种为翻译家写作的趋势绝不可取。尽管文学走向世界必须经过翻译家的翻译，必须经过他们创造性的劳动，但是作为一个作家，在写作的时候如果想着翻译家，那势必使自己的艺术风格大打折扣，势必为了翻译的容易而降低自己作品的高度和难度。因此，作家在写作时，什么人都可以想，就是千万别想着翻译家；什么人都不能忘，但是一定要忘记翻译家。只有如此，才能写出具有自己风格、具有中国风格的小说来。
“The death of Haizi the poet will become one of the myths of our time,” eulogized Xi Chuan 西川 in 1990, a year after the suicide of one of his closest friends. Four years later, however, he tried to pierce that mythology: if we continue to “frame Haizi in a sort of metaphysical halo,” he wrote, “then we can neither get a clear view of Haizi the person nor of his poetry.” Testifying to its significance in the promotion and dissemination of Haizi’s writings, the first quotation (differently translated and romanized) also appears on the back cover of Over Autumn Rooftops (Host Publications, 2010), the collection of Haizi translations by Dan Murphy… The reconsideration, however, presents a cognizance essential for literary history and readers interested in approaching the reality, rather than mythology, of the poet. It is also the starting point for Rui Kunze’s ambitious, painstakingly researched, yet ultimately uneven study, Struggle and Symbiosis: The Canonization of the Poet Haizi and Cultural Discourses in Contemporary China.
An upbeat and inspiring look at literary translation by Danny Hahn who says: 'You know you’re in safe hands with “Once upon a time” – the hands of a storyteller, a writer, perhaps a translator. Good stories start with a “Once upon a time”. In English, at least.'
By Nicky Harman, February 17, '13
This year, the Birkbeck (London) Translation Summer School offers Chinese to English as an option again. There will be a mixture of texts to study - from literary to technical via reportage. Dates: 22-26 July 2013. For more details see here. The workshop leader will be Nicky Harman.
Article by John Samuel Harpham, in Criticism, Volume 55, Number 1, Winter 2013, pp. 95-118. (subscription needed)
Tired of rants castigating Mo Yan, the alleged Chinese “government stooge” and recently decorated Nobel Laureate?
Tiresome because most of his critics have read few if any of his novels in any language; Mo Yan bashing has so far concentrated on the much-awaited criticisms he has not uttered about his government’s shameless censorship policy. With Folk Opera in the New York Times, we get a better educated view from Ian Buruma, who has actually read some of Mo Yan’s novels in both Chinese and English translation . . .
By Helen Wang, February 10, '13
Happy New Year from the China Fiction Book Club (especially if you were born in the year of the snake, the most unloved/ feared/ despised of the 12 animals). Here's what we posted on twitter (@cfbcuk) earlier...
金蛇出洞！Hoping that the Year of the Snake ("little dragon") will be a good year! Some very famous Chinese writers were born in the Year of the Snake: Qu Yuan 屈原; Lu You 陆游; Wu Jingzi 吴敬梓; Lu Xun 鲁讯, Mao Zedong 毛泽东.
[Source: http://www.shengxiao5.cn/shengxiao/6/shengxiao500.htm …]
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By Helen Wang, February 10, '13
My surprise last week at the Chinese New Year display and stock of Chinese fiction at Watermark Books in King's Cross Station was because most bookshops in London stock very few Chinese books (and then mostly on the X,Y,Z shelf). What's more, the staff usually know next-to-nothing about the Chinese fiction they're selling (Mo Yan? Who?). The exception is Arthur Probsthain Bookshop (known to locals as Probsthain’s) which always has a range of Chinese fiction on display and for sale, not just at Chinese New Year, and has knowledgeable staff.
Arthur Probsthain Bookshop specialises in Asian, Middle Eastern and African books, and is located at 41 Great Russell Street, opposite the British Museum. The business was founded in 1902 on Bury Place (round the corner) and has been at its current location since 1903. It is still a family-run business. Recently refurbished, there is now a bookshop and gallery at street level, and a very nice café called Tea and Tattle downstairs. There’s also a branch of Probsthain’s at the School of Oriental & African Studies (SOAS), a short walk away. Michael Sheringham, the great-nephew of Arthur Probsthain, has supplied details of the Chinese fiction currently on display for Chinese New Year.
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Yan Lianke, whose bleakly humorous novel Lenin's Kisses is published in Britain on Thursday, had two books banned in the past decade. He said it had been easier to publish in the five years before that.
He also criticised the intelligentsia – including last year's Nobel literature prize-winner Mo Yan – for failing to speak out on important issues. "Chinese intellectuals haven't taken enough responsibility. They always have an excuse, saying they don't have a reason to talk or don't have the environment ... If they could all stand up, they would have a loud voice," he told the Guardian.
By Nicky Harman, February 7, '13
Translate a poem from any language, classical or modern, into English. Three categories – Open, 18-and-under and 14-and-under – and cash prizes. Details, entry forms and free booklets of past winning entries available from the Stephen Spender Trust. Closing date Friday 24 May 2013.
So much for the invisible translator. With the launch of his Chinese renditions of classics whose copyrights had expired (新译本), such as The Old Man and the Sea (老人与海) and The Great Gatsby (了不起的的盖茨比), Li Jihong (李继宏) has managed to infuriate a host of fellow translators, hommes de lettres and even would-be readers.
Partly due to the aggressive advertising campaign accompanying the launch that claims these are “the finest translations to date,” and partly by bringing up the very vulgar, very touchy subject of $ earned for literary translation work . . .
By Bruce Humes on Ethnic China Lit:
The authorities are clearly worried about where all this public anger could lead. We learn from a NYT essay (Masters of Subservience) that Wang Xiaofang (王晓方), author of 13 popular fictional exposés such as Civil Servant’s Notebook (公务员笔记), has since reportedly been unable to publish his three newest works.
In his entry in the 2004 report on the state of the discipline, Comparative Literature in an Age of Globalization, David Damrosch, doyen of world literature studies, reproduces a table showing the MLA citation index of Lu Xun 鲁迅 (1881 – 1936) over the previous four decades. According this bibliography, Lu Xun was referred to in 3 articles between 1964 and 1973, in 12 articles from 1974 to 1983, in 19 articles from 1984 to 1993, and in 22 articles between 1994 and 2003 (David Damrosch, “World Literature in a Postcanonical, Hypercanonical Age,” in Comparative Literature in an Age of Globalization. Haun Saussy (ed.). Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006, p. 49). Without question, in what may be the disciplinary “age of world literature” even more than “an age of globalization,” Lu Xun has entered into a certain kind of canonicity. Investigating and interrogating the specifics of that canonicity, and the ways in which Lu Xun is framed, understood, translated, and transformed via such canonicity, is the subject of Daniel Dooghan’s fascinating, revealing, and provocative dissertation, Literary Cartographies: Lu Xun and the Production of World Literature (University of Minnesota, 2011).
In China, “bureaucracy lit” is a hot genre, far outselling spy stories and whodunits as the airport novel of choice. In these tales of overweening ambition, the plot devices that set readers’ pulses racing are underhanded power plays, hidden alliances and devious sexual favors . . .
“I never thought I would drink urine for a full five years,” reflects one unfortunate flunky on his attempts to ingratiate himself with his boss in the opening scene of Wang Xiaofang’s “Civil Servant’s Notebook,” which has sold more than 100,000 copies in China since its publication in 2009 and has just been published as an e-book in English [translated by Eric Abrahamsen]. “Urine is a metaphor for the culture of officialdom that has existed in China for thousands of years,” Wang told me. “Urine is the garbage excreted from people’s bodies. And this book is an attack on the culture of officialdom.” Bribery, he explained, is ingrained in every aspect of Chinese culture. “When devotees go to worship Buddha, they don’t cleanse their souls, like Christians confessing their sins in church,” he said. “They kneel down and donate money to the collection box, to bribe the Buddha.”
By Helen Wang, February 3, '13
Having heard that Watermark Books in Kings Cross station (London) was doing a promotion on China-related titles, I went to take a look this afternoon. They have a small table, piled with about a dozen non-fiction titles (eg by Yang Jiping, Frank Dikotter, Fuschia Dunlop, Henry Kissinger, Julia Lovell, Martin Jacques), a dozen fiction titles and a couple of books for children. If anyone’s interested, I’ve put some photos on twitter @cfbcuk . By Chinese standards this is a tiny display, but for a non-specialist bookshop in the UK, and bear in mind that this is a small bookshop located in a railway station, it’s quite impressive. This is the first Watermark Books in the UK; there are other Watermark Books in other countries, also located in station/airport locations.
The fiction and children’s books on the table were all produced by Better Link Press, Shanghai Press & Publishing Development Company 上海新闻出版发展公司. There were also some glossy posters behind the till desk, so I assume that the publisher is involved in the promotion, or at least is the source of the fiction books, children’s books, and the decorations. They had a couple of other China-related titles on their regular shelves : the Penguin Classics edition of The Analects, and The Flowers of War, by Geling Yan, translated by Nicky Harman. When I pointed these out, they added them to the table display.
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Which Language Do You Want More Broadly Translated into English?
Chinese
Portuguese
Russian
Arabic
Hindi/Bengali
Nobel Laureate Gao Xingjian is amongst the most challenging writers of the present era. He has probed the dynamics of Chinese and European literature and developed unique strategies for the writing of seventeen plays, two novels, a collection of short stories and a collection of poems. He has also written two collections of criticism.
The present collection takes the title Aesthetics and Creation from the name of the Chinese collection from which most of these essays are drawn, but it also includes some of Gao’s most recent unpublished essays. University of Sydney academic Mabel Lee is the translator, and the book also includes her authoritative introductory essay that contextualizes Gao’s significant position as an independent and uncompromising voice in the noisy hype of the globalized world of the present in which creative writers and artists are forced to conform with the demands of political and other group agendas, or with market forces, in order to survive.
Gao Xingjian’s Aesthetics and Creation has importance and relevance to the general reader with an interest in literature and art as a creative human pursuit that is not demarcated by national or cultural boundaries. This book is both indispensable and inspiring reading for intellectuals and informed readers who regard themselves as citizens of the world. For academics, researchers, and students engaged in the disciplines of literature and visual art studies, world literature studies, comparative literature studies, performance studies, theatre studies, cultural studies, narrative fiction studies, and studies in the history of literature and the visual arts in modern times, this book is essential and thought-provoking reading that will have many positive outcomes.
Because the language in Finnegans Wake is so dense and complicated, translating it into another language might seem an impossible task. Is it even possible to convey any of this in translation?
“Yes, it’s possible and its been done,” says Michel Hockx, a professor of Chinese at the University of London. “Most of his work has been translated. Anything can be translated into any language.”
Repeat slowly... ANYTHING CAN BE TRANSLATED INTO ANY LANGUAGE. Congratulations to translator, Dai Congrong!
After Salman Rushdie, Chinese writer Hao Qun, popularly known as Murong Xuecon [sic] — his pen name — was missed at the Kolkata literary meet. Murong was to address the media on Thursday, but failed to turn up as he was allegedly denied visa to India. However, like his writings that seeped through Chinese government censorship with the help of the Internet, Murong interacted with the audience through Skype.
Murong's translator and publisher Harvey Thomlison said, "He wasn't actually refused visa, but they delayed it till it never happened. I was told that the delay was caused from India's end, though most of his controversies are in China. I personally feel that the Indian government is afraid of offending China. It's a shame because he has been given visa across the world."
By Canaan Morse, January 31, '13
This is an informal review of Xi Chuan’s newest published collection, Enough for A Dream 够一梦, which contains more important poems in one book than I have read here in two or three years together. The poems presented in it command the attention of the reader because they speak in a language that is both colloquial and singularly Chinese, and can be bitterly poignant in their depictions of China. They represent an inimitable poetic voice as pronounced as any one might read in this language. And the poet, Xi Chuan, has mastered the use of the question, and how many of us who write poetry can say that?
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Edited by Thomas Moran and Ye (Dianna) Xu.
"Simply magnificent." -- says Kate Saunders in her review.
Short story, translated by Ken Liu. This link gives both the text version (in English) and an audio version.
Yan Lianke (阎连科) is one of just 5 authors—and the only Chinese—who has made the shortlist for this year’s Man Booker Int’l Prize.
Coming in the wake of Mo Yan’s Nobel Prize for Literature, this poses a thorny PR challenge for the authorities: how do you explain to your people that yes, another of our authors is being (justly) highlighted in the West, but, um, several of his best works can’t be purchased in the Middle Kingdom?
By Qiufan Chen, with some book covers to enjoy!
By Louise Edwards, The China Quarterly, Vol. 212 (December 2012), pp 1059-1078 (subscription required)
Abstract: This article examines 70 years of debate about Ding Ling's 1941 influential short story about a woman spy, “When I was in Xia Village.” In the article I show that the re-absorption of “our” female spies into post-conflict solidarity narratives is a fraught process. For national governments, the difficulty lies in asserting the moral legitimacy of their rule in the face of evidence about their deployment of women as sex spies. For national populations, the difficulty lies in the desire to construct reassuring victory stories within which peacetime normalcy can be restored. The diverse exegeses around Ding Ling's “Xia Village” reveal that even decades after the hostilities cease, “our” women sex spies still require an explanation to communities seeking to consolidate or “remember” their national virtue. The evolution of this process of “explaining” reveals the on-going importance of sexual morality to governance in current-day China. Specifically, through the analysis of the critiques of “Xia Village” the article demonstrates that female chastity has been and continues to be an important commodity in establishing and sustaining popular perceptions of the moral virtue of the PRC as a nation, and the CCP as its legitimate government.
Maialen Marín-Lacarta, "A Brief History of Translations of Modern and Contemporary Chinese Literature in Spain (1949-2009) (1)" in 1611: Revista de Historia de la Traducción 6.
Bruce Humes talks about translating Chi Zijian's novel The Last Quarter of the Moon, about the Evenki.
Another roundup of news & views on the most recent Nobel Literature laureate.
By Margaret B. Wan, SUNY series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture
hardback 2009, paperback 2010)
ISBN13: 978-0-7914-7701-4
The Festival of Liumang: The Liumang Narrative in Contemporary China (流氓的盛宴), by Dake Zhu (朱大可) (New Star Press, Beijing, 2006)
- reviewed by Pan Lu (Lecturer, The University of Hong Kong Community College; HYI Visiting Fellow)
One story, “Air Burst!” is told from the point of view of Chinese soldiers in a dangerous retreat after a failed offensive, and they are treated with exactly the same level of sympathy one sees in Kurtzman’s stories about American G.I.s. ... Here, we've moved beyond the sympathetic to the empathetic, in that we don't just feel for the Chinese soldiers, we feel through them, are asked to see through their eyes and feel what they feel. We become them, to the degree that we become Jane Eyre or Huck Finn or any other protagonist with whose plight a story asks us to identify.
Or almost. There's one major stumbling block to our identification with Kurtzman's Chinese soldiers: the way he represents their speech. Kurtzman's American G.I.s speak as realistically as he could make them, given the anti-profanity restrictions placed on publications by the Comics Code Authority. But his Chinese soldiers, for all their humanity, speak a stilted, formalized version of English. "Let us pause a moment" one will say, "Why do you stop, Lee?" another will ask ... you get the idea: no slang, no contractions, the kind of thing the writers of Star Trek did when writing for Spock or Data. The idea seems to be to present the Chinese characters as exotic, and this interferes with the attempt to give us their experience and their point of view, since they are exotic only to us, not to themselves. If they come across as exotic, we are taken out of their lived experience, and reminded of their otherness. We are no longer fully experiencing their point of view.
A review of In the Name of the Masses: Conceptualizations and Representations of the Crowd in Early Twentieth-Century China, by Tie Xiao.
In Western media and scholarship, Chinese crowds are often schizophrenically portrayed as either terrifying or emancipatory – from the manic frenzy of the Red Guards to the student fighters for democracy at Tian’anmen, from angry mobs destroying Japanese goods to heroic Hong Kong citizens defying Mainland “brainwashing,” the massive, nameless Chinese crowd looms large in the global imagination as a specter embodying the ambivalence at the heart of modern political democracy. While the “people” constitutes the source from which political sovereignty derives, it also harbors fears of irrational mob rule, the steamrolling of the individual, and the claustrophobia of the collective. Tie Xiao’s dissertation admirably charts the development of notions of the crowd in early twentieth-century intellectual discourse and aesthetic production. As he convincingly demonstrates, Chinese thinkers, while acknowledging the need for a political and social order that would be democratic in the broad sense, were also troubled by the antimony between terror and liberation that also lurked in the collective’s bosom. Moreover, the early twentieth-century Chinese engagement with the “crowd” took part in the processes of what Lydia Liu has termed “translated modernity” – the Chinese interest in crowds paralleled European interest in crowd psychology, as well as global aesthetic trends in representing the “masses” in both literature and visual art.
The National Museum of Taiwan Literature 國立台灣文學館 website
Chinese literature - viewing this emerging superpower through its novels
AVAILABILITY:OVER A YEAR LEFT TO LISTEN
Duration: 28 minutes
First broadcast: Sunday 20 January 2013
In October the Nobel prize for Literature was awarded to Mo Yan, the pen name of the Chinese novelist Guan Moye. Mo Yan translates as 'Don't speak' , a warning given to him by his parents during the Cultural Revolution. His latest novel translated into English, Pow!, is set in Slaughterhouse village and tells the story of a rural community obsessed with meat and the deadly extent they will go to in order to maximise a profit in animal flesh. Mo Yan's translator Howard Goldblatt and novelist and film maker Xiaolu Guo discuss the nature of Chinese literature and how much Mo Yan and his fellow contemporary Chinese novelists can teach us about life inside this emerging world force.
Recorded at the 2011 PEN World Voices Festival.
"No one, wise Kublai,” says Marco Polo in Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, “knows better than you that the city must never be confused with the words that describe it.” In Atlas: The Archaeology of an Imaginary City, Hong Kong’s Dung Kai-cheung writes, “All places are misplaces, and all misplaces are misreadings,” and “The prerequisite for the setting of boundaries on maps is possession of the power to create fiction.”
Calvino’s Invisible Cities has Marco Polo telling Chinese emperor Kublai Khan of the fabulous and fantastical cities he has visited, all named after women, like the idealized Venice (Venus) from which he hails. Dung’s Atlas, meanwhile, tells only of Victoria, a city named after a queen and, coincidentally, the ur-name of central Hong Kong. Coincidentally, because in line with Marco Polo’s admonition not to confuse the city with its verbal representation, despite any resemblance between actual Hong Kong and the city Atlas describes, its placement is misplaced and its maps are inscribed with the power of fiction: historical details mix with the made-up, and fact and the factitious blend in its pages.
Yiju Huang’s dissertation is an investigation of the Cultural Revolution through its aesthetic and literary afterlives in the post-Mao era. The dissertation takes as its point of departure the widespread notion that the Cultural Revolution was a “colossal catastrophe,” and proceeds to examine the ways in which traumatic traces were embedded within works of literature, art, and cinema. Focusing on how people produce meanings in the aftermath of a major historical event, Huang argues against the attempts of the CCP to bring the subject of the Cultural Revolution to premature closure, in its attempt to transfer the country’s attention to a fetishized future of economic development and modernization. Instead of understanding the Cultural Revolution as exclusively belonging to a bygone era, Huang urges us to reopen the subject as “a nexus of unresolved and unfinished problems that spill beyond the threshold of the past.”
In the last decade economic historians like Ban Wang and Kenneth Pomeranz have demonstrated that the Chinese economy dominated the planet from about 500 to 1500 CE, creating the world’s first global economic system. The possibility of China’s return to that position of dominance—and here I ask all readers to call up a mental image of a sleeping dragon awakening—is what has folks on both sides of the Pacific trembling, in fear or glee, for the “Chinese century” to succeed the American one. “China” is thus one of the names of the global future as we imagine it.
China is also, therefore, an intellectual and social problem, for everyone. What is China to us today—assuming the “us” includes (and how could it not?) the wide variety of people who think of themselves as “Chinese”? What kind of place is it? What must we know to comprehend its nature (if it has one)? What would it mean to recognize ourselves (again, the first person plural includes the Chinese) as people who want to know what China is, and who are willing to work hard, as authors and as readers, to understand it? How will such an understanding return us, like fiction, to a new vision of the world we have known until now?
By Canaan Morse, January 20, '13
Communist Party philosophy is the philosophy of struggle!
Chinese poet and poetry critic Qin Xiaoyu invited the Proletarian to attend a meeting at Peking University last Friday on poetry in online media. The meeting was sponsored and chaired by Yang Erwen, founder of ArtsBj.com (北京文艺网), and Yang Lian, whom Yang Erwen has worked into some advisory position at the website. Having no prior knowledge of the event, the Proletarian thought it was just going to be another stereotypical academic meeting, where people made airy speeches over an audience checking their cell phones; who knew that the first item of news would be one of significant importance?
In the spirit of, “In China, all the numbers are big,” ArtsBj.com is managing a Chinese poetry competition, and they have over forty thousand entries already. They will be awarding prizes for single poems, with long poems and short poems judged separately, as well as a prize for the best individual collection. All judging is open; that is, the judges’ comments and decisions are posted publicly on the website and are open for comment by those who submit.
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A Chinese tale of timeless nomadic lives threatened by politics and change
The Last Quarter of the Moon [额尔古纳河右岸] is the first novel from award-winning Chinese novelist Chi Zijian to be translated into English. It is an atmospheric modern folk-tale, the saga of the Evenki clan of Inner Mongolia – nomadic reindeer herders whose traditional life alongside the Argun river endured unchanged for centuries, only to be driven almost to extinction during the political upheavals of the 20th century.
Taiwan and Hong Kong journalist and political affairs commentator Zhang Tiezhi (张铁志) has written an intriguing piece for the Chinese edition of the New York Times, 歌唱美丽岛 , that calls attention to an overlooked but sensitive aspect of the recent hullabaloo over censorship at Guangzhou’s Southern Weekend (南方周末).
At one point, anti-censorship demonstrators at the entrance to the newspaper, he says, actually sang Meili Dao (美丽岛, aka Formosa) . . .
By Nicky Harman, January 15, '13
Bruce Humes has been too modest to flag this up, so I will: Last Quarter of the Moon by Chi Zijian, translated by BH, is out now and Harvill Secker is gearing up with some Twitter promotion
Author Li Chengpeng’s book-signing tour for The Whole World Knows (全世界人民都知道 ) has attracted some bizarre—not to mention dangerous—behavior according to the South China Morning Post’s Author Attacked by Leftists:
Li Chengpeng [李承鹏], a former journalist, was punched in the head during an afternoon signing of his new book for readers at the Zhongguancun Bookstore in [Beijing’s] Haidian district, and another man was filmed throwing a packaged kitchen knife at Li . . .
ed. by Alexandra Green, Hong Kong University Press, 2012
ISBN 9789888139101
Considers narrative and visual narrative across disciplines and cultures
Harvard University Press, due 15 Feb 2013.
ISBN 0674067681, 9780674067684
Rhythms, conceptual metaphors, and political language convey meanings of which Chinese speakers themselves may not be aware. Link’s Anatomy of Chinese contributes to the debate over whether language shapes thought or vice versa, and its comparison of English with Chinese lends support to theories that locate the origins of language in the brain.
In Milestones on a Golden Road, Richard King presents pivotal works of fiction produced in four key periods of Chinese revolutionary history: the civil war (1945-49), the Great Leap Forward (1958-60), the Cultural Revolution (1966-76), and the post-Mao catharsis (1979-80). Taking its cues from the Soviet Union’s optimistic depictions of a society liberated by Communism, the official Chinese literature of this era is characterized by grand narratives of progress.
Addressing questions of literary production, King looks at how writers dealt with shifting ideological demands, what indigenous and imported traditions inspired them, and how they were able to depict a utopian Communist future to their readers, even as the present took a very different turn. Early “red classics” were followed by works featuring increasingly lurid images of joyful socialism, and later by fiction exposing the Mao era as an age of irrationality, arbitrary rule, and suffering – a Golden Road that had led to nowhere.
Richard King is Professor of Chinese Studies at the University of Victoria.
Christopher Maziere interviews:
For more posts on Taiwanese Indigenous Poets and Authors, see twitter MAZIERE Christophe @CMaziere
By Eric Abrahamsen, January 8, '13
Many people have been asking where they can get hold of some of the novels published by Penguin China over the past year. Sheng Keyi's Northern Girls and Wang Xiaofang's The Civil Servant's Notebook in particular. These and other books are now available in e-book format on the US and UK Amazon sites, so go shopping!
