Our News, Your News
By Nicky Harman, December 31, '12
Thanks, everyone, for your additions and corrections. Here's what we've got now:
Fiction
An Unusual Princess, by Wu Meizhen, tr. Petula Parris-Huang (Egmont UK)
Atlas: The Archaeology of an Imaginary City, by Dung Kai-cheung, tr. Dung Kai-cheung, Bonnie McDougall and Anders Hansson, Columbia University Press
Dream of Ding Village, Yan Lianke, tr. Cindy Carter (Constable)
Flowers of War, by Geling Yan, tr. Nicky Harman (Chatto & Windus)
Hanging Devils, by He Jiahong, tr. Duncan Hewitt (Penguin China/Australia)
Jackal and Wolf, by Shen Shixi, tr. Helen Wang (Egmont UK)
Lenin's Kisses by Yan Lianke tr. Carlos Rojas (Chatto & Windus)
Northern Girls, by Sheng Keyi, tr. Shelley Bryant (Penguin China/Australia)
Pai Hua Zi and the Clever Girl, by Zhang Xinxin, tr. Helen Wang (https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/pai-hua-zi-clever-girl-vol./id553372788)
Shi Cheng: Short Stories from Urban China, various authors and translators (Comma Press)
The Civil Servant’s Notebook, by Wang Xiaofang, tr. Eric Abrahamsen (Penguin China/Australia)
The Road of Others, by Anni Baobei, tr. Nicky Harman (Make Do Publishing)
This Generation: Dispatches from China's Most Popular Literary Star (and Race Car Driver) Han Han tr. Allan Barr (Simon & Schuster)
Trees Without Wind: A Novel, Li Rui, tr. John Balcom, Columbia University Press
Under the Hawthorn Tree, by Ai Mi, tr. Anna Holmwood (Virago Press)
Poetry
A Phone Call From Dalian, Han Dong, tr. Nicky Harman and others, Zephyr Press (Jintian series)
Doubled Shadows, Ouyang Jianghe, tr. Austin Woerner, Zephyr Press (Jintian series)
Jade Ladder: Contemporary Chinese Poetry, tr. W.N. Herbert, Yang Lian, Brian Holton and Qin Xiaoyu (Bloodaxe Books)
June 4th Elegies, Liu Xiaobo, tr. Jeffrey Yang, (Graywolf Press)
Notes on the Mosquito, Poems of Xi Chuan, tr. Lucas Klein (New Directions Publishing)
Stone Cell, Lo Fu, tr. John Balcom, Zephyr Press (Jintian series)
The Changing Room, Zhai Yongming, tr. Andrea Lingenfelter, Zephyr Press (Jintian series)
Wind Says, Bai Hua, tr. Fiona Sze-Lorrain, Zephyr Press (Jintian series)
2013 January, fiction
Last quarter of the Moon, Chi Zijian tr. Bruce Humes, Jan 2013 (Harvill Secker)
Sandalwood Death, Mo Yan, tr. Howard Goldblatt, Jan 2013 ( University of Oklahoma Press)
And a Happy New Year to all!
The lives and aspirations of young Chinese (those between 14 and 26 years old) have been transformed in the past five decades. By examining youth cultures around three historical points – 1968, 1988 and 2008 – this book argues that present-day youth culture in China has both international and local roots. Paul Clark describes how the Red Guards and the sent-down youth of the Cultural Revolution era carved out a space for themselves, asserting their distinctive identities, despite tight political controls. By the late 1980s, Chinese-style rock music, sports and other recreations began to influence the identities of Chinese youth, and in the twenty-first century, the Internet offers a new, broader space for expressing youthful fandom and frustrations. From the 1960s to the present, this book shows how youth culture has been reworked to serve the needs of the young Chinese.
Includes awards for writing in Kazakh, Korean, Mongolian, Tibetan and Uyghur, as well as translations into and out of Han Chinese, Kazakh, Korean, Tibetan, Yao and Zhuang.
Forensic scientist Qin Ming listens to the dead, and he hears their stories. Now, he has translated the tales into a best-selling crime thriller that has topped China's Amazon and sold about 50,000 copies in just two months. His debut novel, Voice of the Dead, is a collection of 20 enthralling criminal investigations from his seven years working in forensics.
In my view, Laughlin’s essay raises two important questions: 1) To what extent, if any, are Mo Yan and other contemporary Chinese writers trapped in a Maoist language that constricts their expression, and perhaps their vision as well? and 2) Can writers who live under political censorship nevertheless find ways to write to write well?
The latest article from Bertrand Mialaret. Timely too, because December 28th will be the 100th birthday of Shen Congwen (1902-1988).
By Nicky Harman, December 20, '12
I make it a total of nineteen books. OK, I’ve cheated a bit – three of the publications below are poetry, and two others come out in January 2013. Still, it’s a good haul and many times better than the annual total, say, ten years ago. (Please post a comment if I’ve missed anyone out.) I couldn’t begin to add up just how many hours of translation the whole list represents, and that’s without the extra work translators have put in, on some of these books, to get them off the ground. So, lets raise a glass to translation and all pat ourselves on the back!
In alphabetical order, this year’s publications from Chinese are:
More…
In <四成少数民族语言临危,> Wang Bo at Chinanews.com reports that up to four of ten languages native to minorities in China are threatened with extinction.
When Pearl Buck received the 1938 Nobel Prize in Literature – for "her rich and truly epic depictions of peasant life in China" – the focus on the prize sharpened further, with many Chinese writers, including Hu Feng and Ba Jin, seemingly indignant that a non-Chinese had won for writing about China. Buck, however, took the high road and used her acceptance speech to make a passionate case for the power of traditional Chinese novels, like Shuihu Zhuan (which she also translated into English). "The Chinese novel was free," she said. "It grew as it liked out of its own soil, the common people, nurtured by that heartiest of sunshine, popular approval, and untouched by the cold and frosty winds of the scholar's art." She also used her position as Nobel Laureate to nominate Lin Yutang for the literature prize in 1940 and 1950.
"....Art is beyond realism. Art is beyond geographical time and space. Art is obviously beyond dissidence. That should be our motto when we are trying to discover a powerful authentic form of art. "
Two videos made post-Mo Yan Nobel win and pre-acceptance speech, talks about the John Updike review in the New Yorker and splitting a small translation fee with the author for the last Mo Yan novel he translated.
Mo Yan 莫言 has given his Nobel acceptance speech, but that doesn’t mean the debates about whether he deserved the award have stopped–or that older pieces haven’t been resurfacing.
A good deal of the debate focuses on the contrast between Mo Yan and Liu Xiaobo 刘晓波, the imprisoned critic who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010...
As for [Mo Yan's] remarks on censorship... You may disagree. You may find this naïve. You may feel like security checks and censorship are not the same, and that the kinds of governmental controls on the news he imagines do not exist in your country and should not exist in his. You may feel that the restrictions on writing inherent to literature are of a different order from the restrictions on writing imposed by the government, and that writers can be subtle without having to worry about censorship. You may feel like the “highest principle” he wishes for is a pipe dream, that as long as the state has power to limit speech it will use that power, and the only high principle is the principle of freedom. I certainly think all those things. That is different, however, from claiming that Mo Yan advocates, let alone celebrates, censorship. I’ve written about problems of translation in English-language reporting on China before; this example, in which reporters have treated the word jiancha as if it were shencha, is more of the same.
One of the most informative essays yet -- in my opinion -- on Mo Yan, his writing, and how he is viewed both in China and by Sinologists:
. . . 对莫言盛赞有加的，当属诺贝尔文学奖得主、日本作家大江健三郎。据称，他就是莫言获奖的提名者之一，而且，很显然，是起重要作用的提名者。在某种程度上说，大江在文学上的贡献与其说是获得诺奖，不如说是他推荐了莫言获奖。可是，另一位诺贝尔文学奖得主赫塔·米勒却对莫言获奖表示了极度的不满。相关报道语焉不详，也没有证据表明米勒对莫言的作品有多大程度上的理解，我们所知道的是，米勒的批评主要是出于道德义愤。至于批评的合理性理由，并不难猜测，应该跟前文所提及的反对者的意见差不多，只不过在她的言论环境中，她的表达更为直截了当。我理解这位前罗马尼亚作家的情绪，但我怀疑她的资讯来源的可靠性，也怀疑媒体传播的准确性。
Mo Yan has written panoramic novels covering much of twentieth-century
Chinese history. “Rewriting history” has been a fashion in Chinese fiction
since the 1990s; it holds great interest for readers who are still
struggling to confront the question of “what happened?” during and after
the country’s Maoist spasm. For writers inside the system, a dilemma
arises in how to treat episodes like the Great Leap famine (1959–1962), in
which 30 million or more people starved to death, or the Great Proletarian
Cultural Revolution (1966–1970), which took the lives of another two or
three million and poisoned the national spirit with a cynicism and
distrust so deep that even today it has not fully recovered. Today’s
Communist leaders, worried that their power could suffer by association
with these Maoist disasters, declare the topics “sensitive” and largely
off-limits for state-sponsored writers. But a writer doing a panorama
cannot omit them, either. What to do?
Mo Yan’s solution (and he is not alone here) has been to invoke a kind of
daft hilarity when treating “sensitive” events.
Article by Göran Sommardal (in Swedish).
By Bruce Humes, December 9, '12
It's true that the Western media, and not a few China hands, would like nothing better than for Mo Yan to have delivered a Nobel acceptance speech that criticizes China's censorship practices.
One could argue that this is a selfish if not downright childish desire.
His speech is now up in Chinese (讲故事的人), so we know that his speech contained nothing of the sort. He basically said that:
*** He perceives himself as a "storyteller" who was deeply inspired by the lives of those around him as he grew up in a small Shandong town
*** Recent criticisms leveled at him in fact have nothing to do with Mo Yan the writer
*** A writer should be judged by what he writes, not what he says -- or doesn't say -- about what he writes
More…
"Chinas staatlich gelenkte Medien feierten den diesjährigen Literaturnobelpreisträger Mo Yan mit Sonderprogrammen. Doch es gibt auch Kritik: Der nach Deutschland geflüchtete Autor Liao Yiwu bezeichnet Mo Yan als Vertreter des Systems, und der Künstler Ai Weiwei ist regelrecht empört über die Wahl."
Excerpting blind here. Also, apparently I'm an Übersetzer, which is pretty exciting.
By Helen Wang, December 7, '12
I’ve pulled out all the Chinese titles in the Penguin Classics series, giving one link per title – but some titles have more than one edition and at different prices, so you might want to check which one you want. I’ve also tweeted each title (with link) on @cfbcuk
The discount code is PenguinAdvent
More…
By Helen Wang, December 6, '12
Du Fu was born in 712, and would have been 1300 years old in 2012! Rather than let this momentous occasion slip by unnoticed, I checked with Du Fu aficionado Brian Holton if there had been any celebrations. We haven’t heard of any, so we’d like to propose that we squeeze in a celebration before the end of the year. We don’t know his actual birthday, so have plumped for 12.12.12 as it’s easy to remember, and propose that we designate this day (12 December) hereafter as Du Fu Day.
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The translator's experience of translating Chen Xiwo's The Man with the Knife and Sun Yisheng's The shades who periscope through flowers to the sky...
These are two very different stories. One deals with sexual politics and is deeply unsettling; the other is vividly imaginative, combining realistic narrative with rich hints of fantasy. Their authors, too, could hardly be more different: one is a highly politicized , mature writer, the other is just starting his career, and is from the newest “literary generation” in China.
Shi Cheng: Short Stories from Urban China, edited by Liu Deng, Carol Yinghua Lu and Ra Page, translated by Eric Abrahamsen, Nicky Harman, Julia Lovell and others, Comma Press, RRP £9.99
An anthology of short stories that engage obliquely with themes such as migration, prosperity and gender relationships offers refreshing glimpses into life in modern Chinese cities. With settings ranging from Beijing and Hong Kong to the icy Harbin, it includes works by newcomers as well as established authors such as Han Dong.
A very good piece by Xiaolu Guo, arguing that it is simplistic to think of artists and writers in undemocratic countries as being restricted to the either-or choice of servant-of-the-state or martyr. (published in German, translated from the English by Gregor Dotzauer)
And on the list are....
Northern Girls, by Sheng Keyi, tr. Shelly Bryant
The Bathing Women, by Tie Ning, tr. Zhang Hongling and Jason Sommer
The Garden of Evening Mists, by Tan Twan Eng
In the fourteen-page Author’s Afterward to his Selected Poems, Xi Chuan references or quotes from Tolstoy, Yang Lian, the Zhuangzi, the Indian social theorist Ashis Nandy, Eileen Chang, Leo Strauss, C.T. Hsia, Jonathan Spence, Milan Kundera, Li Bai, Czeslaw Milosz, the 20th-century sociologist Fei Xiaotong, ancient philosopher Han Feizi, Mao Zedong, Foucault, Tang dynasty literati Han Yu, and Goethe. This is not a poet who can be accused of parochialism. Yet Xi Chuan wears his erudition lightly, at least in the context of his verse. This is not to say that the poems do not give a sense of a formidable intellect behind them—they do—but what is striking in the poems is less Xi Chuan’s breadth of reference than his sense of humor, his humanity, and his attention to the smallest details of ordinary life, ranging from bodily functions to rats to the way drizzle soaks through socks.
Xi Chuan was born in 1963, just after the mass starvation of the Great Leap Forward, and was a small child during Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Lucky and talented enough to be one of the few children able to go to school at the time, he later went on to major in English at Beijing University. As translator Lucas Klein explains in his exemplary Translator’s Introduction, in the spring of 1989 Xi Chuan lost two close poet friends, Hai Zi and Luo Yihe, both of whom were also Beijing University students. Following on the heels of that trauma were the events in Tiananmen, which Xi Chuan participated in and suffered from. The pain of his friends’ deaths and the disillusionment he experienced after the government crackdown discouraged him from writing for nearly two years. When he resumed, his style had changed considerably from the Imagist Western-influenced Obscure Poetry exemplified by poets such as Bei Dao, Duo Duo, and Yang Lian. He moved toward a more philosophical and less lyrical prose poetry that contrasts with his earlier shorter, often nature-inspired work. His most recent poems play with ideas of paradox, inheritance, and the past, present, and future of civilization.
About Yang Xianhui:
Subsequently, the Shanghai Art and Literature Publishing House gathered all of Yang’s stories into one volume, and, perpetuating the pretense, published them as fiction in 2003. Last year, a new edition was published by the Flower City Publishing House. So far, the author says the government has been silent and both books are selling well. “The fiction label has given me greater flexibility to maneuver in China,” Yang says in a recent interview. Yang has even won numerous national accolades, including the Best Short Story award from the Chinese Academy of Short Story Writers in 2003.”
Novel by Wang Xiaofang, translation by Eric Abrahamsen, review by C.S.M. (Clarissa Sebag Montefiore?)
Officialdom fiction works in part as muckraking, for the rest of us, and in part as a guide for aspiring officials, who are advised on what not to do if you want to keep your head (hint: do not accept bribes). It owes its popularity to a readership that is both fascinated and repelled by the elite who rule them. Mr Wang’s novels have sold millions.
The video of my discussion of Xi Chuan 西川 and Yang Lian 楊煉 in terms of Ezra Pound, "Ideogrammic Methods: The Space of Writing and Tradition in Contemporary Chinese Long Poetry," has finally been posted online.
The American TV character Bart Simpson copies an often ironic sentence on the blackboard over and over again. It is a gag. But in China, prominent writers obediently did the same. Only not so funny. Four months ago, novelist Mo Yan copied by hand a passage of Mao Zedong's speech, known as the Yanan Talks, which exhorts writers to put their art to the service of politics.
The announcement on October 11 that Chinese writer Mo Yan had won the 2012 Nobel Prize for Literature was met with delight in some quarters and despair in others. The hand-wringers have focused on Mo Yan’s politics—or rather their perception of Mo Yan’s lack of political consciousness—and talk about this has dominated editorial pages in the West, rather than talk about his art. In recent weeks, the 2009 Nobel Literature Prize winner, Romanian author Herta Mueller, characterized Mo Yan as a Communist Party hack and called the award “a catastrophe.”
Mo Yan’s politics are somewhat oblique, by design, and a read of his most recently translated novel, Pow!, shows that comments like Mueller’s are wide of the mark. Shot through with politics and history and translated by the masterful Howard Goldblatt, Pow! adds to the growing list of Mo Yan’s rollicking and ribald novels available in English—all translated by Goldblatt, who has championed Mo Yan’s work for decades and continues to do the author great justice in his earthy and vivid translations.
HENAN Province, China, 1942. Nearly three million people die of starvation.
I am a descendant of these victims. But I know nothing of this great famine until 1990 at age 32 when a friend embarks on writing a history of disasters in China. He asks me to go back with him to the Henan of 1942 to help him write this story, and this is when I first learn of the magnitude of the tragedy.
He Ma, author of the wildly best-selling Tibet Code, ranks 28th among the Top 30 in the just-released (unofficial) list of China’s Richest Authors. . .
A RMB millionaire he may now be, but He Ma—a Han from Sichuan who has reportedly spent nearly a decade exploring Tibet, including three years in Lhasa—appears to be one of the unnamed targets of a Nov 27 article by Gao Yujie in the Tibet Daily trashing much of the fiction published during the so-called “Tibet craze” that has swept the popular literary scene over the last few years. . .
By Nicky Harman, December 1, '12
... has a short story by young writer Sun Yisheng called
The Shades who periscope Through Flowers to the Sky. (The title is taken from a poem When Once The Twilight Locks No Longer by Dylan Thomas, translated into Chinese by the poet Bai Hua.)
By Helen Wang, November 29, '12
Data compiled from the entry 2012第七届中国作家富豪榜 on www.baidu.com.
Chinese Writers’ Rich List 2012
1. Zheng Yuanjie 郑渊洁 (2011 – no.3 // 2010 – no.3 // 2009 – no.1 // 2008 – no.2)
2. Mo Yan 莫言
3. Yang Hongying 杨红樱 (2011 – no.4 // 2010 – no.1 // 2009 – no.3 // 2008 – no.3)
4. Guo Jingming 郭敬明 (2011 – no.1 // 2010 - no.1 // 2009 - no.2 // 2008 - no.1)
5. Jiang Nan 江南 (2011 – no.6)
6. Yu Dan 于丹 (2011 – no.25 // 2008 – no.7)
7. Han Han 韩寒 (2011 – no.9 // 2010 – no.8 // 2009 – no.8 // 2008 – no.18)
8. An Dongni 按东尼
9. Nan Pai San Shu 南派三叔 (2011 – no.2 // 2010 – no.14)
10. Dang Nian Ming Yue 当年明月 (2011 – no.7 // 2010 – no.4 // 2009 – no.4 // 2008 – no.15)
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"China: One in 1.3 billion ..... Surprising, and rather wonderful."
Leon Comber's rendering of the Pao stories offers a hero more interested than Dee in repairing the social fabric torn by crime. In particular, he delights in finding new mates for those bereft by crime (in accordance with the principle from the Chinese classic of Mencius that "Three things are unfilial, and of these the worst is to have no offspring.")
The overlapping world of literary critics and cultural commentators is still arguing about Mo Yan 莫言 and his Nobel Prize.
Merry Laughter and Angry Curses, by Juan Wang, reveals how the late-Qing-era tabloid press became the voice of the people. As periodical publishing reached a fever pitch, tabloids had free rein to criticize officials, mock the elite, and scandalize readers, giving the public knowledge about previously unspeakable and unprintable ideas. In the name of the people, tabloid writers produced a massive amount of anti-establishment literature, whose distinctive humour and satirical style were both potent and popular. This book shows the tabloid community to be both a producer of meanings and a participant in the social and cultural dialogue that would shake the foundations of imperial China and lead to the 1911 Republican Revolution.
Drawing, thinking, speaking and ministering — Bai Hua explores language as a multi-dimensional medium in which image and voices mold words and synergies into portraits and encounters. Unlike traditional pastoral poets and landscape artists, Bai Hua does not depict thriving or romantic representations of the landscape. The literal world within and without, here run the undercurrents of poetry. There is neither pastoral contentment nor dramatic exile in Bai Hua’s work. — from the Introduction by Fiona Sze-Lorrain
Cosima Bruno’s new book asks us to consider a deceptively simple question: what is the relationship between a poem and its translation? In the course of Between the Lines: Yang Lian’s Poetry through Translation (Brill, 2012), Bruno helps us imagine what an answer to that question might look like while guiding us through the sounds and spaces of contemporary Chinese poet Yang Lian.
Writes The Guardian:
The choice of the Chinese writer Mo Yan as the winner of this year's Nobel prize for literature is "a slap in the face for all those working for democracy and human rights", according to the author Herta Müller, who won the Nobel in 2009.
Cyber Monday - For 24 hours (12 am to midnight, HST) on Monday, November 26, 2012, order online and receive 40% off every title currently available and in stock at our website.
Francois Laplantine's new book Une autre Chine: Gens de Pékin, observateurs et passeurs des temps, was published in May 2012. Looking beyond the distorted and simplified view of China that is presented by the Chinese and Western media, he examines everyday life in Beijing, Chinese literature and film to reveal the cultural wealth of contemporary China. He discusses the writers Mo Yan, Yu Hua, Yan Lianke, Chi Li, Liu Qingbang, Xu Xing (and sees links to Shen Congwen); and notes that the Sixth Generation of film directors (Jia Zhangke, Wang Chao, Liu Jie and Zhu Wen) have broken away from the "flamboyant lyricism" of directors like Zhang Yimou to show scenes of ordinary life, in a process devoid of frills, to film life as it is - in naked reality.
Congratulations, Shouhuo!
The discontent lies in Mo Yan’s language. Open any page, and one is treated to a jumble of words that juxtaposes rural vernacular, clichéd socialist rhetoric, and literary affectation. It is broken, profane, appalling, and artificial; it is shockingly banal. The language of Mo Yan is repetitive, predictable, coarse, and mostly devoid of aesthetic value. The English translations of Mo Yan’s novels, especially by the excellent Howard Goldblatt, are in fact superior to the original in their aesthetic unity and sureness. The blurb for The Republic of Wine from Washington Post says: “Goldblatt’s translation renders Mo Yan’s shimmering poetry and brutal realism as work akin to that of Gorky and Solzhenitsyn.” But in fact, only the “brutal realism” is Mo Yan’s; the “shimmering poetry” comes from a brilliant translator’s work.
By Helen Wang, November 24, '12
Are there any copies of Sheng Keyi's Northern Girls or Wang Xiaofang's The Civil Servant's Notebook on sale in the UK? Christmas is coming and I was thinking these might make good presents, but it's not easy to get copies of them in the UK. I contacted Penguin China, and it appears they have been launched in the Asia Pacific territory, and the best way is to try and get ebook editions on Penguin.com.au, or to place orders in Australia, or ask a friend to bring them in the luggage. Is anyone in the UK selling these titles?
The latest piece by Bertrand Mialaret featuring Wang Xiaofang's The Civil Servant's Notebook (tr. Eric Abrahamsen), and tracing the development of this genre from The Scholars written in the 18th century.
Just the other day I took questions from students in Professor Lucas Klein’s Stylistics & Translation class at HK City U. Given that I’ve translated two Chinese novels written by female authors, what did I think about men translating women’s writing, particularly works narrated by a woman in the first person?
I wonder: did anyone put the same query to Shanghai Normal University Professor Zheng Kelu (郑克鲁) when he embarked on his translation of Simone de Beauvoir’s feminist classic, Le Deuxième Sexe (第二性)?
[中国文学海外传播研究中心负责人] 姚建彬坦言，翻译的困难不在于选择哪些作家、哪些作品，而在于怎样把我们选定的作家作品翻译出去，用英语世界的人认可的高水准的语言传达中国文学的真实面貌。他说：“《今日中国文学》编辑部达成了共识，尽可能聘请母语为英语，且对传播中国文化、译介中国文学有热情和经验的高水平翻译家参与我们的工作。而高水平的译者通常意味着要支付高额的报酬。。。”
Comrades: Please raise your hand if you feel that you have been overpaid -- or even adequately remunerated -- for your latest Chinese-to-English literary translation.
Renditions 77 & 78 (Spring & Autumn 2012), Guest Editor: Mingwei Song.
This issue showcases representative work of Chinese science fiction from the late Qing and the contemporary. As a popular genre, science fiction has energized modern Chinese literature by evoking a whole array of sensations ranging from the grotesque to the sublime, from the Utopian to the apocalyptic, and from the human to the post-human. It mingles nationalism with fantasy, envelopes politics in scientific discourse, and delivers sharp social criticism with an acute awareness of probabilities and possibilities. Science fiction today both echoes and complicates the late Qing writers' vision of China's future and the transformation of our species and universe, and this special issue aims to contextualize a comparative reading of some important Sci fi writings from these two epochs and the similar expectations and anxieties they bring to Chinese readers.
Issues of the 1970s-1990s.
For anthology Flash Fiction International forthcoming from distinguished publisher W.W. Norton, NY. The editors are looking for:
1.Recent very short stories from any country, in English translation, word limit 750 (1-3 pages). We usually reprint works that have already been published (send us a copy) but will also consider original, unpublished manuscripts.
Zhang Xinxin writes about publishing her graphic novel Pai Hua Zi and the Clever Girl as an ibook. (in Chinese)
We are delighted to welcome a new member to the Dissertation Reviews family. Lucas Klein will be the editor of our Chinese Literature series, set to launch fully in early 2013. If you are interested in reviewing for the new series, or having your dissertation reviewed, please contact chineselit@dissertationreviews.org.
By Eric Abrahamsen, November 21, '12
Unless I'm very mistaken, which has been known to happen, the New Yorker's publication of "Bull", excerpted from Mo Yan's forthcoming novel POW! and translated by Howard Golblatt, marks their first foray into translated fiction from a mainland Chinese author. Publishing Mo Yan now may not quite be the bold move it would have been a few months ago, but still it's a landmark moment. Congratulations to Mo Yan, Howard Goldblatt, and the New Yorker!
Read a short interview with Howard on the NY-er blog.
This volume features three novellas originally written in Chinese by the Qinghai author Jing Shi, with an introduction by Keith Dede. (Asian Highlands Perspectives 20)
A unique new fund open to submissions from all UK-based publishers. 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.
Although Old Wu was only the gatekeeper of the large Daoist temple in Huamatou village, his powers had recently increased – as had his irritability. Sometimes he simply kept the door closed for a whole day, and wouldn’t let anyone into the temple. Would-be worshippers peered in through the crack in the door, and only saw him and his big golden dog Root....
About The Civil Servant's Notebook by Wang Xiaofang, translated by Eric Abrahamsen.
By Helen Wang, November 17, '12
Twitter @cfbcuk
Founded by Nicky Harman in 2010, welcoming everyone interested in Chinese fiction in English.
Meets every 6-8 weeks in London - next meeting will be on 16 January 2013.
