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.
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.
By Eric Abrahamsen, April 18, '13
We're very pleased to announce that Paper Republic has partnered with China Book Business Report and Shanghai Eastern Book Data to begin producing monthly reports on the Chinese book market. The reports consist of bestseller lists (general and by category, both overall and for newly-published books), general market analysis, and rankings of Chinese publishing houses according to a variety of indicators.
We've created a sample monthly report for December, 2012, which you can download here (PDF).
These reports are something we've been planning for quite some time, and we're confident they'll be indispensable to anyone wanting an in-depth familiarity with the book market in China, and an up-to-date window on how it's changing.
As a bonus, we've also produced an overview of the Chinese publishing industry for 2011, which you can download here (PDF).
We're excited about this initiative! The lack of timely information about what's going on in China has been a major stumbling block for many potential connections between the Chinese and international publishing industries – this ought to go quite some way to remedying that.
By Canaan Morse, April 17, '13
I am very glad to let everyone know that new things will be coming from Paper Republic in the very, very near future. While most of you know us as a community and a discussion group for translators, writers, academics and all others interested in Chinese literature, fewer of you know of Paper Republic, Ltd., the US- and Hong Kong-registered company that has been building business incrementally for two years now.
That company is about to step a little farther into the open. Check back on the site in the course of the next day or two to discover how this institution is ready to serve publishers and readers worldwide.
Jacob Edmond opens the work with a shot across the bow of more conventional two-tradition comparative studies of poetry by referencing what now seems like an anachronistic Fredric Jameson criticizing Bob Perelman's poem "China" written at the time when China still appeared largely outside academia's western/US frames of reference. If Jameson saw LANGUAGE writing practices like Perelman's poem as symptomatic of the fragmentation of the "cultural logic of late capitalism," what, Edmond leads us on to wonder, would he make of poetics of the hyper-capitalism of twenty-first century Beijing, Shanghai, or Shenzhen? This is to say, Edmond starts off with a critical dialogue that foregrounds the radical global transformations that have taken place under the feet of scholars and poets during the 1980s (USSR crumbles and China "rises" while America lounges forward into a prolonged post-structuralized culture war, etc.). Edmond notes that the global dislocations that have taken root following the Cold War "mean not just separation or estrangement from home and nation, but an aesthetic that question the solidity of the relationship between word and world through writing that foregrounds its own strangeness" (6). Therefore, Edmond moves from the sociological strangeness of late-late capitalism to the aesthetic strangeness of avant-garde language practices and conceptualist technologies citing these latter as the most appropriate texts for decoupling the cold-war binary oscillation between east-west, global-local, and same-different which he argues continue to dominate the critical frames used by comparative and world literary studies today. Instead, he points toward what he defines as a "common strangeness."
Fed up with agents and publishers who want "free" translated excerpts?
Here's the perfect link to send them...
By Eric Abrahamsen, April 15, '13
Penguin China has just announced that they've bought world-wide rights, all languages excluding Chinese, for Wang Anyi's newest novel, Scent of Heaven, in conjunction with Penguin Australia.
Scent of Heaven won the 4th Dream of the Red Chamber Award, and will be a very welcome addition to the Chinese literary landscape in English!
“Xi Chuan's surprising poems reach into tight corners of mind and matter, impersonal but intimate, new to be heard but also oddly familiar. An impressive voice — bold and calm.” — Gary Snyder
Yu, who notably translated Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita and Raymond Carver’s short stories into Chinese, both with a great impact on China’s literary youth in the late 1980s and early 1990s, abandoned her life as a literary editor for Foreign Literature Review by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and started anew in the US in the mid-1990s.
2013 Best Translated Book Award: Poetry Finalists
Transfer Fat by Aase Berg, translated from the Swedish by Johannes Göransson (Ugly Duckling Press; Sweden).
pH Neutral History by Lidija Dimkovska, translated from the Macedonian by Ljubica Arsovska and Peggy Reid (Copper Canyon Press; Macedonia).
The Invention of Glass by Emmanuel Hocquard, translated from the French by Cole Swensen and Rod Smith (Canarium Books; France).
Wheel with a Single Spoke by Nichita Stanescu, translated from the Romanian by Sean Cotter (Archipelago Books; Romania).
Notes on the Mosquito by Xi Chuan, translated from the Chinese by Lucas Klein (New Directions; China).
Almost 1 Book / Almost 1 Life by Elfriede Czurda, translated from the German by Rosmarie Waldrop (Burning Deck; Austria).
Children's fiction is such a profitable business that publishing houses are clamouring for more material, and this has prompted many mainland writers to switch genres. But books by Yang and her fellow children's authors often get short shrift from more educated parents.
By Nicky Harman, April 6, '13
Karen Emmerich on Words Without Borders. This link is to part 2 of her essay, follow WWB link for part 1. http://wordswithoutborders.org/dispatches/article/the-making-of-originals-the-translator-as-editor-part-2
Why this book should win the Best Translated Book Award for 2013:
1. It’s not Jackie Chan. From Kai-Cheung’s introduction: "There are enough fictitious Hong Kongs circulating around the world. It doesn’t matter so much how real or false these fictions are but how they are made up ... I am not claiming that literature represents a Hong Kong more real than the movies, but it has its unique role and methods and thus yields different meanings. It is not just a different way of world-representing but also a different way of world-building, that is, creating conditions for understanding, molding, preserving, and changing the world that we live in."
2. It’s like Calvino plus Borges... At first glance, Atlas sounds a lot like Calvino’s Invisible Cities with a touch of the Borges
3. ... except that it’s not. it’s also something quite different and all of its own. (The titles Dung’s other novels make these influences even more obvious: The Rose of the Name and Visible Cities.) At times, this is more cerebral and heady than Calvino’s work, which makes this even more interesting.
4. It’s written in Cantonese and Mandarin. ... this book is originally written in Mandarin with some Cantonese expressions. This mix occurs in other works of Hong Kong literature, but may also be why it’s not accepted as readily by mainland China.
Citing Paper Republic...
CaixinOnline has just published a revealing piece on the duties of a Beijing 'black guard' that echos the portrayal of Chan Koonchung's Tibetan protagonist in his new novel earlier this year, The Unbearable Dreamworld of Champa the Driver (裸命) . . .
"The amnesia I’m talking about is the act of deleting memories rather than merely a natural process of forgetting. Forgetting can result from the passage of time. The act of deleting memories, however, is about actively winnowing out people’s memories of the present and the past."
By Helen Wang, April 1, '13
At the end of last week on twitter this question was posed: why don't people complain about poor quality Chinese>English translations? Good manners prevailed (no one was named and shamed), and as a critical session was not forthcoming, @cfbcuk held an ad-hoc Weekend Challenge to turn the question around and try to identify the 10 best translated Chinese books. For those who aren’t on twitter, but who might be interested, we’ll post the results below. The challenge was open to all, and while some eminent people participated (thank you!) we were also happy to include translated titles that people have enjoyed reading (thank you too!). In the end we received more than 10 titles. Here they are, in no particular order, except for The Story of the Stone, which was the clear favourite.
Of course, there are popular novelists of various ethnicities who choose to write about their people using Chinese. Part-Tibetan Alai, author of King Gesar (格萨尔王) and Red Poppies (尘埃落定), comes to mind.
But what about ethnic writers who not only speak two languages native to China, but write in both? How does their ability to move seamlessly between two tongues impact their choice of themes and their “narrative voice”?
Great Wall Planet: Introducing Chinese Science Fiction, by Yan Wu, tr. Wang Pengfei and Ryan Nichols.
Chinese Science Fiction: A Response to Modernization, by Han Song
Beyond Narcissism: What Science Fiction Can Offer Literature, by Liu Cixin, tr. Holger Nahm and Gabriel Ascher
Science Fiction for the Nation:Tales of the Moon Colony and the Birth of Modern Chinese Fiction, by Nathaniel Isaacson
“A Tale of New Mr. Braggadocio”: Narrative Subjectivity and Brain Electricity in Late Qing Science Fiction, by Shaoling Ma
Alterity and Alien Contact in Lao She's Martian Dystopia, Cat Country, by Lisa Raphals
Variations on Utopia in Contemporary Chinese Science Fiction, by Mingwei Song
Gloomy China: China's Image in Han Song's Science Fiction, by Jia Liyuan, tr. Joel Martinsen
Translation and the Development of Science Fiction in Twentieth-Century China, by Qian Jiang
Voyage into an Unknown Future: A Genre Analysis of Chinese SF Film in the New Millennium, by Wei Yang
In the near future of 2066, China dominates the world as its sole superpower. A team of Chinese go players is sent to the poverty-stricken United States to show off China’s cultural superiority. By 2066, the United States has been forced to adopt the policy of biguan suoguo [closing doors to the world], exactly what the Qing Empire, China’s last imperial dynasty, did in the nineteenth century when confronted by the aggressive expansionism of the Western powers. In 2066, however, China’s experience as a “weak nation” repeatedly invaded and manipulated by “strong powers” since the late Qing has been decisively erased: China and the West have reversed their roles in world politics and the Chinese are finally triumphant. This is the future setting that opens Han Song’s Huoxing zhaoyao meiguo: 2066 nian zhi xixing manji [Mars Over America: Random Sketches on a Journey to the West in 2066], a novel published in 2012 that presents readers with an apparently utopian vision of China’s rise. Under China’s global leadership, a new world order is being formalised and humanity enters a period of prosperity and peace…
Article by Mingwei Song, Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 40, No. 1 (March 2013), pp. 86-102.
This article focuses on father–son incest stories, a distinct subgenre of Chinese Boys' Love (BL) fiction, to examine the cultural and political implications of BL in China. We start with an overview of the development of BL fiction in China, followed by a discussion of some representative texts. Situating our textual analysis within the context of traditional Confucian ethics and contemporary Chinese society, we argue that father–son stories showcase a feminine attempt to re-order the power structure in the family by means of eros. Since the family is conflated with the state in Chinese social organization, the restructuring at the family level will have significant political consequences. We conclude that BL is not only ‘better than romance’ but also more than romance. It is, first of all, an inclusive and powerful mental tool that enables Chinese youth, both male and female, to think out of the box.
The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Brendan Riley on Yan Lianke’s Lenin’s Kisses, translated from the Chinese by Carlos Rojas and published by Grove Press.
This is Yan Lianke’s third book to come out in English translation, the first two being Serve the People! and Dream of Ding Village. (Interestingly, this is his third translator, with Julia Lovell having done Serve the People! and Cindy Carter having translated Ding Village.)
In terms of Brendan Riley, he was born in Dunkirk, New York in the Year of the Fire Horse. He holds degrees in English literature from Santa Clara University and Rutgers University. He has worked for many years as a teacher, translator, editor, and writer. An ATA Certified Translator of Spanish to English, he also holds certificates in translation studies from U.C. Berkeley and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His translations include works by Juan Velasco, Álvaro Enrigue, Juan Filloy, and Carlos Fuentes.
Here’s the opening of his very positive review:
China's rapid urbanisation and population growth of the past 30 years has been almost inevitably paralleled by rapid growth in the arts and cultural scene. Yet the vastness of China's contemporary arts and culture scene can seem daunting. The following are the best arts and culture blogs and websites that will help navigate the riches of China's vast cultural landscape.
Internet writing has been nothing short of a revolution for Chinese literature. It has allowed myriad voices to be heard. The digital landscape and technology have changed since the first wave of authors began to write; readers in China now access novels through smartphones and tablets rather than desktops. Yet the internet remains the "single root" in China today to kick-start a career as a wordsmith, says Jo Lusby, managing director of Penguin China, a publishing house. "There are no authors under the age of 35 who were not discovered on the internet," she adds.
Saturday 25 May at 2.00 p.m.
Venue: London Review of Books Offices
The art of literary translation is at the heart of World Literature series at the London Review Bookshop. Over the year, we are running a programme of masterclasses led by a team of Britain’s most distinguished literary translators.
The TEDA -- Turkey's government-funded body that provides grants for the translation of Turkish books into foreign languages -- has helped more than 175 German versions see the light of day. And what about Chinese editions?
By Nicky Harman, March 22, '13
Some of you will have noticed that the London–based China Fiction Book Club, has a thriving twitter account, @cfbcuk. Launched, serendipitously, the day of the announcement that Mo Yan had won the Nobel Prize for Literature, it's going strong and has nearly 200 followers…(198 today and counting. Several new followers arrived between yesterday and today as a result of the Dorothy Tse story which appeared in the Guardian). PLUS Helen Wang has launched 3 more Twitter accounts, all worth browsing: Story of the Stone @caoxueqin1760; Lin Yutang @lytwords; and – together with the Emerging Translators Network - Translated World, @translatedworld. These have daily posts - have a look. If you don't yet have a Twitter account, then google the @names and you can reads the tweets...
