Our News, Your News
By Eric Abrahamsen, November 25, '11
Busy days for the Peony Literary Agency, who recently announced the sales of three books from two of their authors: Han Han's Youth and 1988: I Want to Talk to This World have both been bought by Simon & Schuster US, to be translated by Allan Barr and published in the second half of 2012; and Yan Geling's The Flowers of War (金陵十三钗), to Other Press, translated by Nicky Harman, to be published next January.
Congratulations!
For further information please contact Marysia Juszczakiewicz in Hong
Kong at marysia@peonyliteraryagency.com, or Tina Chou in Shanghai at
tina@peonyliteraryagency.com. Full press releases below:
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Heaven – Tibet by Ning Ken (《天•藏》，宁肯著) has won the 2011 Shinai’an Literary Prize (施耐庵文学奖) awarded to a Chinese novel exhibiting an innovative style of narration, along with three other novels: Jia Pingwa’s Old Kiln (《古炉》，贾平凹著), Yan Lianke’s Me and My Father’s Generation (《我与父辈》，阎连科著), and Dong Qizhang’s Tiān gōng kāi wù (《天工开物·栩栩如真》，董启章著).
By Eric Abrahamsen, November 20, '11
So that this shouldn't become a wall of rambling text, I'm going to
arrange the rest of my observations and recollections from the
Chinese Literature Week
in Oslo into easily-digestible bullet points. No actual
logical structure or cohesion is implied!
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Turnout was amazing—around 4,000 attendees at 30-some events. Not
bad for a group of writers few of whom are translated into Norwegian.
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A total of seven Chinese authors are available in Norwegian
translation, two of whom write in English (Li Yiyun and Guo Xiaolu) and
three of whom live outside China (add Ma Jian to the above). The
Norwegian publishers I met, to their credit, seem fairly intent on
changing this situation. Yu Hua's Brothers is in the works, as is Ai
Mi's Under the Hawthorn Tree. Xu Zechen was eyed appraisingly.
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The Norwegians are quite generous. Never have I purchased meals
with a square of plastic that didn't have to be run through a machine:
you gestured with it at the waiters, and they smiled and brought you
free food.
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By Eric Abrahamsen, November 16, '11
I'm in Norway for the
House of Literature's
Chinese Literature Week
(see the link for full schedule). Participants include Xi Chuan 西川, Wang Hui 汪晖,
Murong Xuecun 慕容雪村, Ma Jian 马建, Leslie T. Chang, Rebecca Karl,
Michael Dutton, Li Yiyun 李翊雲, Hong Ying 虹影, Mian Mian 棉棉, Xu
Zechen 徐则臣, Han Song 韩松, Lan Lan 蓝蓝, Cheng Yong Xin 程永新, Zou
Zou 走走 and me (thank you Lucas for
typing all that up). Annie Baby was
supposed to come, but she recently received word that her magazine,
Open, was going to be shut, and stayed home instead. The spirit
hovering over all this is Halvor Elfring who, besides having a pretty
decent name, is Norway's principle sinologist and gracious dinner host
of sundry China-related vagabonds [edit: I got Halvor Elfring confused with Harald Bøckman, who has a less exciting name but makes up for it with a great beard].
I'm pleased to be here: we put a fair amount of work into the planning
stage of this event ("we" here means Canaan), and it's nice that we
can also be present for its execution ("we" here means me). Houses of
Literature around the globe, take note!
This is day three of events, but I only arrived last night, so more
reports to follow. So far, the House of Literature seems lovely: a
large, well-run place offering regular readings and author talks, with
a writing center, writer-in-residence quarters, children's literature
center, and bookshop. The bookshop had a nice selection of Chinese
literature in English and Norwegian translation: Lenin's Kyss by Yan
Lianke can only be 受活 (Shouhuo), currently being translated into
English by Carlos Rojas. I was also foolishly amused to read of Mo
Yan's association with the "Lu Xun-prisen" and the "Mao Dun-prisen". I
guess a translator shouldn't laugh at these false cognates—the problem
is in your head, after all, not the language—but one permits oneself a
little snarkle.
Events have so far been packed: 500+ for writers with no Norwegian
translations.
By Canaan Morse, November 15, '11
3:00 p.m. @ City University
Panel: Writing Across Languages
Moderator Lucas Klein
Panelists Bejan Matur (Turkey), Tian Yuan (China/Japan), Yao Feng (China), Tomaž Šalamun (Slovenia)
This turned out to be an interesting event, though not quite for the reasons I imagined; though I hoped at first to hear a lot of good debate, I see now my notes all dwell on the statements given by each poet at the panel’s beginning. The poets were very well selected, as each one moving away from his or her native language into another, later having to negotiate the distance between the two (or three). Bejan went from Kurdish to Turkish (get to her in a sec), Tomaž has written in Slovenian, French and English, Yao Feng has tried Portuguese and Tian Yuan, who lives in Japan, writes often in Japanese. Discussion shifted midway through the panel from the limits of certain languages to the translatability of poetry, where both Ezra Pound and Robert Frost raised their fearsome heads.
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By Canaan Morse, November 13, '11
Sacrifice everything to express our loyalty to Mao Zedong thought! The Proletarian just spent three days in Hong Kong, that lair of capitalist excess, attending a poetry festival organized by Bei Dao through the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Starting last Thursday (11/10) and only finishing Sunday afternoon (11/13), "International Poetry Nights Hong Kong" featured nightly readings by guest poets from around the world and moderated panels during the day. Something like twenty poets were invited, while a number of writers and translators came out of their own interest. Unfortunately, the various events were held separately in four different university venues around Kowloon, so not even this determined student could make it to all of them. Bad notes and not enough coffee make holes in my record inevitable, but if we’re lucky, IPNHK board member and PR contributor Lucas Klein will appear in time and italics to correct me. If you would like to read his perspective on the events in another format, visit his blog, Notes on the Mosquito.
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Murong Xuecun (moo-rong shweh-tswen) is the pen name of Hao Qun. At 37, he is among the most famous of a wave of Chinese writers who have become publishing sensations in the past decade because of their canny use of the Internet.
Mr. Murong’s books are racy and violent and nihilistic, with tales of businessmen and officials engaging in bribe-taking, brawling, drinking, gambling and cavorting with prostitutes in China’s booming cities. He is a laureate of corruption, and his friends have introduced him at dinner parties as a writer of pornography.
Words & The World, the twenty-volume box set of multilingual pocket-sized poetry books for this year’s International Poetry Nights in Hong Kong (which will take place from the 10th to 13th this month) has been published, and will be in select Hong Kong bookstores soon.
The books, featuring the twenty participants of the International Poetry Nights, are by María Baranda (Mexico), Régis Bonvicino (Brazil), Arkadii Dragomoshchenko (Russia), Bejan Matur (Turkey), Paul Muldoon (Ireland), Vivek Narayanan (India), Tomaž Šalamun (Slovenia), Silke Scheuermann (Germany), Tanikawa Shuntarō (Japan), C. D. Wright (USA), Chen Ko-hua 陳克華 (Taiwan), Ling Yu 零雨 (Taiwan), Luo Chih Cheng 羅智成 (Taiwan), Tian Yuan 田原 (PRC / Japan), Wong Leung Wo 王良和 (Hongkong), Xi Chuan 西川 (PRC), Yao Feng 姚風 (PRC / Macau), Yip Fai 葉煇 (Hongkong), Yu Jian 于堅 (PRC), and Yu Xiang 宇向 (PRC). All books include the original language of composition, plus English and / or Chinese translations, and sell for HK$25 each, or HK$450 for the entire set.
Dream of Ding Village (丁庄梦) by Yan Lianke has been long-listed for the 2011 Man Asian Literary Prize. Based on the AIDS epidemic in Henan, China, this Chinese novel was translated into English by the frequent Paper Republic contributor, Cindy Carter.
By Cindy M. Carter, October 31, '11
From Chad Post and the Three Percent crew comes this $2.99 downloadable version of The Three Percent Problem: Rants and Responses on Publishing, Translation, and the Future of Reading [Kindle Edition].
This little book should be required reading for everyone who cares about books, in an age when translation matters more than ever (but has become an increasingly marginalized sub-specialty), in an era in which it's all too easy to forget that the books we've loved the most (Dostoevsky, Proust, Shakespeare, Mark Twain, Confucius, the I Ching, the Torah, the Koran, the Old & New Testaments, pretty much every religious tract or towering work of poetry or fiction within that last 2 milennia, for fuck's sake...) have been made available to most of the world's population through translation.
By Lucas Klein, October 21, '11
The International Poetry Nights in Hong Kong, organized by Bei Dao 北島, will take place from the 10th to 13th of November. Ten Chinese-language poets and ten international poets will give readings and participate in roundtable discussions at various locations around Hongkong. The Chinese-language poets are:
Chen Ko-hua 陳克華 (Taiwan), Ling Yu 零雨 (Taiwan), Luo Chih Cheng 羅智成 (Taiwan), Tian Yuan 田原 (PRC, resides in Japan), Wong Leung Wo 王良和 (Hongkong), Xi Chuan 西川 (PRC), Yao Feng 姚風 (PRC, resides in Macau), Yip Fai 葉煇 (Hongkong), Yu Jian 于堅 (PRC), and Yu Xiang 宇向 (PRC). For more information see the Notes on the Mosquito blog and the Poetry Nights' website for full details and to register.
This is interesting to consider. Certainly what Cayley says is true, that English translations of classical Chinese poetry have been loved by readers and influential to poets who have little or no knowledge of Chinese as a language or a culture otherwise; Eliot Weinberger‘s early Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei and more recent New Directions Anthology of Classical Chinese Poetry are testaments to this fact. And yet, when it comes to contemporary Chinese poetry, I’m not so ready to agree (I’ve been critical, for instance, of anthologies of contemporary Chinese poetry that seem to exploit the creativity of the translator and suppress what makes the original original).
Turkish-to-Chinese translator Xia Yongmin, who rendered Baba Evi (父亲的家园), sports an impressive résumé that is also quite politically correct from the Chinese point of view. Now a reporter for China International Radio, he studied in Turkey in the 1980s and later served as official interpreter for the likes of Jiang Zemin and Li Peng. Within days of the bloody July 2009 Urumqi riots in Xinjiang, he hosted broadcasts from the city aimed at informing Turkish listeners about the events that included taking questions direct from callers in Turkey.
By Nicky Harman, October 15, '11
The New International? Literature in an age of ‘globish’, talk on Thursday 20 October 2011, 7.00pm until 9.00pm, Free Word Centre, 60 Farringdon Road, London EC1R 3GA. For details see here. Not strictly Chinese-focussed and nothing to do with me, but I promised I'd pass the news on. It sounds very interesting.
By Nicky Harman, October 14, '11
So I’ve had to dream up a series of Free Word Centre talks for a non-specialist, non-translator audience, which are China/translation-focussed. Why not ask myself? It seemed like a great idea at first. I could hardly refuse…. So I did: “Nicky, will you give a talk on ‘3,000 years of Chinese translation’? “Yes Nicky, I will, no problem.”
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Many of the Chinese poets included in Push Open the Window, the new anthology from Copper Canyon, cut their teeth on bad translations of American poetry. Somehow, they were sufficient for them to get “the idea.” Or, more importantly for their own work, not necessarily “the” idea but “an” idea. In the 1980’s and 1990’s in China, better translations– Yunte Huang’s version of Ezra Pound’s Pisan Cantos, for instance, Zheng Min’s pioneering Contemporary American Poetry, and Zhao Yiheng’s Modern American Poetry anthology– began to appear. But poets like Bei Dao, who says he looked abroad for models, and Yang Lian, whose book Concentric Circles is strongly influenced by Pound’s Cantos, had already forged their signature styles. A somewhat younger poet, Yu Jian, discovered translations of Whitman while working in a factory and went on to write poems that reference important but less celebrated American poets like Ron Padgett. Xi Chuan, who straddles two named factions of poets (the Misty and the New Generation Poets), studied English Romantic poetry and wrote a dissertation on Ezra Pound. The post-Mao-generation poets Hu Xudong, who cites Mark Strand and Robert Hass as influences, and Zhou Zan, who translates from English and cites among her influences Denise Levertov and Adrienne Rich, came of age as internet translations of American poetry exploded in China. Both Zhou Zan and Hu Xudong came to study in America, Hu Xudong at the International Writing Program in Iowa and Zhou Zan at Columbia University. Zhai Yongming, also included in Push Open the Window, speaks little English but wrote a whole book documenting her road trips through the deserts and mountains of the American west.
The English version of Brothers was a joint effort by two translators, each of whom translated one book (Chow, Part I; Rojas, Part II) and then revised the other's work. On the whole, this division of labor has resulted in a consistent narrative voice and style between the two parts. The translators have also made a good strategic decision in italicizing idioms, proverbs, literary allusions, and other set phrases,[9] which collectively play a key role in the novel's strategy of linguistic misuse and abuse. Each truism is held up for ridicule, either applied in an incongruous setting, as when Song Gang acts as "military advisor" to Baldy Li and tells him to pursue Lin Hong by penetrating behind enemy lines (250), or voiced by a buffoon, as when Poet Zhao sighs that by letting his girlfriend coerce him into marriage Writer Liu has become a case of a single misstep leading to regret of a thousand ages (14). (The townsfolk retort that "He bedded her a hundred times, so at the very least that would make it a hundred missteps.") The numerous names, slogans, and titles are also generally as vivid in English as the original Chinese. "Yanker Yu," for instance, is an inspired rendering of Yu Baya 余拔牙, the double-Y nicely substituting for the double-A alliteration in Mandarin.
By Lucas Klein, October 4, '11
To promote my forthcoming translations of the poetry of Xi Chuan 西川, Notes on the Mosquito (New Directions, 2012), I have set up the following blog: xichuanpoetry.com.
The newest news is that,
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