Our News, Your News
By Canaan Morse, January 31, '13
This is an informal review of Xi Chuan’s newest published collection, Enough for A Dream 够一梦, which contains more important poems in one book than I have read here in two or three years together. The poems presented in it command the attention of the reader because they speak in a language that is both colloquial and singularly Chinese, and can be bitterly poignant in their depictions of China. They represent an inimitable poetic voice as pronounced as any one might read in this language. And the poet, Xi Chuan, has mastered the use of the question, and how many of us who write poetry can say that?
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Edited by Thomas Moran and Ye (Dianna) Xu.
"Simply magnificent." -- says Kate Saunders in her review.
Short story, translated by Ken Liu. This link gives both the text version (in English) and an audio version.
Yan Lianke (阎连科) is one of just 5 authors—and the only Chinese—who has made the shortlist for this year’s Man Booker Int’l Prize.
Coming in the wake of Mo Yan’s Nobel Prize for Literature, this poses a thorny PR challenge for the authorities: how do you explain to your people that yes, another of our authors is being (justly) highlighted in the West, but, um, several of his best works can’t be purchased in the Middle Kingdom?
By Qiufan Chen, with some book covers to enjoy!
By Louise Edwards, The China Quarterly, Vol. 212 (December 2012), pp 1059-1078 (subscription required)
Abstract: This article examines 70 years of debate about Ding Ling's 1941 influential short story about a woman spy, “When I was in Xia Village.” In the article I show that the re-absorption of “our” female spies into post-conflict solidarity narratives is a fraught process. For national governments, the difficulty lies in asserting the moral legitimacy of their rule in the face of evidence about their deployment of women as sex spies. For national populations, the difficulty lies in the desire to construct reassuring victory stories within which peacetime normalcy can be restored. The diverse exegeses around Ding Ling's “Xia Village” reveal that even decades after the hostilities cease, “our” women sex spies still require an explanation to communities seeking to consolidate or “remember” their national virtue. The evolution of this process of “explaining” reveals the on-going importance of sexual morality to governance in current-day China. Specifically, through the analysis of the critiques of “Xia Village” the article demonstrates that female chastity has been and continues to be an important commodity in establishing and sustaining popular perceptions of the moral virtue of the PRC as a nation, and the CCP as its legitimate government.
Maialen Marín-Lacarta, "A Brief History of Translations of Modern and Contemporary Chinese Literature in Spain (1949-2009) (1)" in 1611: Revista de Historia de la Traducción 6.
Bruce Humes talks about translating Chi Zijian's novel The Last Quarter of the Moon, about the Evenki.
Another roundup of news & views on the most recent Nobel Literature laureate.
By Margaret B. Wan, SUNY series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture
hardback 2009, paperback 2010)
ISBN13: 978-0-7914-7701-4
The Festival of Liumang: The Liumang Narrative in Contemporary China (流氓的盛宴), by Dake Zhu (朱大可) (New Star Press, Beijing, 2006)
- reviewed by Pan Lu (Lecturer, The University of Hong Kong Community College; HYI Visiting Fellow)
One story, “Air Burst!” is told from the point of view of Chinese soldiers in a dangerous retreat after a failed offensive, and they are treated with exactly the same level of sympathy one sees in Kurtzman’s stories about American G.I.s. ... Here, we've moved beyond the sympathetic to the empathetic, in that we don't just feel for the Chinese soldiers, we feel through them, are asked to see through their eyes and feel what they feel. We become them, to the degree that we become Jane Eyre or Huck Finn or any other protagonist with whose plight a story asks us to identify.
Or almost. There's one major stumbling block to our identification with Kurtzman's Chinese soldiers: the way he represents their speech. Kurtzman's American G.I.s speak as realistically as he could make them, given the anti-profanity restrictions placed on publications by the Comics Code Authority. But his Chinese soldiers, for all their humanity, speak a stilted, formalized version of English. "Let us pause a moment" one will say, "Why do you stop, Lee?" another will ask ... you get the idea: no slang, no contractions, the kind of thing the writers of Star Trek did when writing for Spock or Data. The idea seems to be to present the Chinese characters as exotic, and this interferes with the attempt to give us their experience and their point of view, since they are exotic only to us, not to themselves. If they come across as exotic, we are taken out of their lived experience, and reminded of their otherness. We are no longer fully experiencing their point of view.
A review of In the Name of the Masses: Conceptualizations and Representations of the Crowd in Early Twentieth-Century China, by Tie Xiao.
In Western media and scholarship, Chinese crowds are often schizophrenically portrayed as either terrifying or emancipatory – from the manic frenzy of the Red Guards to the student fighters for democracy at Tian’anmen, from angry mobs destroying Japanese goods to heroic Hong Kong citizens defying Mainland “brainwashing,” the massive, nameless Chinese crowd looms large in the global imagination as a specter embodying the ambivalence at the heart of modern political democracy. While the “people” constitutes the source from which political sovereignty derives, it also harbors fears of irrational mob rule, the steamrolling of the individual, and the claustrophobia of the collective. Tie Xiao’s dissertation admirably charts the development of notions of the crowd in early twentieth-century intellectual discourse and aesthetic production. As he convincingly demonstrates, Chinese thinkers, while acknowledging the need for a political and social order that would be democratic in the broad sense, were also troubled by the antimony between terror and liberation that also lurked in the collective’s bosom. Moreover, the early twentieth-century Chinese engagement with the “crowd” took part in the processes of what Lydia Liu has termed “translated modernity” – the Chinese interest in crowds paralleled European interest in crowd psychology, as well as global aesthetic trends in representing the “masses” in both literature and visual art.
The National Museum of Taiwan Literature 國立台灣文學館 website
Chinese literature - viewing this emerging superpower through its novels
AVAILABILITY:OVER A YEAR LEFT TO LISTEN
Duration: 28 minutes
First broadcast: Sunday 20 January 2013
In October the Nobel prize for Literature was awarded to Mo Yan, the pen name of the Chinese novelist Guan Moye. Mo Yan translates as 'Don't speak' , a warning given to him by his parents during the Cultural Revolution. His latest novel translated into English, Pow!, is set in Slaughterhouse village and tells the story of a rural community obsessed with meat and the deadly extent they will go to in order to maximise a profit in animal flesh. Mo Yan's translator Howard Goldblatt and novelist and film maker Xiaolu Guo discuss the nature of Chinese literature and how much Mo Yan and his fellow contemporary Chinese novelists can teach us about life inside this emerging world force.
Recorded at the 2011 PEN World Voices Festival.
"No one, wise Kublai,” says Marco Polo in Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, “knows better than you that the city must never be confused with the words that describe it.” In Atlas: The Archaeology of an Imaginary City, Hong Kong’s Dung Kai-cheung writes, “All places are misplaces, and all misplaces are misreadings,” and “The prerequisite for the setting of boundaries on maps is possession of the power to create fiction.”
Calvino’s Invisible Cities has Marco Polo telling Chinese emperor Kublai Khan of the fabulous and fantastical cities he has visited, all named after women, like the idealized Venice (Venus) from which he hails. Dung’s Atlas, meanwhile, tells only of Victoria, a city named after a queen and, coincidentally, the ur-name of central Hong Kong. Coincidentally, because in line with Marco Polo’s admonition not to confuse the city with its verbal representation, despite any resemblance between actual Hong Kong and the city Atlas describes, its placement is misplaced and its maps are inscribed with the power of fiction: historical details mix with the made-up, and fact and the factitious blend in its pages.
Yiju Huang’s dissertation is an investigation of the Cultural Revolution through its aesthetic and literary afterlives in the post-Mao era. The dissertation takes as its point of departure the widespread notion that the Cultural Revolution was a “colossal catastrophe,” and proceeds to examine the ways in which traumatic traces were embedded within works of literature, art, and cinema. Focusing on how people produce meanings in the aftermath of a major historical event, Huang argues against the attempts of the CCP to bring the subject of the Cultural Revolution to premature closure, in its attempt to transfer the country’s attention to a fetishized future of economic development and modernization. Instead of understanding the Cultural Revolution as exclusively belonging to a bygone era, Huang urges us to reopen the subject as “a nexus of unresolved and unfinished problems that spill beyond the threshold of the past.”
In the last decade economic historians like Ban Wang and Kenneth Pomeranz have demonstrated that the Chinese economy dominated the planet from about 500 to 1500 CE, creating the world’s first global economic system. The possibility of China’s return to that position of dominance—and here I ask all readers to call up a mental image of a sleeping dragon awakening—is what has folks on both sides of the Pacific trembling, in fear or glee, for the “Chinese century” to succeed the American one. “China” is thus one of the names of the global future as we imagine it.
China is also, therefore, an intellectual and social problem, for everyone. What is China to us today—assuming the “us” includes (and how could it not?) the wide variety of people who think of themselves as “Chinese”? What kind of place is it? What must we know to comprehend its nature (if it has one)? What would it mean to recognize ourselves (again, the first person plural includes the Chinese) as people who want to know what China is, and who are willing to work hard, as authors and as readers, to understand it? How will such an understanding return us, like fiction, to a new vision of the world we have known until now?
By Canaan Morse, January 20, '13
Communist Party philosophy is the philosophy of struggle!
Chinese poet and poetry critic Qin Xiaoyu invited the Proletarian to attend a meeting at Peking University last Friday on poetry in online media. The meeting was sponsored and chaired by Yang Erwen, founder of ArtsBj.com (北京文艺网), and Yang Lian, whom Yang Erwen has worked into some advisory position at the website. Having no prior knowledge of the event, the Proletarian thought it was just going to be another stereotypical academic meeting, where people made airy speeches over an audience checking their cell phones; who knew that the first item of news would be one of significant importance?
In the spirit of, “In China, all the numbers are big,” ArtsBj.com is managing a Chinese poetry competition, and they have over forty thousand entries already. They will be awarding prizes for single poems, with long poems and short poems judged separately, as well as a prize for the best individual collection. All judging is open; that is, the judges’ comments and decisions are posted publicly on the website and are open for comment by those who submit.
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A Chinese tale of timeless nomadic lives threatened by politics and change
The Last Quarter of the Moon [额尔古纳河右岸] is the first novel from award-winning Chinese novelist Chi Zijian to be translated into English. It is an atmospheric modern folk-tale, the saga of the Evenki clan of Inner Mongolia – nomadic reindeer herders whose traditional life alongside the Argun river endured unchanged for centuries, only to be driven almost to extinction during the political upheavals of the 20th century.
Taiwan and Hong Kong journalist and political affairs commentator Zhang Tiezhi (张铁志) has written an intriguing piece for the Chinese edition of the New York Times, 歌唱美丽岛 , that calls attention to an overlooked but sensitive aspect of the recent hullabaloo over censorship at Guangzhou’s Southern Weekend (南方周末).
At one point, anti-censorship demonstrators at the entrance to the newspaper, he says, actually sang Meili Dao (美丽岛, aka Formosa) . . .
By Nicky Harman, January 15, '13
Bruce Humes has been too modest to flag this up, so I will: Last Quarter of the Moon by Chi Zijian, translated by BH, is out now and Harvill Secker is gearing up with some Twitter promotion
Author Li Chengpeng’s book-signing tour for The Whole World Knows (全世界人民都知道 ) has attracted some bizarre—not to mention dangerous—behavior according to the South China Morning Post’s Author Attacked by Leftists:
Li Chengpeng [李承鹏], a former journalist, was punched in the head during an afternoon signing of his new book for readers at the Zhongguancun Bookstore in [Beijing’s] Haidian district, and another man was filmed throwing a packaged kitchen knife at Li . . .
ed. by Alexandra Green, Hong Kong University Press, 2012
ISBN 9789888139101
Considers narrative and visual narrative across disciplines and cultures
Harvard University Press, due 15 Feb 2013.
ISBN 0674067681, 9780674067684
Rhythms, conceptual metaphors, and political language convey meanings of which Chinese speakers themselves may not be aware. Link’s Anatomy of Chinese contributes to the debate over whether language shapes thought or vice versa, and its comparison of English with Chinese lends support to theories that locate the origins of language in the brain.
In Milestones on a Golden Road, Richard King presents pivotal works of fiction produced in four key periods of Chinese revolutionary history: the civil war (1945-49), the Great Leap Forward (1958-60), the Cultural Revolution (1966-76), and the post-Mao catharsis (1979-80). Taking its cues from the Soviet Union’s optimistic depictions of a society liberated by Communism, the official Chinese literature of this era is characterized by grand narratives of progress.
Addressing questions of literary production, King looks at how writers dealt with shifting ideological demands, what indigenous and imported traditions inspired them, and how they were able to depict a utopian Communist future to their readers, even as the present took a very different turn. Early “red classics” were followed by works featuring increasingly lurid images of joyful socialism, and later by fiction exposing the Mao era as an age of irrationality, arbitrary rule, and suffering – a Golden Road that had led to nowhere.
Richard King is Professor of Chinese Studies at the University of Victoria.
Christopher Maziere interviews:
For more posts on Taiwanese Indigenous Poets and Authors, see twitter MAZIERE Christophe @CMaziere
By Eric Abrahamsen, January 8, '13
Many people have been asking where they can get hold of some of the novels published by Penguin China over the past year. Sheng Keyi's Northern Girls and Wang Xiaofang's The Civil Servant's Notebook in particular. These and other books are now available in e-book format on the US and UK Amazon sites, so go shopping!
Leung Ping-kwan 梁秉鈞 (a/k/a Ye Si 也斯), 1949 – 2013
The author is Managing Editor of the Asia Literary Review. Please read the comments, including the one by Bruce Humes.
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:
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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
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"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
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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.)
