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.
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.
