Our News, Your News
By Canaan Morse, December 9, '10
Of the Fiction:
I have to give Bei Shan’s “When You Go to Sa City” (北山，你们去卅城) one thumbs-up for being pretty 给力. From a writer’s point of view, I find that while it is easy to write about vice, it requires much better insight and more courage to appreciate the artistry of vice well done. His description of the brothels’ glittery guest-end exterior and cold, professional human resources system is so in sync with my understanding of China that I am ready to believe such a place exists. I would also be interested in knowing what else Bei Shan has written.
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By Canaan Morse, December 8, '10
Fourteen pieces of visual art, nine brief essays, a poem and nine stories.
The longest written piece is eleven pages long.
The most commonly used phrase is 耿耿于怀, which means “to take (sth.) to heart,” usually connoting resentment, the memory of a past injustice.
There are four pieces I would look at again, four that I would recommend.
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King's style looks simple, but it is actually very difficult to translate. As an author, he's very fond of puns, neologisms, idioms, local slang and so on. He plays with all the singularities of the English language, precisely the stuff that can't be translated in any way! This is typical of, er, “monoglot” writers, by which I mean those writers who don't care about what happens to their works when they're translated into other languages.
There are basically two kinds of novelists: those who care about translations, like Italo Calvino and Umberto Eco, because they're used to exploring foreign languages, and those who don't care, like Elmore Leonard or Uncle Stevie, because they're perfectly happy with inhabiting their native language...
By Eric Abrahamsen, November 20, '10
This is a bit beyond our bailiwick, but it sounds like fun: The English version of the Global Times is running a flash-fiction competition, with fabulous prizes etc. Apparently you need to be an English-language writer, in Beijing. Deadline is late December, here's the blurb:
Writers of Beijing, lend us your biros. The Global Times Beijing
Metro wants your smoking nuggets of flash fiction (1,000 words MAX). If you're one of our winners, you'll find yourself published in an anthology of Beijing fiction, and could win books or even a 5,000 yuan cash prize.
http://beijing.globaltimes.cn/community/2010-11/591698.html
(also find us on Google Buzz for updates)
best,
Flash Fried Fiction team
By Canaan Morse, November 18, '10
China Foreign Languages Press is currently looking to hire qualified, preferably bilingual English-speaking authors to participate in its landmark book series "Cities of China (中国城记)." Dedicated to presenting fresh, in-depth illustrations of rising Chinese cities to readers across the globe, the books in this series are written exclusively by foreign professional authors. Below is a translated sample from the "Cities of China" official introduction:
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By Eric Abrahamsen, November 13, '10
I've been blowing on about Xu Zechen for ages, but only just got around to finishing a sample of his Running Through Zhongguancun, which you can read here.
By Canaan Morse, November 12, '10
From Qarrtsiluni editor and Paper Republic friend Nick Admussen:
Qarrtsiluni is an online literary and artistic journal active since 2005 that features collaborative theme issues, posted in the form of a daily weblog. Learn more about it at our About page. This call for submissions, plus introductions to the issue's editors, is available here.
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As those knowledgeable about Chinese literature in translation may have noted, one occasionally finds European publishers—particularly in France—are willing to translate and publish Chinese fiction long before these “unknown” authors are “discovered” by the English-speaking world. Chinese Books, English Reviews spoke recently with Stéphane Lévêque, who is busy translating Harmonious Land (水乳大地) into French, the first novel—not yet available in English—in a now-complete trilogy by author Fan Wen (范稳) set along the borders of Yunnan and Tibet...
By Nicky Harman, October 28, '10
Manchester (UK) Literary Festival 2010 invited Shanghai short story writer and poet Ding Liying to their Translation Evening last week.
By Dylan Levi King, October 27, '10
Western critics have expected Chinese authors to unambiguously answer political questions, to stake out their positions, to be in opposition to Mainland China's prevailing social order. Chinese books are mostly translated into English and published by university and academic presses to support Western ideological claims, and everybody stopped reading them a long time ago.
So, if I had to jot a list of reasons that Jia Pingwa has never really been translated into English in a major way... somewhere on that list, I'd note a cultural conservatism that doesn't appeal to Western readers of Chinese fiction, and I'd also list a general ideological subtlety. When Jia Pingwa's Turbulence dropped, it was met with kindhearted confusion, and reviews of it still resorted to calling it a critique of "the bureaucracy that hamstrings modern China." They had nothing else to say. Okay. What if Jia wrote a novel set during the Cultural Revolution?
Just like you've always wanted to hear Rod Stewart rip into "My Funny Valentine," there are those that are stoked to have, say, Mo Yan tear into the central government's family planning policy or have Jia Pingwa really get into the Cultural Revolution.
Jia's early writing, which is not very highly regarded (even by Sun Jianxi, really), is often set casually during the Cultural Revolution ("casually" because it's not the Cultural Revolution of Scar Literature or Western imagination). He has never really laid into the subject, as, I guess, he's been expected to. But... he has now.
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By Eric Abrahamsen, October 17, '10
It seems that, for the Beijing Get It Louder events we could have done a slightly better job of, ahem, publicity, so I'm getting the word out early about Shanghai. Here's the full list for literature (follow the links for film and art, etc). Individually:
All events are at the 800Show site. All are free, but the INS Shanghai Declaration on Inauthenticity requires advance signup, you can email me for that.
The script is based upon the award-winning novel by Chen Zhongshi (陈忠实), White Deer Plain (白鹿园), and set in the countryside during the tumultuous years between the fall of the Qing (1910) and the founding of the People's Republic (1949)...
By Joel Martinsen, October 14, '10
Last Friday afternoon I took part in a “Black Box: Literature on Spot” event at the Get it Louder festival, which wrapped up its Beijing leg over the weekend. You can click through for a detailed description of the program and its participants, but in brief, “Black Box” was literary creation as performance art. A writer, sequestered in a curtained cubicle, composed in isolation. Beyond the wall, a translator attempted to keep pace as the text scrolled up the monitor. Spectators viewed the entire process on screens outside.
I was translating for Pan Haitian (潘海天), a writer of science fiction and fantasy and the editor of Odyssey of China Fantasy magazine (九州幻想). (You can find a brief introduction to some of Pan’s work in this post.) I’ve translated a bit of Pan’s work in the past, including a version of "The Eternal City" (永恒之城) in English for submission to ALIA6, an Italian-language anthology of SF in translation.
Pan warned me beforehand that his typical approach to composition involved leaving lots of sentence fragments and place-holders, which he’d expand once he had a rough framework of the story sketched out. Thankfully, this did not become apparent until about half an hour into the event, at which point my nerves had settled.
Ordinarily, I’d probably have gotten sidetracked early on by the quotation from Diary of a Madman and would have spent the full two hours reading up on the historical figures mentioned in the text. Or, if I were particularly disciplined that day, I’d have substituted dummy text for the quotation and moved on to the next paragraph, leaving the decision of how to translate Lu Xun for a later revision. Neither option was available to me, the first because I brought no reference materials and could not access the Internet, and the second because I needed to put up some sort of translation, however imprecise, for the audience. I had to make decisions, even if they weren’t ideal. Don’t recognize a locust tree? Then “tree” it is. Forget the alternate term for tuberculosis? Let’s call it a “fatal illness.” Although I often take this approach in a first draft when I want to capture an uninterrupted voice, I usually tag provisional translations so I can refine them later. Leaving them unmarked disguises my translation as a finished product instead of a work in progress, or more accurately, a partial transcript of a one-time performance.
It’s not a complete transcript because it doesn’t show where edits were made during composition and translation, and it retains just a few traces of Pan’s fragments and place-holders. His writing process seemed to mirror the pace of the story. The opening, which sets the scene and gives a bit of back-story, appears in the final product pretty much identical to how it was initially typed in. The sole edit I can remember was a change from “the man in the gown” to “the mustached man” (which I unfortunately rendered as “the bearded man.”) During the action scenes, things got more hurried and fragmented. For example, at a point in the story when Lu Xun has plummeted from a rooftop to grapple with an intruder (later revealed to be Liang Shiqiu), Pan inserted a bracketed note that I translated as “[insert blow-by-blow].” And the title only became Lu Xun: Demon Hunter after Lu Xun was mentioned by name in the text (to gasps and laughter from audience members who hadn’t caught on yet).
Pan’s original (恶魔猎手鲁迅), an application of wuxia tropes to Lu Xun’s account of why he chose to apply himself to writing, is entertaining, although it terminates abruptly — Pan said afterward that he needed additional resources before he could move forward. As a translator, I enjoyed the game of keeping up with the small changes and additions that the author was continually making to the text; as a reader, my mind had already filled in the details, and I just wanted him to continue with the story.
Photos of the event are available at the Get it Louder website, captioned in English and Chinese.
