Our News, Your News
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original, unpublished manuscripts.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.
More…
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?
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.
