Our News, Your News
By Helen Wang, March 14, '12
Tiananmen Fictions Outside the Square: The Chinese Literary Diaspora and the Politics of Global Culture
by Belinda Kong
Compelling us to think about how Chinese culture, identity, and politics are being defined in the diaspora, Tiananmen Fictions Outside the Square candidly addresses issues of political exile, historical trauma, global capital, and state biopower…
Read more about this book… on http://www.temple.edu/tempress/titles/2176_reg.html
By Canaan Morse, March 14, '12
Never forget class struggle! The Proletarian just came back from two events at the Bookworm: a conversation with crime novelist Mai Jia (yours truly translating) and Yu Hua's second introduction of his most recent book, China in Ten Words (十个词汇里的中国, supposedly masterfully translated by Alan Barr), featuring Eric as interpreter. The Mai Jia event was passably interesting, but Yu Hua damn near brought the political house down, and so while it may contain elements of mainstream sensationalism, we're going to talk about him.
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The result has been an outpouring of mass-market fiction, written (and read) on websites, not in print. Five years ago internet publishers were typically informal, back-room outfits, but Shanda, an online gaming company, seized the commercial opportunity and now owns most of the literary sites. It sells subscriptions by the chapter or book, by the week or month. Online novels start at around five yuan ($0.80) compared with 30 yuan for an average printed volume.
By Helen Wang, March 14, '12
National Theatre of Scotland & National Theatre of China -
First UK season of New Writing from contemporary Chinese playwrights in 2013
An international new writing project is being launched in both China and Scotland on 8th March 2012 with the aim of discovering six new Chinese writers to develop their work with the assistance of National Theatre of Scotland practitioners. Successful playwrights will have their work produced as part of Òran Mór’s A Play, a Pie and a Pint Chinese Season in Glasgow, Scotland, in 2013.
For more information and application forms
By Helen Wang, March 13, '12
From The International Herald Tribune:
Watch Your Language! (In China, They Really Do) by Mark McDonald
Scaling the wall. Buying soy sauce. Fifty cents. A mild collision. May 35. Mayor Lymph. River crab. - These words — mild, silly, inoffensive — are part of the subversive lexicon being used by Chinese bloggers to ridicule the government, poke fun at Communist Party leaders and circumvent the heavily censored Internet in China. A popular blog that tracks online political vocabulary, China Digital Times, calls them part of the “resistance discourse” on the mainland.
Read more...
By Helen Wang, March 13, '12
From The New Yorker:
Working Titles: What do the most industrious people on earth read for fun? by Leslie T. Chang
What do the Chinese read in their spare time? Novels about work. The seventh volume of “The Diary of Government Official Hou Weidong” was published in July, with an initial print run of two hundred thousand copies. Zhichang xiaoshuo, or workplace novels, have topped best-seller lists in recent years. “Du Lala’s Promotion Diary,” by a corporate executive writing under the pen name Li Ke, is the story of a young woman who rises from secretary to human-resources manager at a Fortune 500 company. The books have sold five million copies...
Read more...
By Helen Wang, March 13, '12
Eric Abrahamsen, writing in The International Herald Tribune:
"Last Wednesday I tried to close my bank account. I won’t pretend that the Bank of China is the most Orwellian institution in the world, but in terms of human suffering inflicted by bureaucracy, it has to make the long list..."
Read the whole story here...
(with thanks to Nicky for sending this to me!)
It’s now impossible to keep up with contemporary Chinese writing, and about as difficult to pick out decent work. Overwhelmed Anglophone readers should therefore welcome the recent launch of two magazines showcasing contemporary Chinese writing in English translation: Pathlight and Peregrine, an English-language supplement within Chutzpah, a Chinese literary journal that models itself on Granta. (The idea in reverse—of Granta or The Paris Review, for example, running a Chinese-language supplement—is unthinkable.) The magazines have three points in common but diverge in most other ways.
The Hong Kong Advanced Institute for Cross-Disciplinary Studies has just posted Cris Mattison’s interview with Hong Kong writer Dung Kai-cheung 董啟章, one of the SAR’s most inventive authors. His novel Atlas: The Archaeology of an Imaginary City 地圖集, which mixes fiction with documentary history to chronicle the city of Hong Kong, will be out this summer in English translation by Bonnie McDougall and Anders Hansson. Here’s an excerpt from the interview where he discusses his work as related to translation and world literature in the broad sense, responding to a critique people have leveled against certain writers of modern Chinese literature for nearly a century (I expect Xi Chuan would give a similar response):
DKC: I said my language is influenced by English because since I studied Comparative Literature at the University of Hong Kong much of my reading has been done in English. The influence is not just in terms of subject matter and literary forms but also of sentence structure and diction. My Chinese has been regarded by some language purists as “Europeanized,” which is meant to be a criticism for not writing in a proper Chinese. It is in this sense that I said the language of Atlas “lends itself to translation.” By this I mean not that it is simple to translate, nor do I mean that it is written with the intention of being translated, and thus gaining international attention.
Cloudary Corp. (盛大文学云中书城), arguably China’s largest publisher of e-books, has announced separate rankings for 2011 sales of its cyberlit fiction and e-book versions of “traditional” works by professional authors that were first published in hardback form.
By Helen Wang, March 12, '12
"Bringing Chinese poetry to the UK" Literary Translation Centre, London Bookfair, 18 April.
(http://www.londonbookfair.co.uk/en/Sessions/243/Bringing-Chinese-Poetry-to-the-UK/)
The blurb for this session asks "How important are promotional events or readings, if at all?" If you've ever heard Brian Holton, W.N. Herbert and Yang Lian you will know the answer to this question. If you haven't, see the links below. I single out these three, because I have seen and heard them perform live and it's just not the same as reading the words on the page!
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By Helen Wang, March 12, '12
It took me ages to find the Literary Translation Centre programme on the LBF website, and then it was arranged alphabetically by session title. Call me old-fashioned, but I prefer schedules in chronological order, so here is an abridged version in date/time order, with the names of people. For more info on the sessions, chairs/speakers, check out the website.
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Just a note to say that Jiang Tao's poem Tribe of Palaeopithecus, which I translated with Lee Man-Kay, has come in as runner-up in the MPT 2011 prize.
The poem is included in the Bloodaxe anthology Jade Ladder, edited by Yang Lian, WN Herbert and me.
By Helen Wang, March 12, '12
In a rash moment, I offered to post a new entry on Paper Republic every day until the London Bookfair. Now Nicky suggests that I come clean and say who I am and why I’m doing this!
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By Helen Wang, March 11, '12
Kate Griffin has just written a piece about editing Chinese fiction for the Writers' Centre, Norwich:
“On the way back from Australia in December 2011, I spent a week in Shanghai and Beijing talking to Chinese writers, translators and editors about the editing culture in China (or lack thereof) and its impact on translation, and about support for writers. After a few days of intense conversation I gained a fascinating glimpse into the writing life in China today. All those I spoke with agreed that there is both a serious need for more professional editing as well as a shortage of experienced editors within the Chinese publishing industry…” Read the full article here
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