Our News, Your News
By Eric Abrahamsen, August 13, '12
The Man Asian Literary Prize, is now accepting submissions for its 2012 prize round, deadline August 31, 2012. the MALP is awarded to a novel by an Asian writer, either written in English or translated into English, and already published: submission should be done by the publisher, up to three titles per imprint. The author of the winning novel receives a prize of 30,000 USD and the translator, if any, gets 5,000 USD.
The longlist will be announced December 4th, the shortlist January 9th, and the winner March 14th, 2013. See the MALP press release for more information.
The 30th issue (Summer 2012) of Poetry Sky has been published. The
original work and translations of fifteen contemporary Chinese and
American poets are included. This issue is edited by poet Yidan Han and
Dr. Kyle David Anderson.
I'm not Pan Jinlian is Liu's first novel that centers on women. The novel's title character is inspired by a minor character in the Chinese classical novel Water Margin, who was portrayed as an adulterer.
Read on...
By Eric Abrahamsen, August 10, '12
Litro magazine, a UK-based monthly "pocket" literary magazine, is preparing a China-focussed issue, and wants your translated short stories! See their home page via the link above for submission guidelines.
Edit: The deadline, I'm told, has been extended somewhat, so be swift!
The list of authors includes:
Ha Jin (China, USA)
Liao Yiwu (China)
Enzo (Taiwan)
Chen Jianghong (China, Germany)
Costa's new short story award. The £3,500 prize will be for a single, previously unpublished short story of up to 4,000 words. Entries can be submitted until 7 September 2012, with a judging panel featuring the authors Richard Beard, Fanny Blake and Victoria Hislop, the Spandau Ballet songwriter and guitarist Gary Kemp and the literary agent Simon Trewin to pick a shortlist of six from the anonymous lineup. The public will then choose the winner by vote.
By Eric Abrahamsen, August 7, '12
The 2012 Science Fiction and Fantasy Translation Awards have just been announced, with Chinese translations winning both the long form and short form prizes. Congratulations to John Balcom, who won for Huang Fan's Zero, and Ken Liu, who translated "The Fish of Lijiang", by Chen Qiufan.
More sci-fi!
Harvill Secker Prize Round Table: Tash Aw, Briony Everroad, Nicky Harman & Andrei Kurkov
Kings Place, London, Friday, 5 October 2012, 5:30pm
To mark the 2012 Harvill Secker Young Translators’ Prize, two of its judges, author Tash Aw and translator Nicky Harman, are joined by cult writer Andrei Kurkov and editor Briony Everroad to discuss the art of translation with a particular slant on Chinese, the language chosen for this year’s prize.
The winner’s name will be announced at the event.
Translated by John Balcom. Publication Date: 25 Oct 2012 | ISBN-10: 0143118358 | ISBN-13: 978-0143118350
Here is the perfect introduction to contemporary fiction from the world's most spoken language. These eight short stories, with parallel translations, offer students at all levels the opportunity to enjoy a wide range of contemporary literature without having constantly to refer to a dictionary. Richly diverse in themes and styles, the stories are by both new and well-established writers and range from a story by Li Rui about the honest simplicity of a Shanxi farmer to a story by Ma Yuan exposing the seamy underside of contemporary urban society. Complete with notes, these selections make excellent reading in either language.
By Lo Fu, trans. by John Balcom, Publisher: Zephyr Press (AZ) (14 Aug 2012), 352 pp., ISBN-10: 0981552110; ISBN-13: 978-0981552118
On Pauline A. Chen's new English adapation of Dream of the Red Chamber / The Story of the Stone.
By Nicky Harman, August 4, '12
here - he's the man behind one of our two favourite lit mags, Chutzpah aka 天南 (the other being Pathlight, of course!)
Interview with Julia Lovell on Australian radio.
It seems like everyone in China has read—or seen the televised adaptation of—at least one martial arts novel. The undisputed king of the wuxia (武侠), sometimes translated as “heroic chivalry,” but it really just means kung fu literary genre is Jin Yong, aka Louis Cha, whose tales of noble heroes, beautiful heroines and not a little derring-do read like a modern Chinese take on the Arthurian legends. Only with more flying headbutts...
Conducted under the cover of darkness, grave robbery is a dirty (both spiritually and physically) and highly illegal profession. Yet it has become wildly popular in China, thanks to a couple of pulp serials: Grave Robbers' Chronicles (《盗墓笔记》Dàomù bǐjì) and Ghost Blows Out the Light (《鬼吹灯》Guǐ chuīdēng). Published over the past decade, these adventure-horror series have quickly become known as the Indiana Jones stories of China - only with fewer fedoras and bullwhips, and more Mao caps and feng shui compasses.
Zhang's latest production, The Flowers of War, hits British cinemas Friday – and aims even higher. This epic tale of the Nanjing massacre of 1937 had a budget of $100m, stars a western A-lister, and has almost half its dialogue in English. No Chinese film has ever pitched harder for the mainstream global audience Hollywood takes for granted. No Chinese film has failed harder, either.
By Helen Wang, August 2, '12
http://www.goodreads.com/list/show/23241.China_s_Cultural_Revolution_and_its_aftermath_in_fiction_and_memoir
This list of 79 books is from goodreads.com, and was created by someone called Hannah on 1 August. It's not always on target, but gives an idea of which books general readers are recommending to others, the average rating for each book and the number of ratings it has received.
Here are the Top Ten on the list...
More…
Bertrand Mialeret writes about Anni Baobei...
Anni Baobei, The Road of Others, three stories translated by Nicky Harman and Keiko Wong, with afterword by Harvey Thomlinson. Make–Do Publishing. Hong Kong 2012.
Prunus Press has printed the English version of Greenwood Riverside, a novel by Ye Guangqin. Shortlisted for the 2011 Mao Dun Literature Prize, it narrates the dramatic life story of bandit Wei Futang in the ancient county of Greenwood Riverside, from the eve of the founding of New China to the present. Ye weaves a detailed saga and portrays with poignancy the lives led by bandits and heroes, the rich and the poor, as well as men and women against the vicissitudes of over half a century. "The compelling story of power, politics and revolution offers a shining gateway to knowledge and understanding of the Chinese people, both past and present," American writer Jerry Piasecki comments. A descendent of the family of the Empress Dowager Cixi (1835-1908), 64-year-old Ye draws inspiration from her family background and her years of working in rural Shaanxi province.
In Prospect in April, Julia Lovell wrote about the new wave of Chinese fiction, much of which uses wry humour or playful surrealism to illuminate the contradictions and strangeness of modern China. Lovell, a professor of Chinese, singled out the work of Xiang Zuotie, praising his story “Raising Whales” for its “absurdist take on China’s get-rich-quick fever, as a landlocked village slowly runs out of containers to house its growing whale farm.”
Xiang Zuotie was born in 1974 in the southeastern province of Hunan. He has published one short story collection, A Rare Steed for the Martial Emperor. “Indirectness and allegory have long been essential tools in the Chinese writer’s arsenal,” says translator Brendan O’Kane, “but Xiang’s work takes both to an extreme. He evokes contemporary anxieties without being pinned down—by the censor or the reader— to any one interpretation.”
On Wednesday, July 25, a famous Chinese author and liberal voice with the pen name Murong Xuecun (@慕容雪村) shared a long and heartfelt plea to his countrymen via Sina Weibo, China’s Twitter, based on a speech given earlier in Hong Kong. According to Hong Kong University’s Weiboscope, which tracks Weibo posts popular with influential users, the text of this speech became the most popular image for July 25, with over 36,000 reposts and 8,000 comments. Just over one day later, the post was deleted by censors.
- Cao Xueqin. Dream of the Red Chamber.
- Lu Xun. The Real Story of Ah Q and Other Tales of China. The Complete Fiction of Lu Xun. Translated by Julia Lovell.
- Eileen Chang (Zhang Ailing), translated by Karen Kingsbury. Love in a Fallen City
- Ding Ling. I Myself am Woman: Selected Writings of Ding Ling. Editor, Tani Barlow
- Wang Shuo, Please Don't Call Me Human (Cheng and Tsui, 2003).
- Dai Sijie. Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, translated by Ina Rilke.
- Gao Xingjian. Soul Mountain, translated by Mabel Lee.
- Mian Mian. Candy .
- Yu Hua. Chronicle of a Blood Merchant, translated by Andrew Jones.
- Jiang Rong, Wolf Totem translated by Howard Goldblatt.
The Story of the Stone / Dream of the Red Chamber
By Eric Abrahamsen, July 29, '12
Take a look at David Haysom's new blog featuring translations of… things he likes, I presume! First translation is of Shi Tiesheng's Football.
Ten French books, five literary works and five from the social sciences, have made the shortlist for China’s most prestigious French-to-Chinese translation contest.
The award (傅雷奖) is named after Chinese translator and art critic Fu Lei (1908-1966), who is best known for his translations of Voltaire, Balzac and Romain Rolland. The annual awards honor the year’s most outstanding translation works from French to Chinese, and aim to promote the translation and publication of French books in China.
Presented by Free Word Centre, English PEN, The British Centre for Literary Translation, Literature Across Frontiers , the British Council, the London Book Fair, the Translators Association, Wales Literature Exchange & Words Without Borders.
Fri 5 Oct 9am - 5 pm
By Eric Abrahamsen, July 24, '12
The NEA's 2013 Translation Grants have been announced; the only Chinese-language grant has gone to Sylvia Lichun Lin to translate The Lost Garden (迷园) by Taiwanese writer Li Ang (李昂).
Congratulations!
The Three Body trilogy, one of the most popular Chinese-language science fiction novels, will be published in English soon, a publishing company said Friday.
The three-part saga, written by award-winning writer Liu Cixin, has sold 400,000 Chinese copies, according to China Educational Publications Import & Export Corporation Ltd, which will cooperate with the Science Fiction World magazine to release the English novel.
Beijing Forbidden City Film Corporation bought the copyrights for the book in 2004 after the book was published. Struggling to find a director to take on the project, the producing company waited until the English and French versions were published in 2008 to renew the copyrights in 2009, finally settling on Annaud as the director.
The fair's Renowned Writers Seminar Series, organised by the HKTDC, Ming Pao and Yazhou Zhoukan, features 17 writers from the Chinese mainland, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Taiwan and the United States. They include celebrated novelist, playwright and critic Kenneth Pai Hsien-yung, and martial arts novelist Wen Rui-an. Zi Zhongyun, a Senior Fellow at the Institute of American Studies, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, and one of China's leading scholars on international relations, is also participating, as is Murong Xuecun, the pen name of Hao Qun. Mr Murong is among China's most successful Internet writers. His Leave Me Alone: A Novel of Chengdu, was published on the Internet, then adapted for film and nominated for the Man Asian Literary Prize.
Includes:
- the 20 best Sinophone writers under 40 as originally compiled by Taiwan's Unitas Magazine;
- Yang Mu;
- Arthur Sze (in collaboration with Michelle Yeh);
- Dylan Suher writesabout China's own literary omniscient, Qian Zhongshu;
- Huang Chunming's The Pocket Watch (translated by Howard Goldblatt);
- Dominique Eddé's Kite argues (translated into both English and Chinese).
"The new words we selected for the dictionary are those related to social phenomena in recent years. They are not just words, but cultural symbols, reflecting our changing society," Yu Dianli, manager of Commercial Press, the publisher of the dictionary, said on Sunday.
BUT... "We abandoned these words [shengnan, shengnu] because it's kind of rude to label this group (with such words)," Jiang Lansheng, an expert in linguistics from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences who was responsible for the revisions, was quoted by Chinese Central Television as saying on Sunday. "Besides, tongzhi, (which literally means) comrade in English, can be used to call gay people now. But we don't want to promote the use of such a word in official occasions, so we didn't add it to the new edition."
One top novel of the year went to Mickey Chen (陳俊志) for “Taipei Father, New York Mother” (台北爸爸, 紐約媽媽), a memoir on growing up gay in a classically minded but distinctly dysfunctional Taiwanese family.
Other top Tripods went to next-generation female writer Hao Yu-xiang (郝譽翔) for “Wen quan xi qu wo men de you shang” (Hot spring washes off our grief, 溫泉洗去我們的憂傷), to Wei Tien-tsung (尉天聰) for “Hui shou wo men de shi dai” (Remember our Time, 回首我們的時代), and to Lin Jun-ying (林俊穎) for “Nostalgia that Dare not Speak Its Name” (我不可告人的鄉愁).
Director Wang Quan’an has adapted White Deer Plain, a historical novel about two peasant families, into a 160-minute movie, to be released on Sept 13.
The novel by Chen Zhongshi traces five decades of two families in West China’s Shaanxi Province. Winner of the Maodun Literature Award, the top honor of China’s literature circle, the novel has long been a tempting challenge for filmmakers, but Wang’s work is its first big screen adaptation.
Sky Lanterns brings together innovative work by authors — primarily poets
— in mainland China, Taiwan, the United States, and beyond who are engaged
in truth-seeking, resistance, and renewal. Appearing in new translations,
many of the works are published alongside the original Chinese text. A
number of the poets are women, whose work is relatively unknown to
English-language readers. Contributors include Amang, Bai Hua, Bei Dao,
Chen Yuhong, Duo Yu, Hai Zi, Lan Lan, Karen An-hwei Lee, Li Shangyin, Ling
Yu, Pang Pei, Sun Lei, Arthur Sze, Fiona Sze-Lorrain, Wei An, Woeser, Yang
Lian, Yang Zi, Yi Lu, Barbara Yien, Yinni, Yu Xiang, and Zhang Zao.
Zhou Ruchang, who has died aged 94, was one of China’s greatest literary scholars, devoting almost seven decades of his life to the study of just one novel: the enigmatic masterpiece Dream of the Red Chamber.
Murong Xuecun's essay 'A Few Moments in the China Rising Story' 《大国崛起的十二个瞬间》, translated by Jane Weizhen Pan, Martin Merz, Ling Wang.
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, et al, Comma Press, RRP£9.99, 224 pages
An anthology of short stories that engage obliquely with themes such as migration, prosperity and sexual politics. They offer refreshing glimpses into modern Chinese city life. With settings ranging from Beijing and Hong Kong to the icy Harbin, it includes works by newcomers and longer-established authors.
From MCLC:
Modern Chinese Literature and Culture and MCLC Resource Center are pleased to announce publication of Jon Eugene von Kowallis's review of Placing the Modern Chinese Vernacular in Transnational Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), by Gang Zhou.
There are comparable excitements to be experienced throughout Jade Ladder, which samples the work of over 50 poets – ranging from internationally well-known figures such as Bei Dao and Yang Lian to writers still in their 30s. WN Herbert's informative and witty preface rightly urges readers simply to hurl themselves into the poems, but while many will be glad of work that lives up to the bracing injunction to stop making sense, it's helpful to have some idea of what the points of departure are, and to read Yang Lian's introduction and the various accompanying essays by the poet-critic Qin Xiayou on lyric, narrative and so on, as well as Brian Holton's engagingly irascible closing essay on the opportunities and pitfalls facing the translator.
Xu Zhimo was an early 20th-century Chinese poet who sought to promote a modern Chinese poetry that broke with convention and followed Western forms, especially the style of the Romantic and Symbolist poets, with whose work he fell in love while studying at King’s College, Cambridge in 1922.
Verses from his most famous poem, ‘Saying Goodbye to Cambridge Again’, are inscribed on a monument to him behind King’s Chapel. In light of his immense and ongoing popularity in China, Xu Zhimo can be counted as one of Cambridge’s most influential alumni.
(It's not immediately obvious who the translator is ...perhaps Nicole Chiang, the editor? Or Lai-Sze Ng, who wrote the introduction? Or someone at Oleander? Anyway the new publication is timely, and coincides with 'The Search for Immortality: Tomb Treasures of Han China' exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum.)
Thanks to Bertrand Mialeret for highlighting this in his article (in French) on mychinesebooks.com:
http://mychinesebooks.com/frqiu-xiaolong-il-ny-pas-les-romans-policiers-dans-ma-vie/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+mychinesebooks+%28My+chinese+books+feed%29
China’s rascal literatus Han Han has tackled the violent crackdown on unarmed protesters in Shifang, Sichuan Province over plans to build a molybdenum copper plant. Although the local government has suspended the project, it is also seeking to punish the instigators of the protest. Bloody photo and video continue to circulate on Weibo, long after one would expect the subject to be scrubbed clean. That may be thanks to Han Han himself. Read the original blog post here. Translated by Wendy Qian.
Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review is offering complimentary copies of its inaugural print volume to all interested East Asia scholars. One simply needs to send an email to "crosscurrents@berkeley.edu" with one's full name and address. The table of contents for the inaugural issue may be viewed online at http://cross-currents.berkeley.edu/print-journal.
Info via MCLC
Cerise Press' new Summer issue (Vol. 4, No. 10) is just out.
It features translations of Chinese poets Li Jianchun (trans. George O'Connell and Diana Shi), and Yi Lu (trans. Fiona Sze-Lorrain), artwork by Yi Lu, as well as a special interview by poet/critic Yang Xiaobin with
Taiwanese poets Chen Yuhong and Amang (trans. Yiping Wang and Thomas Moran).
Modern Chinese Literature and Culture and MCLC Resource Center are pleased to announce publication of Jennifer Feeley's review of The Pearl Jacket and Other Stories (Stone Bridge Press, 2008), edited and translated by Shouhua Qi.
Jo Lusby of Penguin China, the book's publisher, says Sheng "presents a very different, inside view" that attracts an international audience.
Unlike other works on the subject of migrant workers, notably Leslie T. Chang's non-fictional Factory Girls, "Sheng adopts an unusually intimate and direct approach and writes through, and about, women's bodies", columnist and writer Didi Kirsten Tatlow says.
In an excellent interview in Chinese with a Nanjing U academic (文学在中国太贱), award-winning author Bi Feiyu speaks of the importance of French in the global translation of his novels:
到目前为止，法国，或者说法语是我的第一站，我的作品都是从法语开始的，然后慢慢地向四周散发，一些小语种因为缺少汉语人才，直接就从法语转译过去了，西班 牙语和土耳其的版本都是这样。波兰和挪威这样的国家选择的是英语转译。到现在为止，我在法国出了六本书，《雨天的棉花糖》、《青衣》、《玉米》、《上海往 事》、《平原》、《推拿》，是最多的，其他的语种多少不一。语种大概有二十来个。
A poetry festival to commemorate the Chinese romantic poet Haizi will be held on July 25 in Delingha, capital of Haixi prefecture, Qinghai. ... The remote and beautiful place deeply fascinated Haizi, who longed for a spiritual paradise. In 1988, Haizi traveled to Delingha and wrote the poem Sister, Tonight I am in Delingha, a sentimental work that reflected the poet's loneliness on a dark night. Haizi, who committed suicide in 1989 at the age of 25, had a strong influence on popular Chinese literature, especially with his most famous poem, Facing the Sea, with Spring Blossoms. ... The poetry festival will assemble contemporary Chinese poets and critics for seminars on Haizi and other Chinese poets. A poetry contest will be held for entrants from all over the country.
The Renowned Writers Seminar Series, organised by the HKTDC, Ming Pao and Yazhou Zhoukan, will feature 17 writers from the Chinese mainland, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Taiwan and the US. ... They include Kenneth Pai Hsien-yung, Zi Zhongyun, Murong Xuecun...
Internet Sensation: One of China's most successful Internet writers, Murong Xuecun (pen name of Hao Qun), will also take part in the series. Mr Murong's Leave Me Alone: A Novel of Chengdu, was first published on the Internet, adapted for film and nominated for the Man Asian Literary Prize.
Barthes’s position in all of this is anomalous, since he does not fall neatly into any category of leftist Sinophile. Travels in China contains no great insights into the geopolitical situation of the time; Barthes realizes quite early on that their tightly-monitored trip will yield nothing of the kind, even if he were the right reader to discover them, which is doubtful. In many ways it’s his acknowledgment of the pitfalls of trying to understand the other that is most insightful. After lunch with a group of Europeans who have lived in China for a long time, Barthes identifies two perspectives on the part of the foreigners. One attempts to speak “from the inside: clothes, rejection of the foreign restaurant, bus and not taxi, Chinese ‘comrades’, etc.” At the other end of the spectrum is the perspective that continues to see China from the point of view of the West. “These two gazes are, for me, wrong. The right gaze is a sideways gaze.”
Mention China and people think of the Great Wall, tofu, kung fu, and of course, Confucius. They might also think of the skyscrapers in Beijing and Shanghai, and the unforgettable 2008 Olympics, which heralded China’s rise as a great nation. . .
The rise of China has also led to a rise in amnesia. Today, as China is rising to new heights I want to retell these stories in the hope that you can learn something about the entirely different kind of life some people in China are living. . .
. . .At 2.40 pm on the 29th of June, 2009, fifty-four-year-old Wu Chandi squeezed on to a number 14 bus in Beijing. She was heading to the Legislative Affairs Office of the State Council to present a petition. In today’s parlance, Wu Chandi is not a citizen, she’s a petitioner. And like most petitioners she had sought help from the government because she did not receive fair treatment from the local courts. And like petitioners who do not get satisfaction from the local government, she too embarked on long pilgrimages to Beijing to lodge a formal complaint with the Petition Office of the State Council.
A Common Strangeness: Contemporary Poetry, Cross-Cultural Encounter, Comparative Literature By Jacob Edmond, New York: Fordham University Press, 2012.
Abstract: Why is our world still understood through binary oppositions ‹East and West, local and global, common and strange‹that ought to have crumbled with the Berlin Wall? What might literary responses to the events that ushered in our era of globalization tell us about the rhetorical and historical underpinnings of these dichotomies? In A CommonStrangeness, Jacob Edmond exemplifies a new, multilingual and multilateral approach to literary and cultural studies. He begins with the entrance of China into multinational capitalism and the appearance of the Parisian flâneur in the writings of a Chinese poet exiled in Auckland, New Zealand. Moving among poetic examples in Russian, Chinese, and English, he then traces a series of encounters shaped by economic and geopolitical events from the Cultural Revolution, perestroika, and the June 4 massacre to the collapse of the Soviet Union, September 11, and the invasion of Iraq. In these encounters, Edmond tracks a shared concern with strangeness through which poets contested old binary oppositions as they reemerged in new, post Cold War forms. (Info from MCLC)
Running Through Zhongguancun, his 2006 novella about the love story of pirate DVD peddler Dun Huang, will soon be available in English.
For Xu, Zhongguancun bears the characteristics of a perfect specimen, inhabited by people from all walks of life. "It's no exaggeration to say that once we understand about Zhongguancun, we understand about Beijing and the rest of the country," he says.
Earn US$1,932 monthly. . ."to assist in translating contemporary high-grade Chinese poetry into English, and vice-versa"
The sessions were recorded and are now available on Youtube.
Cosima Bruno, Between the Lines: Yang Lian's Poetry through Translation, Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2012.
In Between the Lines Cosima Bruno illustrates how the study of translation
can enhance our experience of reading poetry. By inquiring into the mutual
dependence of the source text and its translation, the study offers both
theoretical insights and methodological tools that bring in-depth
stylistic analysis to bear on the translations as against the originals.
Through such a process of discovery, Cosima Bruno elaborates a textual
exegesis of the work by Yang Lian, one of the most translated, and
critically acclaimed contemporary Chinese poets.
This book thus reconciles the theory-practice divide in translation
studies, as well as helps to dismantle the lingering Eurocentrism still
present in the discipline.
Info received via MCLC
As I was going through each story, I felt as if I was entering a sphere of human suffering wrought in burning fire and darkness. This phrase echoed in my mind: "how the steel was tempered". These stories tell us how the lives of these cities and citizens, or peasants-turned-citizens, are being tempered. The stories seem to say that one has to go through the fires of hell to reach some different stage of existence. The road to commercial urbanisation seems to be a harder one than the road to socialism.
There's a joke going around in mainland China about the best way to transcribe the name of the country in Chinese characters. Each line is redolent of some social issue:...
the playboy reads it as qiènǎ 妾哪 = where is my mistress?
the lover reads it as qīnnǎ 亲哪 = where is my darling?
the poor person reads it as qiánnǎ 钱哪 = where is my money?...
THEN follow the thread of comments for a ding dong argument about the meaning of guanggun 光棍....
There was a link to this in The Economist's Johnson blog which focuses on language issues.
Liao's next book, "The Ball and the Opium - Life and Death on Tiananmen Square," is to be released in Germany at the end of the year.
The subject of violence on Tiananmen Square is not new for Liao. On June 3, 1989, he composed the poem "Massacre" about the increasing demonstrations on the infamous square. The poem, which accurately foreshadowed the brutal crackdown that would occur the very next day, led to a four-year prison sentence for Liao.
Despite the hardships he faced in prison - including disease, torture, and his own two suicide attempts - Liao was not deterred from speaking up. In 1998, he was imprisoned again after publishing an anthology of underground poems written by Chinese dissidents, entitled "The Fall of the Holy Temple."
International attention on Liao increased when his "Interviews with People from the Bottom Rung of Society," collected in 1998, were banned in China and smuggled to Taiwan. There, they were published and later translated into English and French. In the following years, Liao was honored with a number of international prizes, including the Hellman Hammet Grant from Human Rights Watch and the Freedom to Write Award from the Independent Chinese PEN Center.
Lecture by Paul French, author of Midnight in Peking
Royal Asiatic Society, 14 Stephenson Way, London NW1 2HD, 6 July, 6.30 pm. All welcome, free of charge. If you're not a member and would like to go, please contact the RAS first. (Podcasts of previous RAS lectures are here
Through the years of research for his latest book, Midnight in Peking, Paul French discovered that those two Worlds of Peking were not as separate or as different as people might have liked to think. His lecture will reveal a city full of intrigue, a city where the authorities were more interested in saving face than solving crimes, a city on the brink of invasion, and in doing will bring the last days of old Peking to life. French will also talk about the difficulties and complexities of recovering the stories and narratives of the foreign underworld and criminal classes in Peking and China's treaty ports as well as the largely overlooked role of the foreign police and diplomatic presence in attempting to monitor and control their more criminally minded nationals in China. He will go on to examine the relationships between Chinese and foreigners both within law enforcement, the judiciary, the nightlife and entertainment economy and illegal activities during the late 1930s and the early years of the Japanese occupation of Peking.
BEIJING, June 19 (Xinhua) -- Tibetan writer Zhang Zuwen's latest work "The Riverside of Lhasa" was published by the Beijing-based Writers Publishing House this month.
The novel was Zhang's second book following "Lhasa, How Have You Been?" Both novels depict the lives of Tibetans and people from other ethnic groups. "The Riverside of Lhasa" tells the story of a woman and her mother managing an inn on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau around the beginning of the 21st century, just before the construction of the Qinghai-Tibet Railway. "The novel is an ode to ethnic unity and expresses a deep love for life and high expectations for a bright future," read a comment on "China Tibet Online."
"I think a good work should be good for everyone who reads it," Zhang said.
By Nicky Harman, June 19, '12
The And Other Stories Chinese Reading Group is having a lively online discussion about Han Dong's novellas. I have just translated an excerpt of one, which appears here. It can also be viewed on the And Other Stories website.
Mardi McConnochie's response to Leslie T. Chang's article "Working Titles - What do the most industrious people on earth read for fun? (New Yorker, 6 Feb 2012)
To a Western reader, these plots and concerns seem mundane, and not the stuff of fiction. But as Chang points out, the competitive workplace is a new thing for the Chinese...
These novels are doing what the novel has always done: offered advice and instruction on how to function in an area of society which is new and frightening, opening up to a terrible new kind of mobility, advising on pitfalls and opportunities. A massive cultural change is taking place in China, and this new fiction – enabled, as Chang describes, by changes to the Chinese publishing industry – is helping Chinese workers to understand and navigate that change, using techniques drawn from both fiction and the self-help manual...
Article Xujun Eberlein on "Second in Command* and China's officialdom novels.
The Rules of the Game: China's booming
bureaucracy lit
is part exposé --
and part how-to guide...
The first of Huang's three planned volumes was published in May 2011 and sold 100,000 copies in its initial month on the market. By October, a month after the second book was published, the two volumes together had sold 630,000 copies in print. Their actual readership is likely many times higher -- the books, like many bestsellers in China, are widely available online, legally and otherwise...
Review by David Goldblatt in The Independent
To tell the stories of China's gargantuan transformation in just ten words might seem a little quixotic. How could one capture the consequences of the fastest industrial revolution ever witnessed, in the world's most populous state? In these short, kaleidoscopic essays, novelist Yu Hua has done it, each word the prompt for personal memoir, contemporary reportage and sharp political commentary.
. . . je dois ajouter que parfois la réalité dépasse la fiction : je viens d’écrire un article sur l’affaire Bo Xilai (haut cadre du Parti communiste limogé et dont la femme est accusé de plusieurs meurtres, ndlr) mais je suis sûr que si j’avais approché un éditeur avec cette histoire, il m’aurait expliqué que mon intrigue était invraisemblable!
Some 40 Uyghur singers of long rhymed tales that extol heroes in the Turkic tradition—known as dastan in Uyghur and Persian, destansı in Turkish and dasitan (达斯坦) in Chinese—gathered recently in Hami (哈密) for an event that featured seminars and actual performances.
Lecture by Theo Hermans:
Translations add value to the texts they represent because they communicate about these texts even as they represent them. Starting from examples which show translators voicing reservations about the works they are reproducing, I will suggest that all translation, whether dissonant or consonant or indifferent, has the translator's value judgements inscribed in it.
The model I propose views translation as reported speech, more particularly what Relevance Theory calls 'echoic' speech. It casts the translator's intervention as the main communicative event, accounts for the shift in perspective characteristic of translation but leaves room for the translator's subject position in the translated text.
Taking questions from the public, Murong reflected: “I hope the rise of my country is not at the expense of its people’s lives.” On being asked about Internet censorship he stated said that the Chinese government is powerless to stop the rise of freedom of speech in his country and that the Internet will change China. Currently, his twitter account has been blocked in China for the past 13 days.
Over the past year and a half, several political developments — from the Arab Spring to the purge of the charismatic Chongqing leader, Bo Xilai — have made China’s leaders especially jittery. This has led to online crackdowns, including the temporary suspension of Murong’s wildly popular microblog. Last month, China’s biggest microblogging site announced a new code of conduct, punishing those who post information deemed inappropriate in a bid to limit “sensitive content.” The authorities have arrested some gadfly writers who, in less paranoid times, might have been censored but left alone.
Penguin China recently released the English translation of author Sheng Keyi’s first novel Northern Girls, a fictional journey through the riotous streets and shops of boom-town Shenzhen, led by the 16-year-old village girl Qian Xiaohong. It’s a book that is interesting for its content, and frustrating for its stylistic and narrative problems, many of which could have been avoided with the help of a good editor....
If poets are, as P. B. Shelley wrote, “the unacknowledged legislators of the world,” then translation must be one of the unacknowledged legislators of poetry. Certainly translation of Chinese poetry has been essential to modern American writing: Ezra Pound’s Cathay didn’t just invent, as T. S. Eliot put it, “Chinese poetry for our time,” it invented the possibility within English for modes of writing recognizable as somehow Chinese. Poets as dissimilar as Charles Reznikoff and Stanley Kunitz, or Charles Wright and J. H. Prynne, have built careers inhabiting these modes; from Gary Snyder’s Mountains and Rivers Without End to John Ashbery’s Mountains and Rivers, we know Chinese whispers when we hear them in American poetry because we have read Chinese poetry in an English first invented by Pound.
Never mind the inaccuracies that have often come with translating poetry from Chinese to English; inaccuracies have been one of poetic translation’s more fruitful possibilities: Aramaic gamla may mean both “camel” and “rope,” but would we cite the Bible’s suspicion of the rich entering heaven if not for the striking surrealism of camels passing through needle-eyes? Or, in that case, mind the inaccuracies, because through them a kind of poetry is born. And this is the kind of poetry that Jonathan Stalling brings us with Yingelishi: Sinophonic English Poetry and Poetics.
When I first read the story [The Blue Lotus], I was interested by the profusion of Chinese writing in signs, wall-hangings, posters, graffiti, and occasionally speech bubbles. What did they say? Or were they merely random characters included for atmospheric effect? I later learned some Chinese, and found that they were intelligible. Some characters in the larger banners may have been copied by Hergé or a studio assistant, but the smaller texts are written with such assurance that the hand must be Zhang’s. In three places his personal name 充仁 (Chongren) appears as a cryptic signature, partly obscured, on signs in the background, once next to the character 張, Zhang, his family name.
The works of two Miao and three Tujia authors were put under the magnifying glass at the recent “Conference on Chongqing Ethnic Minority Writers” held in Beijing (重庆少数民族作品). The conference was co-sponsored by five heavyweight organizations including the Chongqing chapter of the China Writers’ Association, Nationalities Literature Magazine (民族文学) and the Ethnic and Religious Affairs Commission of Chongqing.
Une journée d'étude consacrée à la Poésie chinoise, des origines à nos jours (Diversité des formes et des temps de l'écriture poétique chinoise) se tiendra à l'université Paris VII le jeudi 14 juin à partir de 9h30. Parmi les intervenants : Rémi Mathieu, Stéphane Feuillas, Rainier Lanselle, François Martin, Chantal Chen-Andro, Sandrine Marchand).
. . .publishing the French-Buyi Dictionary [布法辞典] is a big project and should be undertaken with a scientific and serious attitude. Since this book was created by French missionaries who had penetrated deeply into ethnic minority regions, the culture and customs of China’s Buyi people are seen through foreign eyes, and therefore evidence a certain bias. If it were directly translated, published and distributed, there would be issues related to matters such as its authorship, copyright and relationships between different ethnic groups.
I had no choice but to surrender all hopes of producing a precise replica, and settle for recreating the meaning in an English that hopefully reflects some of the vivid, subtle colloquialism of the original. After all—if I may be so brazen as to introduce another metaphor—translating literature is like transposing music from one instrument to another: there are things the violin can do that the piano cannot, and vice versa.
Qian Xiaohong is the protagonist of Northern Girls, a novel by Sheng Keyi (盛可以) published last week in English translation (the original Chinese book was titled Bei Mei 北妹). The novel draws on Sheng Keyi’s personal experience: she too left rural Hunan to seek her fortune in Shenzhen...
Northern Girls was Sheng’s first novel, written in 2002 and originally published in 2004. She has since published five novels, with a sixth on the way, as well as several short stories. She tackles difficult aspects of Chinese society, and she says that she writes what she wants to: She has several times chosen to let her work go unpublished rather than neuter it to meet the censorship requirements of a domestic publishing house. She is widely respected by the Chinese literary community, and is considered one of the better female writers of her time. The following is an interview with her about the new English-language release (the original Chinese is at the bottom of the English)...
The collection begins with a moving meditation on the personal tragedies of the massacre, and especially on the losses suffered by the "Tiananmen Mothers" group. Other essays range more widely, exploring the historical origins of China's current political system, and the pre-conditions required to bring about change. Time and again, his analysis focuses on the Communist Party's long-term monopoly of power, on the commonalities of diverse generations of Communist leaders, and on the need to develop non-violent forms of resistance through expanding civil society. He debates the politics of privatisation, calling for an overhaul of land ownership to diminish Party control. In another piece, he avers that Han China's conflict with Tibet is not ethnic, but political: a legacy of the totalitarian system of government. Along the way, he discusses also China's recent spike in angry patriotism, and what he sees as an unseemly obsession with winning gold medals.
The June Bride is one of the eight comedies created by Eileen Chang, a Chinese writer noted for fiction writing that deals with the tensions between men and women in love...
It talks about the excitement, anxiety and confusion of a bride-to-be who gets the cold shoulder from her fiancee but is wooed by two other men at the same time...
The June Bride incorporates more than 30 Chinese hit songs in the 1980s and 1990s to help refresh the original material, created in 1960. The hit songs will hopefully strike a chord with the audience.
8 pm, June 15. Concert Hall, Xinghai Concert Hall, 33 Qingbo Lu, Ersha Island, Yuexiu district, Guangzhou.
Her latest film is like many of her others in that the title - UFO In Her Eyes - takes its namesake from her novel...
It is the first novel Guo wrote as a film story. The plot surrounds an anonymous woman from a Chinese village, whose life changes after she sees a UFO...
An ongoing comprehensive retrospective of her movies since 2003, plus her latest film, UFO In Her Eyes, which runs from May 20-June 10 at Ullens Center For Contemporary Art (UCCA), offers a glimpse of a pioneer among Chinese women.
Wolfgang Kubin, a Sinologist at the University of Bonn, famous for his blunt assessments of popular contemporary Chinese literature—he described Wei Hui’s Shanghai Baby as “trash” and Jiang Rong’s Wolf Totem as “fascist”—has been designated as “Poet-in-Residence” by Beijing’s Renmin U:
今年春季学期，顾彬应邀成为中国人民大学文学院第3届驻校诗人。人大文学院“国际写作中心”于近日举行了顾彬诗歌朗诵会，文学院院长孙郁教授为顾彬颁发了驻校诗人聘书。
Amid very little fanfare, the Writers Publishing House, one of China’s most prestigious publishers of literary fiction, brought out a book entitled “One Hundred Writers’ and Artists’ Hand-Copied Commemorative Edition of the ‘Yan’an Talks.”’ ...
But the hand-copied feature caught the notice of online commentators. Among the hundred calligraphers were most of China’s best-known and respected authors, including Mo Yan, Su Tong, Jia Pingwa and Han Shaogong. ...
Ye Zhaoyan, one of several writers who participated and later posted contrite apologies on the Web, said, “I’m deeply repentant of not taking this more seriously.” Other mea culpas took the same tone: I wasn’t thinking. ...
By Helen Wang, June 5, '12
MCLC LIST
From: tom moran moran@middlebury.edu
Subject: contributors for fiction writers volume
Contributors are needed for the Modern Chinese Fiction Writers,
1950-2000 volume of the Dictionary of Literary Biography (DLB) series
that is produced by Bruccoli, Clark, Layman and published by Gale. The
book is co-edited by Tom Moran and Dianna Xu.
More…
By Jiang Chenxin, June 3, '12
The And Other Stories Chinese reading group is up and running!
More…
