By Nicky Harman, November 16, '12
Check out the goings-on at the Crossing Border festival, in The Hague and Antwerp, till Monday 17th Nov, where Yan Ge and Phil Hand are among the guest writers and translators. Guest authors write daily blogs (Chronicles) which the translators translate. The rest of the fest begins this evening.
Chinese publishers operated 459 overseas branches and companies in 2011, according to the GAPP, and the number may have risen since those statistics were compiled.
On recent developments in publishing, international collaborations, etc.
Zhang Wei (main) has warned he will withhold publishing of his latest novel From the Juvenile to the Youth in foreign languages if translations are "unworthy."
Acclaimed author Zhang Wei launched the Chinese edition of his autobiographical novel From the Juvenile to the Youth (2012) on Monday ahead of the release of the novel's foreign language versions. Over the next two years, 26 novels by Zhang - who won the 2011 Mao Dun Literature Prize for his decade-long, 10-volume work On the Plateau - are expected to be published in several languages, marking another milestone in Chinese literature's foray overseas.
The novels will be published by Publish On Demand Global (PODG), an American private publishing house.
China Lion Film will release "Back to 1942," the latest pic by China's top helmer Feng Xiaogang, in North America on Nov. 30 as a day-and-date release with its Chinese mainland bow, the distrib said.
Pic is based on Liu Zhengyun's bestseller "Remembering 1942" and tells the grim tale of a famine that ravaged central Henan province while Nationalists and Japanese troops fought during WWII.
Life is nothing but a circus. Such is the message of Yan Lianke's absurdist "Lenin's Kisses," a tale of political lunacy and greed set in modern-day China. In this sprawling novel, an ambitious county official forms a traveling freak-show of the disabled. His aim is to raise enough money to buy Vladimir Lenin's embalmed corpse from Russia to display in China.
Xi Chuan has been famous in China (and not just in China) since the 1980s. Until this year, however, there have been no book-length English translations of his poetry. So reading this new career survey from New Directions and translator Lucas Klein, Notes on the Mosquito: Selected Poems, feels like discovering a strange and exhilarating new region of world poetry. Some notes on what one finds there:
Ming Erotic Novellas: Genre, Consumption, and Religiosity in Cultural Practice, by Richard G. Wang, 2011.
"...Through introducing contemporary readers to works that were influential bestsellers in their day and virtually forgotten now, this book makes illuminating contributions to discussions of the erotic in literature, print culture and consumption of the book, and the religious dimensions of Ming fiction..." ── Rania Huntington, University of Wisconsin-Madison
A Cheerleader for Mao's Cultural Revolution:
Han Suyin hid the truth about China's regime. She was not the last.
By Helen Wang, November 8, '12
(via H-Asia) New Journal: Asian Literature and Translation (ALT): A Journal of Religion and Culture. ISSN: 2051-5863
Asian Literature and Translation (ALT) is an open access, peer-reviewed, online journal established by the Centre for the History of Religion in Asia (CHRA), Cardiff University. The main objective of the journal is to publish research papers, translations, and reviews in the field of Asian religious literature (construed in the widest sense) in a form that makes them quickly and easily accessible to the international academic community, to professionals in related fields, such as theatre and storytelling, and to the general public.
By Eric Abrahamsen, November 7, '12
...you get Liu Cixin's science fiction masterpiece, The Three Body Trilogy. This afternoon was the translators' signing ceremony/press conference for the trilogy, where Ken Liu (present in spirit only), Joel Martinsen and I signed up to translate volumes one, two and three, respectively. Expect volume one to be announced at next year's BEA.
So who's publishing it? That's complicated.
Another newslink: cuhk.edu.hk
It features interviews with Chinese poet Yu Xiang, and co-editor of Jintian series from Zephyr Press, Christopher Mattison (a Russian translator himself), as well as translations of classical Chinese poets Du Mu, Ouyang Xiu and Yao Sui (trans. David Lunde).
Indeed, reading Sinclair's novel, with its narrative in the hands of a Chinese female, I had to keep reminding myself it was a 50ish Kiwi bloke pulling the strings.
It's happened all over the world, and it's happening in China, too. As the country's middle class swells in number -- and its people discover the pleasures and disappointments of a life spent pursuing material comfort -- there has come the emergence of a distinct counter-culture. In Chinese, they are the wenyi qingnian (文艺青年), or wenqing for short, literally meaning "cultured youth." It's China's closest equivalent to the alternately beloved and reviled English word, "hipster."
ATol: Northern Girls depicts a male-dominated society. To what extent does that represent China today? To what extent are the situations of characters Qian Xiaohong and Li Sijang consequences of their gender and to what extent are they consequences of their class, their rural origins and lack of education?
The playwright and poet, born in Nigeria in 1934, will stay for a week. He will give three speeches in Beijing and tour Shanghai and Suzhou briefly after an invitation by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and Renmin University. Soyinka said at a speech at CASS that he has a strong interest in China's culture. "I'm greedy when it comes to new experiences," he said. ... During the visit, Soyinka will also meet Chinese writers such as Yan Lianke, Xu Zechen and Zhang Yueran.
So, a mere 10 months into the year, I’ve finally updated the Translation Database and just posted a new version of the spreadsheet for 2011 and posted the first version of the spreadsheet for 2012.
...
There are a few changes in the most translated languages rankings . . . Here’s the list from 2011:
French (63) Spanish (50) German (39) Japanese (23) Italian (20) Russian (19) Swedish (19) Arabic (15) Norwegian (14) Chinese (12)
And 2012:
French (57) German (50) Spanish (45) Italian (32) Arabic (25) Swedish (23) Russian (17) Portuguese (15) Japanese (13) Chinese (11)
In work that could not be published in their native country, the authors here testify to the conditions both during the Cultural Revolution and now. We open with Liao Yiwu's impassioned acceptance speech for the Peace Prize for the German Book Trade, just awarded in mid October. Yang Xianhui exposes the hideous truth of the Great Famine, and Xie Peng and Duncan Jepson contribute a graphic portrait of gluttony. Chenxin Jiang interviews censored authors Yan Lianke and Chan Koon-chung. In fiction, Chen Xiwo depicts scheming poets, and Sheng Keyi describes a paradise turned dark. Activist Cui Weiping urges individual action. And in two memoirs of the Cultural Revolution, the late Ji Xianlin recalls his torture and imprisonment, and Zhang Yihe records a clandestine meeting between the top two Rightists.
The Japanese title is "Shanghai: Katatsumuri no Ie" ("Snail House") by Liu Liu. It is a comedy depicting the roller-coaster life of a young couple striving to leave their tiny "snail shell" of a house to buy a bigger home during a time of soaring real estate prices. A TV adaptation became a smash hit in China in 2009.
Translated into Japanese by Akiko Aoki. With Diaoyu/Sekankyu in the background, the author hopes to promote better understanding between the peoples of Japan and China.
By Xinkai Huang, Southwest Jiaotong University
Discusses a selection of fantasy stories from QIDIAN (the most popular Chinese fantasy literature website and
fan community) and the interactions between the writers and readers.
Marilyn Chin has been inventing a literature of Pacific Rim cultural assimilation, resistance, and hybridization throughout a distinguished career as one of the leading authors of her generation, but perhaps never more so than in her genre-bending first novel, Revenge of the Mooncake Vixen (2009). Always a prolific experimenter, Chin here constructs a new kind of pastiche fiction, a feminist magical realism built from both ancient Chinese erotic ghost tales and contemporary Asian and American (manga, kung fu) character concepts, spun through narrative modes ranging from Buddhist tales and Zen texts to other Chinese folktales, animal fables, and revenge tales—all within an overarching picaresque.
The density of his poetry aside, the other trial facing me and any reader at this time is that we have no serviceable nomenclature for what Xi Chuan is doing, particularly his work of the past ten years or so. He is engaged in an unprecedented project to recast literary expression in contemporary China. And we do not know, cannot now know, whether the results of his project eventually will be the idiosyncratic work of one man, or whether he is setting a path, one possible path, for other poets to follow. Xi Chuan exists at a special time in Chinese literary history when form has finally matured in modern Chinese poetry, when the anxiety of influence can be tempered by several generations of earlier modern poets who bore the major brunt of being compared with the illustrious tradition of classical Chinese poetry and when experiments with Western poetic structures have by and large been cast aside.
Novelists and poets, however, are not heroes in this sense, and they receive awards according to the cultural prestige they accrue based on their creative contributions to literature and culture. The Newman Prize (which Mo Yan won) and the Neustadt Prize (for which Mo Yan was nominated in 1998) are awarded, like the Nobel Prize in Literature, on an artistic basis that does not diminish peace prizes but complements them by way of further clarifying the work of our cultural heroes. Such a distinction is essential and should be vigorously protected. In such troubled times, we must remember the value writers have—the value of inventing new language to keep pace with the rapidly transforming world around us. We are not so different from the provincial characters that populate Mo Yan’s novels in our struggle to gain traction to offset the cataclysmic global forces that swirl around us. But who among us can make the unseen seen and bring the inarticulate force of pain, loss, and paralysis into blisteringly lively prose?
While noting Mo's "wide-ranging, earthy writing [on] even such sensitive matters as forced abortions," theInternational Herald Tribune hinted at Mo's being an apologist-intellectual like Ezra Pound or Jean-Paul Sartre: "was he, even then, under a kind of spell?" The paper quoted Gao Xingjian, the 2000 literature laureate whose dissident stature and French citizenship made him ineligible for recognition as a "Chinese" winner back home: writers need "'total independence' to create [...] 'eternal'" literature. "What is the relation between officials and literature?" Gao asks. "Nothing... They have nothing to do with literature, especially with literature [...] Where can officials and literature be connected? Nowhere. ... And if they are, then it's merely official literature, and that's a really laughable thing. So literature shouldn't be organized by officials."
Just don't tell that to Tang dynasty wordsmiths Li Bai and Du Fu, or the historian Sima Qian, painter-poet-calligraphers Su Dongpo and Ouyang Xiu, 11th-century public-interest crusader Bao Zheng, or prominent 2nd-century BC anti-corruption activist Qu Yuan. And definitely don't tell noted itinerant philosopher Confucius.
On January 26, translator and China scholar Perry Link joined the Center, the Asia Society, and the Mechanics Institute in San Francisco for a discussion on imprisoned Chinese activist and 2010 Nobel Peace Prize Winner Liu Xiaobo’s No Enemies, No Hatred, a collection of his political essays and poetry.
By Helen Wang, October 29, '12
The Blue Sky (Der blaue Himmel) by Galsan Tschinag is Ann Morgan's choice (see her blog, 27 Oct). It's from Mongolia rather than China, but about life in the Altai mountains.
Ann Morgan has set herself the Herculean task of reading a book/story from each of 196 countries within 12 months. Her deadline is 31 December 2012. It's a great blog - so interesting. But what will she recommend for China?!
It is one thing to try to translate the meaning of a text from a language as different from English as Chinese. Trying to capture the sound of a poem in translation is something else entirely. In a presentation that is part lecture, part performance, Jonathan Stalling will demonstrate different ways to hear the problem of sound in translation and explore some of his solutions. In a series of “experiments,” Stalling will discuss, chant, and recite Chinese poetry in Chinese, English, and in both at the same time.
With the publication of China in Ten Words, the puzzle over Yu Hua’s surrealism comes largely undone. Here, in ten very realist chapters, which he calls fiction but in fact is memoir, self-analysis, and cultural analysis of China, Yu shows how childhood trauma has shaped his worldview and how the excesses of late Maoism are still very much at work in the undergirding of Chinese life today. It no longer seems plausible to guess that his early inspirations came from foreign writers, or sprang from mere self-promotion. Surrealism then, as realism now, was just his way of writing what shock feels like.
2000 Nobel Laureate Gao Xingjian will be in Boston in January 2013 to present at two sessions of the 128th Modern Literature Association Convention, and to launch his forthcoming book Aesthetics and Creation that will be published as part of the Cambria Sinophone World Series. (via MCLC)
Chinese writer Mo Yan's Nobel Prize in literature has led to Mo-mania sweeping the nation, but as publishers rush to reprint the laureate's works, confusion reigns over the copyright status of his books.
Published by Editions Fei. Jacques Pimpaneau will be at the launch.
This autobiographical work describes the author's life growing up on the northeast Tibetan Plateau, in a farming community in Zorgay (Mdzod dge) County, Rnga ba Tibetan and Qiang Autonomous Prefecture, Sichuan Province. The original English text and a Swedish translation are provided.
The event, the only international awards for Chinese-language sci-fi writers, was organized by the World Chinese Science Fiction Association (WCSFA) based in Chengdu, the capital of southwest Sichuan province.
Xingyun Awards cover works from all over the world since the birth of sci-fi in China 200 years ago. The awards were first set up in 2010 and are held annually.
By Michelle Deeter, October 28, '12
I'm sure you've heard of the Chinese government blocking access to the English and Chinese websites of the New York Times earlier today. The New York Times published an article about the riches that Premier Wen's family has gained since he has been in office. The English version of the article can be found here and the Chinese version can be found here. In this case, the Chinese translation does not list the translator's name, perhaps because the translator asked to be anonymous. Typically the translator is credited at the bottom of each NY Times article.
I am curious if others have translated "sensitive" content before, and what kind of experience they had. Have you ever translated something that you thought might be blocked or censored if published in China? Have you translated something that you would not put on your resume, because it might affect job prospects or have some other negative impact? Have you ever asked to not be credited for your translation?
Nestled deep within the Balou mountains, by and large spared from the government’s watchful eye, the people of Liven enjoy harmonious days filled with enough food and leisure to be fully content. But when their crops are obliterated by the unseasonal snowstorm, and with it their livelihood, a county official arrives with a lucrative scheme both to raise money for the district and boost his career. He convinces the village to start a traveling performance troupe showcasing their talents, which are unlike anything he has ever witnessed. The majority of the 197 villagers are disabled, and their skill sets include ...
But many Chinese novels that have won top prizes and been well received in China face delays in getting published abroad due to a lack of good translators.
Take the example of the novel Shou Huo (The Joy of Living) by Yan Lianke. Although copyright contracts for it were signed with publishers from Japan, France, Italy and the United Kingdom in late 2004, to date none of the four translated novels have been published, as no competent translators are available.
China reads crime fiction from other countries, but why does it remain an underdeveloped genre at home?
In 2010, Frank Dikötter produced "Mao's Great Famine," an authoritative account of the catastrophe, written with a bravura seldom seen in Western writing on modern China. Impassioned and outraged, Mr. Dikötter detailed the destruction, the suffering and the cruelty or hubris of China's leaders. Sorting through forgotten and hidden documents with great intellectual honesty, Mr. Dikötter ended his journey pointing his finger directly at Mao, who notoriously said, as he called for higher grain deliveries from the countryside at the height of the famine: "It is better to let half the people die so that the other half can eat their fill."
For the general reader, "Mao's Great Famine" is unlikely to be bettered. "Tombstone" is something quite different, a condensed, yet magisterial 600-page edition of a densely detailed, two-volume Chinese-language account by Yang Jisheng, a retired Chinese journalist and Communist Party member.
[Jonathan Stalling, editor of Chinese Literature Today, responds to Didi Kirsten Tatlow’s “In 3 Awards, 3 Ways of Seeing China,” linked from this blog two days ago.]
“Can great lasting literature find a reader in America?” I think so, do you?
“Literature is not a boxing match, though sometimes it can appear that way given the polarizing passions it can generate.” So begins yesterday morning’s Times “View from Asia,” a piece by the reporter Didi Kristen Tatlow entitled “In 3 Awards, 3 Ways of Seeing China.” This is the second and more balanced piece she has published in the Times in a week...
By Helen Wang, October 25, '12
Just read Xiaolu Guo's story Then the Game Begins in which two lovers drive round and round the ringroads in Beijing. It reminded me of another story in which two close friends drive round and round the ringroads - Shi Kang's story, Sunshine in Winter. Until now I've always associated cars on the Beijing ringroads with traffic jams and stress, but maybe the ringroads are associated with long hours of intimacy and late at night? Do they feature in lots of stories?
in Litro #118: China [http://www.litro.co.uk/?p=32057]
Short Fiction
"Disguises" by Jean Kwok
"Then the Game Begins" by Xiaolu Guo
"Common People" by A Yi
A week from today at City University of Hong Kong.
By Eric Abrahamsen, October 25, '12
For anthology /Flash Fiction International/ forthcoming from distinguished publisher W.W. Norton, NY. The editors are looking for:
Recent very short stories from any country, in English translation, word limit 750 (1-3 pages). We usually reprint translations that have already been published (send us a copy) but will also consider original, unpublished manuscripts.
Deadline: March 15, 2013.
Contact: Robert Shapard, 3405 Mt. Bonnell Drive, Austin, TX, USA, 78731,rshapard@hawaii.edu.
(The other co-editors for the anthology are Christopher Merrill, director of the Iowa International Writing Program, and James Thomas.)
On the evening the Nobel Prize committee crowned magical-realist novelist Mo Yan as the first laureate living in China (outside a prison), Alice Xin Liu, managing editor of Pathlight, a new magazine of Chinese literature translated into English, was downing homemade ale at Vine Leaf, a Beijing bar. Her smartphone lit up with ecstatic text messages. “But I wasn’t really surprised,” she said. “Mo Yan’s name had been floated for a while...
Mo Yan 莫言, winner of the 2012 Nobel Prize for Literature, continues to be a topic of conversation. Following yesterday’s posting of “A Westerner’s Reflection on Mo Yan,” here are three other links to the relationship between Mo Yan–and by extension, Chinese literature, if not China–and the world.
First, Mo’s longtime translator into English Howard Goldblatt gives a brief take on the relationship between translator and writer, in “My Hero: Mo Yan.”
Then Julia Lovell, translator and author of The Politics of Cultural Capital: China’s Quest for a Nobel Prize in Literature, weighs in on the political responses in China and the “intellectually lazy … Western observers” in “Mo Yan’s Creative Space.”
Then, looking at Yang Mu 楊牧 winning the Newman Prize, Liao Yiwu 廖亦武 winning the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, and Mo Yan winning the Nobel–all in the space of a few days–Didi Kirsten Tatlow looks at “In 3 Awards, 3 Ways of Seeing China,” quoting observations from P K Leung and Michelle Yeh.
By Helen Wang, October 22, '12
This collection of Huzhu Mongghul (Monguor, Tu) folktales, riddles, songs, and jokes features website links to audio files of the original tellers' materials for each folklore item, as well as a link to each item as retold by Limusishiden and Jugui, who collected the material in Huzhu Mongghul Autonomous County, Haidong Region, Qinghai Province, PR China, in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
How could a writer who knew no foreign languages call himself a translator? How, too, did he become a major commercial success, churning out nearly two hundred translations over twenty years?
At the “International Conference on Chinese Literature in Global Contexts” at Beijing Normal University 北师大, World Literature Today editor Robert Con Davis-Undiano read his “Westerner’s Reflection on Mo Yan [莫言].” With Mo Yan winning the Nobel, WLT has posted it online. He writes,
Given Mo Yan’s stature and productivity, I propose that we view him as a possible test case to gauge the depth and quality of Western engagement with Chinese literature. He is only one writer, but Western critics have responded strongly to his work, and how critics and readers react to a major writer is always revealing … I will argue that the Western active appreciation of Mo Yan signals a Western openness to Chinese literature and a deepening engagement with Chinese culture. I will also argue that Mo Yan’s Red Sorghum (1986) is especially valuable for probing the Western response to his work and Chinese literature, owing to the significance of this novel in his production overall, the book’s grand scope, and the Western attention that the film Red Sorghum has already brought to the novel.
Read the whole piece here.
Reclaiming the Female Body: Dissociating Reproduction from Confucian and Socialist Patriarchy in 1980's Chinese Women's Literature, by Alice Cai.
This thesis examines Hu Xin’s "Four Women of Forty" and Lu Xing’er’s "The Sun is Not Out Today" as examples of efforts by 1980's women writers to dissociate traditionally "feminine" qualities of nurturing, love, and motherhood from patriarchal demands driven by revolutionary forces and traditional forces.
by Pin-Chia Feng, LIT Verlag Münster, 2012.
Diasporic Representations examines the stratification of various diasporic subjectivities through a close reading of fiction by Chinese American women writers of different social and class backgrounds. Deploying a strategy of “attentive reading,” Feng engages intersecting issues of historicity, spatiality, and bodily imagination from diasporic and feminist perspectives to illuminate the dynamics of deterritorialization and reterritorialization in Chinese American novels in this transnational age.
Another event in the Asia Society (NY) series.
Chutzpah! Issue 10 — "Worlds Apart" — is due out in bookstores October 23. This special issue, printed with two separate cover images drawn from stunning photoessays by Lin Dong and Zhang Kechun, is a collaboration with the Brooklyn-based literary magazine A Public Space, featuring seven of the magazine's stories in Chinese translation, selected in cooperation with novelist and APS editor Yiyun Li. Read more...
The Chutzpah! English website is back in action! Stay tuned for news, updates, events, and fiction in English from both the current and past issues of Chutzpah!'s English-language translation supplement, Peregrine. Now online: Fiction by Chang Hui-Ching, Xu Zechen, Lu Min, Lu Nei, and others, with more to come.
Follow @tiannanmagazine on Twitter and 温侯廷(Austin Woerner) on Weibo.
Interview with Eric Abrahamsen and Michel Hockx in Brazilian journal, Veja. Portuguese language.
"The award is given to the best book in the best translation. We consider these two qualities to be inseparable. In other words, a great book with a shitty translation won’t win, and a shitty book that was spectacularly translated won’t win."
Three Percent, University of Rochester. See website for rules and eligibility.
By Yang Jincai. The main characteristic of Chinese fiction in the twenty-first century is its sheer diversity featured by various thematic concerns. Examples of novels can be identified that address issues of globalization, hi-tech, urbanization, marketing economy, internet and poverty and their impact upon the lowly common Chinese such as the disadvantaged rural farmers. This turn to reality gives rise to a burgeoning ecological awareness in Chinese literature.
On the heels of Mo Yan's (IWP '04, China) Nobel win, the Life of Discovery creative exchange project prepares to bring four of China’s top young writers to Iowa City for a series of creative meetings and events.
Names: Zhang Yuntao, Mao Juzhen, Sun Wei, Liu Yewei.
The Rose of Time: New and Selected Poems, by Bei Dao, edited by Eliot Weinberger, New Directions, 2010, $16.95 paper, ISBN 978-0811218481, reviewed by Jonathan Hart
"Gaomi is no longer what it was. It is now the holy land of the country, Mecca of Chinese literature," said local poet Li Danping, after Mo won the prize last week.
More news from the Frankfurt Bookfair.
"But now the integrity of that prize has come under question in Sweden" - Swedish National Television puts the spotlight on the translator "Göran Malmqvist, a sinologist and member of the Swedish Academy, was instrumental in Mo's selection, lobbying the academy to recognize the Chinese writer and providing Swedish translations of the writer's work to other members of the academy."
The disparaging of Mo Yan began before the Nobel Prize for Literature was announced on October 11 when rumor had it that Mo Yan was this year’s favorite. With the exception of the literarily versed, the criticism wasn’t based on his works, to be sure, but on a few events that had thus far shaped people’s perceptions of the man: Boycotting dissident writers during the Frankfurt Book Fair in 2009; refusal to comment on Liu Xiaobo’s sentence in late 2009; and handcopying Mao Zedong’s Talks on Literature and Art earlier this year. (The Chongqing doggerel, turned up after the prize, wasn’t part of that perception, so I will leave it out of my discussion.)
The Tibet Web Digest Project was founded to translate interesting and relevant items from Tibetan language websites, blogs and online magazines. The goal of the project, which is a part of Columbia University’s Modern Tibetan Studies Program, is to provide access to the vigorous intellectual and cultural activity of the Tibetan language cyberspace. As the project develops, we hope to have translations of pieces from a wide variety of sites on various subjects. We also hope to provide Tibetan and Chinese language versions of the pieces.
By Canaan Morse, October 18, '12
A bolt from the blue. The Man Asian Literary Prize has announced that its primary sponsor, the Man Group, is taking its money and walking away from the prize. The Prize's Executive Director, Dr. David Parker, has just posted a letter on the Prize's official website bidding goodbye to his old sponsors and, supposedly, "looking forward to the future with a new partner." The optimistic tone of his letter is disconcerting; given the obvious crisis represented by the result of such a high-profile sponsor, the out-with-the-old-in-with-the-new message seems like a cover. At any rate, the Asia Pacific Writers and Translators Association doesn't buy it; their online announcement is titled The FINAL Man Asian Literary Prize.
For the Man Asian to fail would be a disaster for Asian literature in particular and translated literature in general. What has happened? Did the Man Group have too much money in Fannie Mae, or is this perhaps a political move?
ROC Culture Minister Lung Ying-tai said Oct. 15 that her agency is mulling a publication policy to help Taiwan literary works break into the global market. The policy would provide for translations to help writers make it onto the world stage and increase opportunities to sell the rights to their works, Lung said.
Only 100 copies of "Our Jing Ke", a collection of three plays, were on sale in the Genuine & Profound bookstore at a launch organized by the Beijing Genuine & Profound Culture Development Company. The company, the only authorized publishing firm of the book on the Chinese mainland, also holds the rights to adapt some of Mo Yan's works into films. "The first issue had a print run of 200,000 copies," said Tang Juan, the vice head of the company's marketing department. "But we only got the first batch last night and the others are still at the printers."
More about Mo Yan.
Sun's crime story, The Shades Who Periscope Through Flowers to the Sky, will appear in the December issue of the Chicago-based online-magazine Words Without Borders, which introduces international literature to English-language readers. His novel was the only Chinese selection.
Published by Merwin Asia (http://www.merwinasia.com/). The three novellas are:
Divorce Handbook
The Gardener¹s Art
Tattoo
Liao's speech came as he collected the German Book Trade Peace Prize, the country's second highest award, and the accompanying endowment of 25,000 euros (HK$251,000) at a ceremony attended by President Joachim Gauck.
A video (in Chinese) of this discussion between Ou Ning and three young authors, including Sun Yisheng.
New Nobel Prize-winner for Literature Mo Yan 莫言 has, for obvious reasons, become a hot topic of discussion. I’ve assembled some of the analysis that’s recently appeared online in various forms.
First...
...a chronicler like Han Han. His first English-language collection is ‘This Generation: Dispatches from China’s Most Popular Literary Star (and Race Car Driver)’. The subtitle may flatter his fame. But his is a voice that is worth hearing, even if grates and whines, and slips into narcissism. At its best, he’s sly and profane, skewering the foolish and mocking the powerful. He affects not to seek the spotlight in the role of youth spokesman.
Atheist China's only Nobel Prize winning author Mo Yan has been using Hindu-Buddhist ideas like reincarnation and god of death Lord Yama since his first novel Red Sorghum in 1987.
New Noble Laureate Mo Yan’s books are no doubt enjoying a sudden spurt in popularity and sales but a new decision by the government will ensure that his work is now read compulsorily by millions of young Chinese; a short novel he wrote 27 years ago has been included as a text book for nearly 25 million high school students as part of their syllabus.
Penguin Books, which published Mo's most famous novel, Red Sorghum, is reprinting 15,000 copies in response to the announcement, publicity director Maureen Donnelly says. Arcade Publishing, an imprint of Skyhorse Publishing and the publisher of five of Mo's books, will reprint 10,000-20,000 copies of each book in the coming weeks, director of publicity Oleg Lyubner says. Jeannette Seaver, consulting editor and co-founder of Arcade Publishing, expressed excitement at the increase in Chinese books available to Western readers.
Ebooks are already selling well on mobile phones in China. At the International Rights Directors Meeting on Tuesday, Gary Tan, owner of the Grayhawk Agency in Taipei, offered a brief overview of China’s mobile ebook market. China has over one billion cell phone users and 300 million smartphone users as of March 2012 and China Mobile, one of two major telecom providers in China, is the country’s largest ebook platform. Publishers may be reluctant to sell foreign rights to China Mobile, as it takes a huge cut of sales — at least 50 percent and sometimes as much as 70 percent — and sells the ebooks at a 90 percent discount from the print price. “These terms sound really bad,” Tan said, but China Mobile has such a large user base that if a book becomes a bestseller on the platform, “we might be talking about six-figure U.S. revenue.”
"That was an experience that rattled my entire life," Wang [Xiaofang] said in an interview last week following a reading at the Hong Kong International Literary Festival. "After that, I didn't want to repeat the same life. I didn't want to become a spiritual eunuch. I realised that to be able to be yourself is real success," he said. Since then Wang, who is 49, has published thirteen novels about corruption and politics in China, selling millions of copies in the process.
October 15, 2012, Charles Laughlin wrote: "The Pathlight/Paper Republic group are exciting and knowledgeable translators, and their suggestions are pretty good, but I find it regrettable that they exclude women writers, who could be represented on the fiction side by Can Xue, Wang Anyi, or Hong Ying. Also it’s regrettable that poetry is represented by Bei Dao, a poet of considerable accomplishment but who left China decades ago. If anthologies were permissible in the selection, Zhang Er and Chen Dongdong’s bilingual anthology Another Kind of Nation, or Wang Qingping’s recent Push Open the Window would be much more representative of the contemporary vitality of poetry. If it had to be a single author, choosing Zhai Yongming’s The Changing Room would have addressed the gender gap as well. In general, it would be good to balance the view of translators and publishers with those of teachers of Chinese literature on these questions, as we have to teach Chinese literature as a whole on a frequent basis, requiring us to keep our eye on the big picture, as well as how the current scene fits into it."
Reading recommendations from the Pathlight editors.
By Helen Wang, October 14, '12
I've just received a recommended reading list for UK Key Stage 4 students (ages 14-16 years). Among the 20th century literature there is no Chinese author (although Amy Tan is on the list). I'd like to encourage the school to add a couple of Chinese names and titles to the list. Any suggestions?
