By Nicky Harman, September 14, '10
Diary date for anyone within striking distance of London, UK.
On Thursday 30th September, join English PEN and other leading translation organisations for a full day of events focused on the future of literary translation, organised by FLOW The Free Word Festival. Visit their website or download the flyer here
As Guest of Honor in 2009, China was omnipresent at last year's Frankfurt Book Fair.
But there will also be plenty of Chinese publishers and China-related events in 2010 too, including: A session about imprisoned Uighur writer Nurmuhemmet Yasin, nature writing in Taiwan, new novels set in Tibet, and more.
Follow the link for regularly updated China-related news on the Oct 6-10 event...
First published in April 2010, Each Leaf a Bodhi Tree: My 15 Years at Dunhuang (一叶一菩提——我在敦煌十五年), a memoir detailing how Buddhist grottos in northwestern China were saved from marauding Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution, has been formally banned from further publication and distribution in China.
By Eric Abrahamsen, August 25, '10
Submissions for the 2010 Man Asian Literary prize will be accepted up until the end of the month! Remember, submissions must be of published English-language translations of books by Asian citizens, and must be submitted by publishers. If you're a translator (or Asian-citizen-author) with a novel you're proud of, bug your publisher now!
For the language-impaired (if you don't speak Chinese!):
Access to English-language schedule of 100+ events—press conferences, seminars, panel discussions, book readings/signings—featuring publishers, agents and authors
Recommendations on events of particular interest to overseas publishing professionals
By Nicky Harman, August 17, '10
from Danny Hahn, Translators Association, London
For some time those of us at the (British) Translators Association have been discussing the possibility of setting up a mentoring scheme, as a way of allowing emerging translators to benefit from the experience of their more experienced colleagues. Mentoring does of course happen informally all the time – translators are a benign, helpful bunch on the whole, after all – but we wanted something more formal, something that the emerging translator could rely on for a set period of time, and which would also involve a modest fee to recognise the mentor’s time. And thanks to the generosity of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation we are delighted to have secured funds to make this happen at last.
By Eric Abrahamsen, August 13, '10
I planned to write a bit about whatever translation-related issues of interest cropped up in the midst of Notes of Civil Servant, and as it happened I barely got through the preface before I reached the first hard-to-crack nut. So here is Imponderable Number One: the word 官场 (guānchǎng), guan indicating government officials or officialdom, chang here meaning "field" or "arena". I suspect that this term is a derivation of 战场 (zhànchǎng), "battlefield", which gave birth elsewhere to 职场 (zhíchǎng), "professional arena" or, as we prosaic Westerners might call it, the employment market.
It's precisely the touch of martial romance inherent in the term that is significant. Your typical North American or Western European civil servant is anything but romantic. Dull of eye and stunted of fancy, clad in the sober weeds of duty, they do one thing and they do it, if not well, at least doggedly. They are cogs in the machine, possessing perhaps even less moral agency in their day-to-day decisions than your average voter/taxpayer.
My Chinese Books provides reviews of Chinese novels and information about Chinese authors, currently in French but with an English version coming soon!
By Eric Abrahamsen, August 3, '10
Here comes a rather impressive dispatch from the far reaches of linguistic brain-bendery: Johnathan Stalling's Yingelish, a poem written in Chinese characters, which can be read aloud (in Chinese) to create a completely different story in Chinese-sounding English. As if that weren't impressive enough, the whole thing was rendered last week as a "Sinophonic English Opera" at the University of Yunnan, where the text was sung, acted out, and accompanied by a dizzying array of musical instruments. Download the flyer for the event, or see a few pictures here (Chinese only).
Bi Feiyu has joined the ever-growing list of authors, artists, musicians and academics denied entry into Britain for short-term professional visits either by outright refusal or – in his case – by bureaucratic delays in the processing of visa applications under Byzantine new rules. ...Bi was due in London last week to discuss his work and promote the English translation of 《玉米》- Three Sisters (trans. Howard Goldblatt, pub. Telegram Books, 2010).
Director Feng Xiaogang graces the covers of at least 5 major publications this week, thanks to his direction of the red-hot "disaster" movie, Aftershock, based on Zhang Ling's novel of the same name about the 1976 Tangshan earthquake that killed over 200,000.
But Southern Metropolis Weekly's interview with the screenwriter, who just happens to work for the Film Review Board under the infamous State Administration of Radio, Film and Television (SARFT), is a gem in itself...
From George Szirtes, poet, translator and blogger: "....Can we have books re-translated? Is it right to do so?
The pragmatic answer is that it is always difficult to to get the copyright and persuade a new publisher to publish something that has already appeared in the language via another publisher relatively recently, in other words in the sales cycle of the book.
The less pragmatic answer has an ethical dimension that can cut both ways. It may, on the one hand, be morally desirable to replace bad work with good, but it may not, on the other hand, be morally desirable for a newcomer to push aside a firstcomer, especially when opinions about quality may vary."
By Nicky Harman, July 28, '10
It's been a good year for Chinese to English translation, and it's getting better. Eric Abrahamsen is to translate Wang Xiaofang's well-known novel on official corruption in China, working title Notes of a civil servant. The publisher is Penguin and the book is due out in 2011. Eric needs no introduction, since he is the founder and driving force behind Paper Republic. Great news, Eric!
At last author Fan Wen (范稳) has his reward for a decade of immersion in the multicultural wonderland along the Yunnan-Tibet border: Dadi Yage (大地雅歌), the closing novel in his longish trilogy, has just been published in Chinese.
That day in 1999 when he came across the "lonely" grave of a martyred Swiss missionary in Lancangjiang Canyon, Father Maurice Tornay, he realized he had found his "sacred vocation". Indeed, the area straddling the provinces of Yunnan and Sichuan and Tibet autonomous region is an anthropologist's dream. One finds Tibetans, Han, Naxi, Yi, Lisu and other ethnic groups living together.
"I find describing the interaction - and collisions - between different cultures a challenging and engaging affair," Fan says. "Conflicts have taken place due to differences in culture and faith, like wars between Naxi and Tibetans, and Tibetans and Han. Irreconcilable contradictions occurred between Tibetan Buddhism and Catholicism when the latter was introduced."
Some translators find themselves by bringing you the project in the first place (see my blog of 29 June on how Saramago came to be published by Harvill). Of course, an editor may find themselves in the awkward position of be alerted to a book by a translator who just isn’t right for the job. Fortunately that doesn’t happen very often. If a translator with a good track record feels sufficiently passionate about a novel to persuade a publisher to acquire the rights, the chances are he or she is the right person to translate it. It is important that a translator really likes the text they are to translate. After all, they have to live with it for at least a few months, if not a year – or longer depending on the length of the book. Translators have frequently turned down my offers of work because they just don’t feel a sympathy for the book I’m proposing. As one translator wrote to me today: ‘It sings in a key that is well out of my range.’
As for the people living in this paradise, they are happy, almost eerily so, in a manner that has resonances of the Stepford Wives or a Truman Show, albeit with Chinese characteristics. They have wealth, they have entertainments and divertissements galore, they know how to have fun, and they know their French wines. They spend a lot of time on the Internet and in self-congratulation, frequently combining both activities. They are able to do and get almost anything they want in life, so long as they don’t cross certain boundaries of acceptable behaviour, including those related to political expression. Because these boundaries have a way of shifting, people involved in borderline activities such as worship in non-sanctioned Christian churches tend to remain more alert and anxious than most. But who cares? Lao Chen describes this situation as ‘ninety-percent freedom’ (jiucheng ziyou 九成自由).
By Eric Abrahamsen, July 17, '10
Cha: An Asian Literary Journal (http://asiancha.com/) iis now accepting submissions for "The China Issue", an edition of the journal devoted exclusively to work from and about contemporary China. The issue, which will be published in June 2011, will feature poetry, fiction, creative non-fiction, scholarly works and visual art exploring the modern Middle Kingdom. We are looking for submissions from a wide range of Chinese and international voices on the social, political and cultural forces which are shaping the country. If you have something interesting, opinionated or fresh to say about China today, we would like to hear from you. Please note that we can only accept submissions in English. More information here: http://asiancha.blogspot.com/2010/07/call-for-submissions-china-issue.html
By Eric Abrahamsen, July 16, '10
The University of Iowa's "Life of Discovery" program concluded recently: this was the second annual installation of a joint program between Iowa's International Writing Program and the China Writers Association, bringing American and Chinese writers together for a little road-trip bonding. Besides the official webpage above, you can peruse their blog, where the writers (Americans only?) posted photos and blogged their bewilderment. The event consisted of two parts: a week in Iowa last May, and a couple of weeks in China, mostly Kunming, which ended July 9.
This year's participants, on the Chinese side:
Interestingly, nearly all the Chinese participants were ethnic minorities, mostly poets. The Americans:
Great to see these kinds of events going on!
By Alice Xin Liu, July 14, '10
I was really excited when I saw the title Girl in Translation (published by Penguin), but I didn't know it was going to be a book of literal translation.
The author of Girl in Translation is Jean Kwok. The description on *Girl in Translation is as follows: "When Kimberly Chang and her mother emigrate from Hong Kong to Brooklyn squalor, she quickly begins a secret double life: exceptional schoolgirl during the day, Chinatown sweatshop worker in the evenings."
But what becomes nagging after a while is then obvious － the author translates literally:
"The white disease" for leukemia," “small-hearted" for be careful and "release your heart" for don't worry. Asked about this in the Danwei interview, she said that the reason was this: “It took me ten years to write this novel and one of my goals was to develop a technique that would show English-speaking readers what it was like to be a native speaker of Chinese. I wanted to put the reader into the head and heart of a Chinese immigrant. English comes in garbled and incomprehensible, while the beauty of the Chinese language is easily understood.”
I wonder if when Chinese people say 小心, they really think of small hearts, or when they say 放心, they think of release. With no disrespect for the Kwok, these are just general questions that are interesting.
Zülfü Livanelli, the Turkish writer, musician, singer, journalist and member of parliament, recently toured China to promote the launch of the mainland Chinese translation of his popular novel, Bliss (Mutluluk), or 伊斯坦布尔的幸福.
Now a movie as well, Bliss is a melodramatic tale of a young village woman who is raped by an elder relative. When she doesn’t hang herself out of shame, as is expected, the task of restoring honor to the family (by ending her life) is assigned to another male relative. The novel takes us from Van in the southeast to Istanbul, touching on most every controversial aspect of "Turkishness," from honor killing to the Asia-Europe divide represented by schizophrenic Istanbul, and the guerrilla war waged by the Kurds against the Turkish state.
But how many Chinese readers will notice that this quintessentially Turkish novel has been translated from the . . . English?
Translation, Maureen Freely said at a recent conference in Qatar, is a feminine, or feminized, act. The translator must remain faithful to the author's words; the contemporary translator is largely invisible; she (or he) is the helpmeet of the more powerful, more famous author.
Freely is best known for her work translating the Nobel Prize-winning Turkish author Orhan Pamuk. And it is clear, in reading Pamuk's dedication to the English version of his most recent novel, that he took pains to direct the translation. The dedication to The Museum of Innocence acknowledges not Freely, but instead others who helped perfect the English text: Sila Olcur, editor George Andreou, fellow author Kiran Desai.
I am careful in transferring the 'heterogeneous nature' of the original style. Haruki's style has an American flavor, even an unique style 'with several inventions,' which basically means that it's Japanese that doesn't look like Japanese, but Japanese with overtones of English in translation. What I do is simple, since Murakami's writing doesn't look like traditional Japanese, then my translation shouldn't look like literary work that has already been translated from the Japanese, and I try my best to dissipate the accent of normal Japanese translations, and take care to conserve the original text's freshness and appealing strangeness, as well as the beauty of its heterogeneity. At the same time, though, I try as hard as I can to transform it into natural and exquisite Chinese.
By Eric Abrahamsen, June 24, '10
Next Tuesday (June 29) Chun Shu will be giving a talk at the Trends Lounge in Beijing about her new book, Light Year American Dream, as part of the Trends Lounge's Cosmo Women's Reading Salon series.
Time: June 29 (Tuesday), 7-9pm
Venue: Trends Lounge, 2F The Place (世贸天地), Beijing
Phone: 010 6587 1999
