Our News, Your News
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!
Call for papers by MCLC - special issue to be guest edited by Anup Grewal and Tie Xiao. Deadline: January 15, 2013
For most of the twentieth century, the imagery of both actual and imagined masses in action was central to evoking political discontent, power, and even subjectivity in different representational forms. Such imagery appears to be largely missing in contemporary China: either actively disappeared or relegated to crowds harnessed for state rituals, stirred up by entertainment, or yoked to a historical past in official politics and culture; and appearing as oblique and sometimes nostalgic imagination in the wider cultural realm.
Collection of papers edited by Paolo Santangelo.
Smiling, laughing, facial expressions - and how to read them.
Juvenile [Young Adult] fiction about this era tends to reflect either the traumas adolescents faced during that period or the guilt of those who perpetrated violent acts.
Authors mentioned include: Su Tong, Wang Shuo, Liu Heng, Ai Weiwei.
Essay by Mark Bender
Today, around 200 million Chinese people read digital publications, and serving the market is a wide range of mostly Chinese companies with a similarly wide range of e-readers, formats and platforms. With an as yet incomplete regulatory environment, the market resembles a formless, chaotic mass with endemic copyright infringement. Yet as the various competitors strive to produce the one device and one platform that will outshine the rest, the digital publishing market in China has a lot of business and publishing potential, even if its not currently clear when the market will sort itself out properly.
Ever since the 1970s, I have known that the Chinese people are the freest and most democratic people in the world. Each year at my elementary school in Shanghai, the teachers mentioned this fact repeatedly in ethics and politics classes. Our textbooks, feigning innocence, asked us if freedom and democracy in capitalist countries could really be what they proclaimed it to be. Then there would be all kinds of strange logic and unsourced examples, but because I always counted silently to myself in those classes instead of paying attention, the government's project was basically wasted on me. By secondary school and college, my mind was unusually hard to brainwash.
Translated by Joel Martinsen.
Paola Zamperini, associate professor of Chinese literature and director of Chinese studies at Amherst College, will present “Moving Fashions: Wearing Gender in Late Imperial China.” Zamperini’s book, “Lost Bodies: Prostitution and Masculinity in Late Qing Fiction” (Brill University Press, 2010), addresses the way fictional characters handle passion, sexuality and love. Her talk begins at 9:30 a.m. Tuesday, Oct. 2, in UNC Asheville’s Karpen Hall, Laurel Forum.
Feature on Han Dong, and his translated by Nicky Harman into English.
Article in The New York Review of Books.
Podcast: Podcast. With music by Cha cha, AM444, and 新裤子, plus an essay by Eliot Weinberger and poems and readings by Bei Dao and a poem by Octavio Paz with translations by Weinberger.
The author of a study of Chinese poetry translation, 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei, he is the current translator of the poetry of Bei Dao, and the editor of The New Directions Anthology of Classical Chinese Poetry and a forthcoming series from the Chinese University Press of Hong Kong.
Young Babylon, Lu Nei’s first book, was published in 2007. It has been described by book reviewers as a Chinese Catcher in the Rye. It’s a wry, slightly detached story narrated by the teenage Lu Xiaolu, who aims to work his way up from factory worker to cadre, just so that he can spend all day in an office drinking tea and reading the paper. The book is an off-beat view into the lives and aspirations (or lack thereof) of this 1970s generation.
Chinese and English versions available to read and discuss on the And Other Stories website.
By Helen Wang, September 20, '12
I know of at least three published this year...
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By Helen Wang, September 20, '12
Chinese Aspirations in the 1980s Workshop, at the Australian Centre on China in the World, the Australian National University, 18-19 February 2013.
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Article by Andrea Lingenfelter
It might come as a surprise to some that one who has devoted years to the study and translation of women writers such as Zhai Yongming 翟永明, Mian Mian 棉棉, and Li Pik-wah 李碧华 (Li Bihua, or Lilian Lee) would not have spent a lot of time thinking about the expression of gender in writing. But let's break it down. What is gendering? And if I don't give gendering per se conscious thought as I work, what does guide my practice as a translator?
By Eric Abrahamsen, September 20, '12
A few weeks ago we had a lively argument/discussion on a mailing list about the proper translation of the term 文艺青年 (wényì qīngnián, literally "arts and culture youth", or "arts and letters youth") – a common term for a certain cohort of under-30 Chinese identifiable by their ability to recite Haizi poetry from memory, their starry-eyed idealism, and their ownership of a digital SLR. They've now sort of become the cultural and lexicological heirs of the "educated youth" (知情) of yore.
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Feature about the miner-turned-writer, Liu Qingbang.
"The most frequent motifs of literature, such as the relationships between men and nature, men and death, and men and women, are brought into full play in the dark and grave underground," he says. For instance, the struggle of human nature is fully demonstrated in his Lao She Literature Prize-winning novella Sacred Wood, whose film adaptation Blind Shaft won the Silver Bear at the 2003 Berlin Film Festival.
A Chinese court ordered Internet search giant Baidu Inc. to compensate three writers for a fraction of the amount they were seeking for failing to protect copyrighted material in a widely watched trial featuring two of the country’s most popular authors.
The case, which included hugely popular blogger Han Han and novelist Hao Qun, better known by his pen name Murong Xuecun, was widely watched. But the outcome means it is likely to have little impact on the way copyright cases are handled, highlighting the struggles of both artists and Internet companies to control the rampant exchange of pirated content on the web in China.
By Helen Wang, September 18, '12
This is the title of Chapter 7 in Diasporic Representations: Reading Chinese American Women's Fiction by Pin-Chia Feng, published by LIT Verlag Münster, 2010.
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.
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By Helen Wang, September 18, '12
By Rachel Leng
Abstract: Throughout the twentieth century, homosexuality has been and remains a highly sensitive and controversial topic in China where homosexual people were actively persecuted under Communist rule. It was not until the advent of the Internet in the mid-1990s that Comrade Literature (同志文学 tongzhi wenxue), an indigenous genre characterized by fictions of homosexuality, came into existence in China.
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By Helen Wang, September 18, '12
Event sponsored by The British Council and the Oxford English Dictionary,
on Thursday 27 September, 18.30-20.30 at The Royal Society, 6 Carlton House Terrace, London SW1Y 5AG.
The event will consider issues such as:
Does ‘standard English’ exist in today’s globalised society?
Who regulates the language – lexicographers, the education system, the media – or the public?
Is the language being dumbed down? And does this matter?
Should we be worried about the state of English today?
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At the press conference for the release of the Cross-Strait Common Vocabulary Dictionary Taiwan edition in August, Taiwan leader Ma Ying-jeou said he did not completely understand a speech given by mainland writer and blogger Han Han, when Han visited Taiwan this year. Though both the Chinese mainland and Taiwan speak Chinese, particular phrases and words, even when composed of similar characters, have different meanings. This thus prompted the creation of the aptly titled cross-Straits dictionary.
Literary critic Meng Fanhua says compared with their counterparts in other areas, Henan writers are more closely concerned with the profound transformation of our social lives.
Literary critic Yan Jingming agrees, adding that Henan writers live in the most "Chinese" areas, lead the most "Chinese" life, speak the most "Chinese" language and write with the most "Chinese" characteristics.
Features Zhou Daxin, Li Peifu, Liu Zhenyun, Yan Lianke, Li Er, Qiao Ye and Liang Hong.
Yun Ling, the only survivor of the camp, meets again in Cameron Highlands ( a mountain resort in Malaysia where they grow tea), friends of her parents and their Japanese neighbour, a former gardener of the Imperial Court. Ling Yun asked him to create a garden in memory of her sister who was fascinated by these works of art. Aritomo refuses but agrees to take Yun Ling as an apprentice for her to lay out a garden in the future.
Successive episodes, flashbacks highly controlled between the Japanese camp and Cameron Highlands and Aritomo and finally the recent period (around 1986) where Yun Ling, Judge of the Supreme Court, is taking early retirement. She wants to write her story and that of her sister before a neurological disease does deprive her of her memory and ability, after the death of Aritomo to restore the garden “Evening Mists” to its former magnificence.
By the Ministry of Education, Taiwan, 2012.
Translated by Denis Mair.
It was from the bronze of her complexion
That I first discovered the color of the land around me
That I first discovered the pale yellow tears of the sun
That I first discovered the teeth marks of seasonal winds
That I first discovered the timeless quiet of a glen
Colonial Modernities and Chinese Science Fiction
by Isaacson, Nathaniel Kenneth, Ph.D., University of California, Los Angeles, 2011, 316 pages; 3493491
In Chapter 4, I present a close reading of Wu Jianren's (1866–1910) New Story of the Stone (1905), arguing that the novel aggregates nearly all of the key metaphors of late Qing science fiction. Building upon this mode of reading, Chapter 5 examines a number of original works of late Qing science fiction, including Huangjiang Diaosou's (b.?) Tales of the Moon Colony (1902), Xu Nianci's (1874–1908) New Tales of Mr. Braggadocio (1904), Bihe Guanzhuren's (1871–1919) The New Era (1908), and others, arguing that Chinese authors were vexed by the difficulties of turning the rhetorical knives of colonial discourse against their colonial wielders. Chapter 6 follows my analysis of late Qing science fiction is followed by an examination of the changing role of SF through the May fourth period, reading Lao She's (1899–1966) City of Cats (1932), in light of the 1920s reassessment of Chinese tradition and Western science.
Within and without bounds: Media and the journalist in the fiction of Chinese writer Sun Haoyuan, by Chen Chengnan, M.A., UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA, 2012, 57 pages; 1513758.
Abstract: This paper examines the image of the journalist in a series of novels by the Chinese journalist-turned-novelist Sun Haoyuan. The author uses journalistic characters as vehicles to critique the practice of journalism in China in four novels: Mafia Game: The Live Broadcast (2009); Mafia Game: Media Violence (2010); Mafia Game: The Hypodermic - Syringe Theory (2010); and Hush Money (2011). In these novels, Sun Haoyuan critiques the function of journalism in society, the responsibility of the journalist in Chinese society, and the misuse of power by journalists and editors alike. After reviewing the social and political factors that influence China's journalism and media industry, the study presents the portrait of the fictional male journalist, female journalist and investigative journalist image through an analysis of the protagonist's life and struggle in the profession. Sun Haoyuan's observation is critical to an understanding of journalism in China, and his fictional journalists reflect and help shape the public's image of journalism as a profession.
On Oct. 4, David Derwei Wang will discuss the writings of Liang Qichao, a Chinese journalist, novelist and activist. Wang’s talk is titled “The Future of New China: Revolution in Fiction.” Wang, who has written, translated or edited more than 20 books, including “The Monster That is History: History, Violence, and Fictional Writing in Twentieth-Century China,” is the Edward C. Henderson professor of Chinese Literature at Harvard.
By Helen Wang, September 16, '12
Following Brigitte Duzan’s comment today, take a look at some of the excellent French websites on Chinese literature...
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