Our News, Your News
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?
By Helen Wang, October 14, '12
New 4-part radio series here:
Martin Jacques presents a personal view on how best to understand the unique characteristics and apparent mysteries of contemporary China, its development and its possible future. In a new series of talks he sets out the building blocks for making sense of China today.
More…
Goldblatt is also the recipient of two translation fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the founding editor of the scholarly journal Modern Chinese Literature, and author and editor of several books on the subject. At Notre Dame, he directed the Center for Asian Studies, one of the projects funded by the Liu Family Endowment for Excellence in Support of Asian Studies and Asian-American Students.
Most recently, the Liu family endowed a new Institute for Asia and Asian Studies that is allowing the University to expand its investment in this vital area of scholarship.
A new collection of plays by Mo Yan will be released next week following the Chinese author's Nobel Literature Prize success, a report said, citing the work's publisher.
The new work, "Our Jing Ke", consists of three plays, according to Chen Liming, from publisher Beijing Genuine and Profound Culture Development Company, state news agency Xinhua reported late Friday.
"Politics is an ugly business," says an official in Chinese author Wang Xiaofang's novel, The Civil Servant's Notebook. "You always need to keep a knife in reserve, even for your own boss."
By Helen Wang, October 14, '12
Article: 'The (Bio)political Novel: Some Reflections on Frogs by Mo Yan', by Yinde Zhang, tr. by Jonathan Hall
Published in China perpectives [Online], 2012/4 | 2011, Online since 30 December 2014, connection on 14 October 2012. URL : http://chinaperspectives.revues.org/5748
More…
On October 10, the New York Times reported on the awarding of the Nobel Prize for Literature to Chinese writer Mo Yan (莫言). As might be expected for positive coverage of this momentous event by a respected American newspaper, In China, a Writer Finds a Deep Well has quickly been translated, re-packaged and served up to the masses in the October 13, 2012 edition of Cankao Xiaoxi (参考消息) as 美报细述莫言作品特点. . .
By Helen Wang, October 12, '12
Posted in today's Guardian is a book dedication dated 1945. Any ideas where the quote is from?
To my darling Rose,
I once read this in a novel about Chinese life: "Success. What is it? A bubble that breaks at the touch. A shallow dream that too often ends in bitterness and despair. The only kind of success is the peace that can come from one's own heart, the ability to live with one's own self and not be ashamed, to love one good woman and with her taste life to its very dregs. That is success and the only kind worth having." Together, we shall, please God, make a success of our lives.
With all my love, Aron, November 1945, [In Hebrew] Kislev, 5706
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/oct/12/book-dedications-true-success?newsfeed=true
Eric Abrahamsen on Mo Yan:
"He was instrumental in reviving Chinese literary language after the Cultural Revolution," said Abrahamsen. "He has also done the best job of tackling the big social and historical issues, I think more successfully than anyone else has, taking historical facts and turned them into convincing art. That's enough, right there, to win the Nobel."
Mo Yan 莫言 has won the 2012 Nobel Prize for Literature–a victory for those who support global pluralism in literature prizes, for those who believe in the legacy of Faulkner and García Márquez in contemporary international fiction, and for those who believe in giving a Nobel to a Chinese writer the Chinese government doesn’t oppose (belonging to one of these categories does not necessarily indicate belonging to either of the others). Congratulations also to Mo Yan’s translators in all languages, particularly Anna Gustafsson Chen in Swedish and Howard Goldblatt in English.
For readers looking for more, here is the press release for the Nobel Prize, the BBC’s beginner’s guide to Mo Yan, a good summary from 3% of Mo Yan’s writings available in English, and a section of an interview Howard Goldblatt did with himself for Chinese Literature Today. Still more? Here’s an article on the reaction in China, advanced ordering information for his forthcoming Pow!, an excerpt from another forthcoming work Change, and yet another excerpt from another forthcoming work, Sandalwood Death.
He could...go...all...the...way!!
Mo Yan scarfs up the big one. Get ready for a one hundred-and-eighty-degree about-face on the global significance of the Nobel Prize by The Global Times and other august state-run press enterprises...
The Centre for East Asian Studies (CEAS) of The Chinese University of HongKong invites applications for its M.Phil. and Ph.D. programmes in Chinese Studies for 2013-2014. We welcome strong applicants with specialized research plans in a variety of disciplines, especially in Chinese Religion, History or Cultural Studies.
British Council: The China Market Focus programme was developed to illustrate the wealth and breadth of Chinese literature today. Authors attending the festivals include:
Fang Fang, Han Song and Xinran at Cheltenham Festival
Yu Jian with Pascale Petit at Cheltenham Festival
Ge Fei and Han Song at Manchester Literature Festival
Fang Fang joins Hillary Spurling at the Small Wonder Festival, Charleston
New York Times, 5 October 2012
By Helen Wang, October 8, '12
楊牧荣获2013年美国纽曼华语文学奖
The Taiwanese poet Yang Mu (楊牧) has been chosen by an international jury as the winner of the third Newman Prize for Chinese Literature. Sponsored by the University of Oklahoma’s Institute for U.S.-China Issues, Newman Prize is awarded biennially in recognition of outstanding achievement in prose or poetry that best captures the human condition, and is conferred solely on the basis of literary merit. Any living author writing in Chinese is eligible. A jury of five distinguished literary experts nominated the five candidates last summer and selected the winner in a transparent voting process on 5 October 2012.
http://www.ou.edu/uschina/newman/winners.html
By Eric Abrahamsen, October 8, '12
So they say the next Nobel prize for literature will be announced this week (Thursday?), and you would not believe the number of people writing around for Mo Yan's contact information.
Dear Western media: leave the poor man alone! He's busy writing the next Great Chinese Novel.
*A little over a year ago, I went with the Chinese writer Yu Hua to his hometown of Hangzhou ... The high point was a boozy lunch where the head of the local writer’s association ogled the legs of the deputy head of propaganda, while a paunchy singer for the People’s Liberation Army showed off a “talented young lady” he had taken under his wing ... When everyone was suitably drunk, Yu quieted the room with an announcement.
“We were just at West Lake,” he said, referring to the city’s most famous tourist site. “I haven’t seen so many people in one place since June 4”—the 1989 massacre of antigovernment protesters in Beijing.
“Ha-ha, Yu Hua, only you,” the writer’s association chairman cackled as he cocked his head in Yu’s direction. “I live next door to him. Always joking.”
“What are you saying?” Yu said crossly. “Your only contribution to society is to file fake meal receipts.”
The chairman widened his eyes and was about to counterattack but everyone began laughing at him. He meekly bowed his head, whimpering: “We’re neighbors, we’re neighbors. Ha-ha. He’s joking.”*
By Nicky Harman, October 6, '12
Danny Hahn and I did a radio interview about the state of the art of translation for Monocle24 Globalist programme on Thursday 4th October. A bit nerve-wracking (for me), but they were lovely people and they gave us a decent amount of time to say what we wanted to say. You can listen here: http://www.monocle.com/monocle24/?openepisode=10600244. It's a nearly 2-hour programme, and we come at 1:29 ie practically the end, but you can download and scoot that progress bar along to the point where they start with a phone interview with David Bellos (Is that a fish in your ear). Should you be so inclined.
He will be at the book festival.
Excerpted from The Last Quarter of the Moon, a novel by Chi Zijian (额尔古纳河右岸，迟子建著) to be published by Harvill Secker in 1Q 2013:
". . . I knew the Oroqen were an ethnic minority who lived on the outskirts of our mountain town. They resided in their open-top cuoluozi (teepees) where they could spy the stars at night. In the summer they fished in their birch-bark canoes, and in the winter they hunted in the mountains wearing their parka and roe-deerskin boots. They liked to go horse riding, drink liquor and sing songs. In that vast and frigid land, their small tribe was like a pristine spring trickling deep in the mountains. Full of vitality, yet solitary.
I once believed that the masses of forestry workers, those loggers, were the genuine masters of the land, while the Oroqen in their animal hides were aliens from another galaxy. Only later did I learn that before the Han came to the Greater Khingan Range, the Oroqen had long lived and multiplied on that frozen land. "
In the aftermath of a violent coup, an epic story of self-sacrifice and revenge plays out as a young orphan discovers the shattering truth behind his childhood. Sometimes referred to as the Chinese Hamlet and tracing its origins to the 4th century BC, The Orphan of Zhao was the first Chinese play to be translated in the West. This beautiful new adaptation is written by James Fenton and Directed by RSC Artistic Director Gregory Doran.
This evening Philip Hand was announced as the winner of The Harvill Secker Young Translators’ Prize for his translation from the Chinese of Han Dong’s story ‘The Wig’. The prize received over seventy entries (all of which were translations of this story) and was judged by author Tash Aw, translator Nicky Harman and editor Briony Everroad. The prize focuses on a new language each year and aims to recognise the achievements of young translators at the start of their careers. You can also read an exchange between Han Dong and Philip Hand, here.
Today, with a dozen novels to his credit and a first, “The Civil Servant’s Notebook,” just out in English, Mr. Wang’s goal is “to tell the truth” about China, he said by telephone from the southern Chinese island of Hainan, where he was spending the weeklong National Day vacation.
3-7 October. Details on the website.
The following interview was conducted by Elisa Nesossi, a CIW Post-doctoral Fellow working on Chinese justice.—The Editors
Shan'ge, the ‘Mountain Songs’: Love Songs in Ming China. By Ōki Yasushi and Paolo Santangelo. Leiden and Boston: Brill Academic Publishers, 2011. Pp. 600. ISBN 10: 9004189009; 13:9789004189003. In recent decades, historians of European history have produced many studies on the history of emotions. Based on the hypothesis that emotions are neither a biological essence nor a universal fixed attribute, they have sought to trace constructions of human emotionality as reflected in literary and other works in a particular society over time. This new sub-discipline, the study of what is often termed “sentimental culture”, has illuminated the interaction between the articulation of an emotional sensibility and significant social trends of the age, including the rise of humanitarian discourse, radical Protestantism, and a destabilizing of sexual norms. From the new perspective of the cultural history of emotion, the modern idea that emotions express individual inwardness and autonomy now appears to be contingent and culture bound. In the case of China, while there has been an abundance of studies of the cult of qing 情 (‘passion, desire’) in the late Ming, there are few works dealing specifically with the historical construction of emotion in pre-modern China, particularly from a linguistic point of view.
Alexandra Buchler, Director of Literature Across Frontiers, recommends… Dream of Ding Village by Yan Lianke, translated by Cindy Carter and published by Corsair. "I recommend this book because it is a must-read for anyone interested in China’s recent transformations and the corruption of a regime which did the unimaginable: fuse the political doctrine of communism with capitalist license, and because it is a such a powerful example of high-quality literature making a political statement. Like some of the masterpieces of 20th century literature this book is the opposite of a “good read”: it is sad and heavy, it speaks about a situation of surreal absurdity, conveying a truth that must be said and cannot be shirked."
Fashion designer Amus Leung's story demonstrates the many forces at work when adopting an English alias. Leung reminded the teacher who named her of the biblical prophet Amos. The teacher cross-bred the name with amuse, which she thought matched Leung's personality and sounded more feminine. "I love my name English name," said Leung. "It is unique and easy to remember. So far I am the only Amus Leung in the world!"
Well, this kind of throws a spanner in the works, when trying to decide if/when/how to translate Chinese names...
[Lu Chuan, the director, said] “After watching Kung Fu Panda, I found the movie producers had given us an amusing and enlightening lesson on how to treat, interpret and show our traditional culture, and how to merge it with other cultures.”
The Korean satirist PSY might not put it in such solemn terms, but that’s exactly what he has done, and he has been rewarded for it. In China, some artists have looked on enviously. In a comic strip highlighted by China Digital Times, the cartoonist known as Peaceful House Pearl Shimao envisioned a Chinese-style Gangnam phenomenon he called “Shanghai Style.” Instead of being celebrated for his madness, the dancer ends up being sent to a mental institution for “involvement in multiple activities,” “running crazily all over the place,” and being a pig.
"Carrie Gracie presents a series exploring ten great lives from Chinese history." 10-part series - understanding the past being crucial to understanding the present.
Juror ---- Nominee
Jennifer Feeley (U. Iowa, USA) ---- Hsia Yu 夏宇
Michel Hockx (U. London SOAS, UK) ---- Yang Lian 杨炼
Wolfgang Kubin (Bonn U., Germany) ---- Zhai Yongming 翟永明
Michelle Yeh (UC Davis, USA) ---- Yang Mu 楊牧
Zhang Qinghua 张清华 (BNU, PRC) ---- Ouyang Jianghe 欧阳江河
Han Han’s This Generation: Dispatches from China’s Most Popular Literary Star (and Race Car Driver) is edited and translated by Allan Barr and published by Simon & Schuster.
"Hu Shi conducted the first experiments in vernacular poetry and Chen Hengzhe has been credited as having written the first Chinese short story in the vernacular."
"Taking China to the World, Taking the World to China: Chen Hongzhe and an Early Globalizing Project", by Denise Gimpel.
Chapter 17 in The Globalization of Knowledge in History, ed. by Jurgen Renn (Max PLank Research Library for the HIstory and Development of Knowledge, Studies 1, Berlin, 2012)
In honor of his “eloquent and fearless battle against political repression,” the German Publishers and Booksellers Association has awarded its prestigious 2012 Peace Prize to Chinese dissident writer Liao Yiwu, who walked out on his native country and landed in Germany a year and a half ago to pursue what he calls “freedom to write and publish.”
There are altogether nine of the best stories by the doyen of Taiwan’s new literature, whom President Chen Shui-bian made one of his senior advisors in 2000. The first of the stories that is serialized is titled “Sobs of the Takokan River.” Those that will follow are “Composition of the Celebration of the Dead,” “A Skull and a Clock Which Has a Dial without Numerals,” “A-Ki and His Women,” “My Youngest Uncle and His Grandchildren,” “An Egret’s Song,” “Marathon, Champions, Ittosho", "Father and Son", and "Calls at Moonlit Night."
By Helen Wang, September 30, '12
Paper given at the Crafts of World Literature Conference, Oxford, 28-30 September 2012.
http://craftsofworldliterature.files.wordpress.com/2012/04/cwl-final-programme.pdf
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Will appear in a few days. Translated by Eric Abrahamsen.
Lenin’s Kisses by Yan Lianke, trans. from the Chinese by Carlos Rojas (Grove) - Both a blistering satire and a bruising saga, this epic novel by Yan (Dream of Ding Village) examines the grinding forces of communism and capitalism, and the volatile zones where the two intersect.
By Canaan Morse, September 28, '12
The Beijing installment of the British Council's "Poetry in Public Spaces" series will be kicking off at Sculpting in Time tomorrow afternoon, with a joint reading and conversation between Robin Robertson, poet from Scotland, and Chinese poet Xi Chuan.
Publisher and poet Robin Robertson is the author of the prize-winning collections The Wrecking Light (2010), Swithering (Picador 2006, Forward Prize), Slow Air (2002), and A Painted Field (1997). The poem "At Roane Head," which is included in The Wrecking Light and which won Robertson the Forward Prize for best individual poem, I link to here:
At Roane Head
Xi Chuan (honestly, who here doesn't know Xi Chuan already?) is quickly becoming one of China's best-known poets. He has five collections of poetry published in his native tongue (like Robertson, Xi Chuan's first collection, A Fictional Geneology, was published in 1997) as well as the English collection Notes on the Mosquito, translated by Lucas Klein and published by New Directions. His work has been widely anthologized in a variety of languages, and we even had the chance to publish a few of his pieces in the trial issue of Pathlight.
Date and Time: Saturday, September 29th, 2:00-4:00
Location: Sculpting in Time Cafe, 2nd floor of Sanlian Bookstore
22 Meishuguan East St. (美术馆东街), Dongcheng District
Yours truly will be moderating and trying not to make a fool of himself. Come on out!
