Our News, Your News
By Nicky Harman, April 26, '10
It was a first for Hua Cheng publishers, for the author, and certainly for me – though perhaps not for the Bai Ye, a bar which hosts regular literary events in Chengdu’s Kuan Zhai Xiangzi district. This book launch provided non-stop entertainment for at least two hours in a packed space where people at the back carried on talking noisily regardless but the mike was so powerful that you could hear the speakers from the street. Han Dong's fourth novel was launched on 24 February 2010. Now called 《知青变形记》[Metamorphosis of an Educated Youth], it had the original, much ruder, working title 《日》(and at least one purchaser asked for “日” to be inscribed above Han Dong’s signature!) An extract appears in translation on Paper Republic under the English title Screwed.
Anyway, titles notwithstanding, the evening was a great deal more fun that any book launch I’ve been to in London (normal format: speech from publisher, reading by author, and too much wine on an empty stomach). There was, true, the obligatory and slightly over-long speech by the publisher, followed by a reading by the author, but thereafter it all became much more lively. Han Dong gave an impromptu speech in which he said he turned to writing novels when he figured he would never write poetry as good as that of his favourite poets, Yu Xiaowei and Xiao An, so thought he had better try something different. The presenter interviewed him on stage about the book; there were also readings of some of Han Dong’s poems – some read in Chengdu dialect and other dialects/languages – and I read a few pages of my translation. A woman played the pi-pa, including a modern arrangement with a backing track that had at least some of the audience dancing, the 200 copies brought by Hua Cheng publishers sold out… and the beer flowed generously.
Hey, you book launch organisers! A model to follow for future events?
Cooperation, harmony and ethics were the key words in the 2010 Chinese-Greek Cultural Dialogue held Friday as part of the seventh annual Thessaloniki Book Fair.
Chinese and Greek scholars versed in philosophy, arts, economics and politics compared notes Friday on "Ancient Civilizations and Modernization," which was the theme of the book fair that also featured China as a guest of honor.
The translator should do his job and then disappear. The great, charismatic, creative writer wants to be all over the globe. And the last thing he wants to accept is that the majority of his readers are not really reading him.
His readers feel the same. They want intimate contact with true greatness. They don't want to know that this prose was written on survival wages in a maisonette in Bremen, or a high-rise flat in the suburbs of Osaka. Which kid wants to hear that her JK Rowling is actually a chain-smoking pensioner? When I meet readers of my own novels, they are disappointed I translate as well, as if this were demeaning to an author they hoped was "important".
The China Daily has (wisely) begun quoting Paper-Republic in such matters...
When someone would suddenly reach a hand toward Wang Er, his right hand would (involuntarily) grab his opponent's wrist. No matter how quickly the opponent dodged, there wasn't one miss in a hundred tries. This is because when he was young Wang Er loved to grab his opponents' wrists in scuffles, and he was in a lot of fights. Wang Er is not a child anymore, and there is no one to fight with him, but if someone suddenly grabs at him, he still can't stand it, no matter who it is. He knows that if committed this sort of infraction in Saudi Arabia, eight or nine cases out of ten his hand would be cut off. So he tries his best to not do it.
In February 2008, editors and translators from the US and UK came together at the British Council in London to discuss "best practices" for translation of literary works into English. This volume comprises the results of that meeting, a collection of summaries, suggestions, and instructions from the leading literary translators and publishers. It is intended as an introduction, the first in an ongoing series of documents to be published by Dalkey Archive Press that will address the challenges faced by translators, publishers, reviewers, and readers of literary translations.
[scroll down for free PDF download]
The [Chongqing Times]'s apology goes even further than the [West China City Daily]'s in emphasizing that the role of the media is to serve the interests of the establishment. According to its statement, the error the paper committed was not limited to factual inaccuracies, but stemmed from an entertainment-oriented approach to journalism that neglected to pay the [China Writers' Association] the attention it deserved. Furthermore, it promised to work hard in the future to carry out its duty to publicize the great accomplishments the CWA and its authors have made in telling stories about the masses.
"Generally speaking, female youth literature is more a concept than real literature. Compared to traditional female literature, which is rich in plot and literary significance, female youth literature has a long way to go to be labeled as real literature," Zhang Yiwu, professor of literature at Peking University, told the Global Times.
"Female literature has improved greatly in the past years especially in the 1990s, represented by Tie Ning and Wang Anyi and other leading women writers and still exerts a profound influence," Zhang added, "but the times have changed and many readers, especially teenage girls, are fond of reading material with a strong flavor of modern times, just like fast food."
By Eric Abrahamsen, April 11, '10
The latest (very small) controversy in the Chinese literary world is author Mai Jia's comments to the effect that "99.9% of online literature in China is garbage", and that if he were given the power he would do away with the internet altogether.
This sparked a lot of huffing and puffing, even attracting notice abroad, and now Mai Jia has posted a clarification on his seldom-updated blog.
The clarification is long-winded and hardly clarifying, but the excerpt he posts from his actual speech makes it pretty clear that he wasn't saying anything all that radical. The line about "exterminating" (消灭) the internet if he had the power (he's been quoted as saying he wants to get rid of all internet writing, but from the speech it seems clear that he means the whole internet) was obviously a throwaway joke (an earlier part of the blog post discusses what a pain the internet has been to him with regards to his thirteen-year-old son).
The second part, about 99.9% of internet literature being garbage and only 0.1% worth reading, is pretty much exactly what he said. But he then goes on to say that the most important and exciting thing about internet literature is that it is a free-for-all, with no artificial barriers to entry or readership, and that the literary greats of China's future are bound to arise online.
So his inflammatory comments, in summary: "There's a lot of crap on the web, but it's still the future."
No argument here.
Events, publishers and agents to watch for if you are “China-focused”...
Xinhua news agency reported on Tuesday that Han Han is on Time's list of 200 candidates vying for 100 spots on its annual lineup of the world's most celebrated "leaders, artists, innovators and icons."
...Does Han really merit being put on a pedestal? Isn't it ludicrous to compare him to Lu Xun, the great forerunner of modern Chinese satirical prose, as some of Han's fans are doing now?
Russian-to-English translator Marian Schwartz:
...our taste for foreignness has increased. A simple example: 50 years ago, names of Chinese characters were translated — “Peach Blossom’’ and the like — whereas now the preference is for the transliterated Chinese names. There is an ongoing debate among translators about “foreignizing’’ and “domestication,’’ but wherever a translator’s choice falls, today it will probably be closer to foreignizing than it would have been 50 years ago.
By Eric Abrahamsen, April 5, '10
On the New Yorker blog Evan Osnos wrote a few days ago about how the Chilling Effects Clearinghouse, a website dedicated to tracking censorship and its deleterious effects, had been represented in the Chinese media as a pro censorship body, effectively reversing the truth in order to give Chinese viewers the impression that Chinese-style censorship is common all over the world. Osnos' question was: "I wonder what this says about the decision-making apparatus. Do some of China’s top technology-policy planners really misunderstand the state of play in the West?"
He invited responses, so this is mine: I think there's no question that this was done deliberately, as a part of a larger campaign to lightly confuse the Chinese people as to just how unnatural their government appears to most non-Chinese observers. Both the government and its people are deeply concerned that China should appear to be a "normal" country (never mind that it be a normal country) and much manipulation of public opinion goes into supporting this illusion. The only thing a little surprising about this case is how baldly the facts were reversed.
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In the wake of the death of author J. D. Salinger, the Chinese version of Catcher in the Rye (麦田里的守望者) has leapt onto the Chinese best-selling charts. But looking back, was a Shakespeare scholar the best translator for the job?
Fifteen years after the Shanghai-based Big Apple Agency Ltd. introduced J. D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye to Chinese readers — the book has since sold nearly nearly one million copies in China — the company is now hoping to discover a Chinese “Holden Caulfield” who can cross-over back to Western culture.
In January, Big Apple, which was among the first literary agencies in Taiwan and mainland China, opened a branch office in Honolulu, Hawaii. The company, dubbed Paradise Literary Agency, represents writers from China and Southeast Asia and strives to introduce their works into the West.
By Eric Abrahamsen, March 29, '10
The third annual Beijing International Literary Festival ended about ten days ago; among a pretty outstanding roster of international authors were eight Chinese writers, photographs of whose events the Beijing Bookworm has kindly provided. Podcasts were made from some of the events as well, we've linked where appropriate.
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By Dylan Levi King, March 27, '10
That's the question in a piece by Wang Yan, for the Liaoning Daily. The article is from a seven part series called, "Re-evaluating Chinese literature."
It features the thoughts of a gang of Chinese scholars, whose opinions range from reasonable to... let's say, unreasonable:
In this installment, "re-evaluating" will take on a slightly different meaning, as we evaluate the position of Chinese literature in a more global sense. We will re-evaluate the status of Chinese literature, from the point of view of cultural exchange and translation of Chinese books. No matter what is achieved in our contemporary literature, the question remains of its standing on the world stage.
Translating books and promoting them overseas is our literary bridge to the West. Currently, that bridge might be said to resemble a plank of wood spanning a wide river. This single narrow and flimsy link to the West is no longer sufficient.
Western translators and scholars of Chinese culture are known as Sinologists. They have been studying China for centuries, but there are very few scholars focusing on contemporary literature. Chinese scholarship on Western literature has a history of at least a hundred years, but Western scholarship on Chinese literature is a field with history of only two or three decades. The West and China do not have an equal understanding of each other. Many Chinese authors are simply ignored by Western scholars. There is a general ignorance of Chinese literature in the West, yet Chinese writers still take to heart everytime China is overlooked for the Nobel Prize for Literature. The West ignores Chinese literature but we still hang on every word that Wolfgang Kubin says. Every Chinese writer still wants to become an international writer. Taking all of that into account, let's rethink our answer to the question of how far Chinese literature has progressed down the road to global acceptance.
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For Eric Abrahamsen, a Beijing-based translator of modern Chinese fiction, it is clear that Mo Yan engages in the complex calculus of what is and isn't permissible that faces every Chinese writer. There is nothing wrong with that: not every artist has the stomach for strident dissent and, having been banned in the past, Mo Yan has nothing to prove. But these days, says Abrahamsen, Mo Yan "knows exactly where the lines are and doesn't cross them." Discussion about the drawbacks of the one-child policy, and whether it should be rolled back, is now permissible in China, for example. "I think the reason the book got published now is because it's not controversial anymore," says Abrahamsen.
When I was a boy, grandpa would pat my head, point to the distant, winding mountains and tell me about the locomotives that used to tunnel beneath them en route to the village docks. Loaded down with gold and copper ore from nearby mines and emitting puffs of white smoke, the trains brought their cargo to the great ships that lay at anchor – waiting, grandpa said, to ferry our national treasure to the far corners of their wretched, god-damned British Empire. He claimed that the belching smokestacks of the British steamers towered so high that seabirds, unfamiliar with the foreign craft, would often fly right into them and smash their skulls in.
There was integrity in the way those birds died, grandpa said. A moral for the Chinese people.
A sidebar in the China Daily features synopses of five Yan Lianke novels, three of which have been banned in mainland China. Interesting.
"Controversy is a driving force for me, to some extent, because I've been experimenting with innovative literary elements, and they are sure to be accompanied by discussion and even debate," Yan says in a quiet cafe near his house in northwest Beijing, in an easily distinguishable Henan accent.
Amid all this debate, nevertheless, Yan has bagged a dozen literary awards, including the top Lu Xun award in 1997 and 2001, and the Lao She award in 2004.
Despite penning numerous novels, novellas, short stories, essays and criticisms, Yan is honest enough to admit he started writing simply as a means to escape the poverty of his native Songxian county, Henan province.
A lively Q+A with an active, curious audience. It was revealed that Mr. Yan’s favorite authors include Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Franz Kafka; that his hometown is in the center of Song County, which is the center of Henan Province, which is the center of China, which is the Middle Kingdom, therefore making his backyard a veritable ground-zero of the human universe as we know it; and that his goal is to one day write the “ideal book” that will– by its very nature– be unpublishable, and that while he acknowledges that raw ideals can never really be brought to fruition, “our life’s most important task is to keep trying anyway.”
Can Xue (Deng Xiaohua), whose pseudonym in Chinese means both the dirty snow that refuses to melt and the purest snow at the top of a high mountain, was born in 1953 in Changsha City, Hunan Province, in South China. She lived in Changsha until 2001, when she and her husband moved to Beijing. In 1957, her father, an editorial director at the New Hunan Daily News, was condemned as an Ultra-Rightist and was sent to reform through labor, and her mother, who worked at the same newspaper, was sent to the countryside for labor as well. Because of the family catastrophe during the Cultural Revolution, Can Xue lost her chance for further education and only graduated from elementary school. Largely self-taught, she loved literature so much that she read fiction and poetry whenever she could. In her younger days, she liked classical Western literature and Russian literature the best, and they remain her favorites today. Can Xue has studied reading and writing in English for years, and she has read extensively English texts of literature.
Regarded as one of the most experimental writers in the world by some literary scholars and readers, Can Xue describes her works as “soul literature" or "life literature."
Since he began blogging in 2006, Mr. Han has been delivering increasingly caustic attacks on China’s leadership and the policies he contends are creating misery for those unlucky enough to lack a powerful government post. With more than 300 million hits to his blog, he may be the most popular living writer in the world.
In a recent interview at his office in Shanghai, he described party officials as “useless” and prone to spouting nonsense, although he used more delicate language to dismiss their relevance. “Their lives are nothing like ours,” he said. “The only thing they have in common with young people is that like us, they too have girlfriends in their 20s, although theirs are on the side.”
Chi Zijian's novel (额尔古纳河右岸), winner of the Mao Dun Literary Award (2008) is a first-person narrative told from the point of view of an aging Evenki woman in the last years of the 20th century. She chooses to stay behind when her tribe abandons the forested mountains of Northeast China for “civilized” life among town dwellers, where their beloved reindeer will be cooped up like cattle...
"According to Huang Youyi, CPCC member and director of the China International Publishing Group, the Chinese language is facing a new invasion: by the English language. Huang feels that no good can come of the popular use of English words and acronyms (such as GDP and CEO) in published Chinese articles and everyday conversations."
By Nicky Harman, March 12, '10
The British Centre for Literary Translation is holding its Summer School 18-24 July 2010 and registration is now open. Bursaries are available for students translating from Chinese to English. Our resident author this year is Yan Geling, and I'll be leading the group. Here's the link: BCLT
By Cindy M. Carter, March 11, '10
Machine translation has been in the news lately, so I thought it might be interesting to conduct an experiment. I've chosen four different Chinese texts (excerpts from a novel, a film and two newspaper interviews), translated them into English with Google Translate, and added my English translations (three of which have appeared on Paper Republic in the past year). I'm sure most of the translators in our forum have their own machine-translation stories...hope you'll share. That's not to say that machine translation is pointless: ten years from now, we will be taking this a lot more seriously. But in the meantime, we might as well have our bit of fun.
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I learned to play the xiao in prison. My master was an 84-year-old monk. When I first entered prison, he had already been there for many years. This monk, who was aloof from worldly affairs, had also committed a kind of age-old crime—participating in a counterrevolutionary reactionary sect—reactionary sects are secret organizations that exist in remote mountainous regions of China. Their source can be traced back several centuries to the Qing Dynasty, where their aim was to resist foreign rule. Because the villagers supported the old monk, he became the head of the sect. However, he kept nothing by his side besides his Buddhist prayer beads, a wooden fish, and a dongxiao. He did not have any weapons of rebellion.
Yesterday morning, Chinese authorities dragged Liao off a plane in Chengdu, where he lives, as he was preparing to fly off to Cologne to attend a literary festival. He was detained and questioned for three hours, then sent home, where he remains under house arrest.
This is an all too familiar condition for Liao, who has been in and out of jail for his fearless insistence on speaking freely for himself and for many of his countrymen since the late 1980s, when he was locked away for four years for reciting his poem “Massacre.” In prison, Liao’s defiance of authority earned him endless beatings, and with them the baffled respect of his fellow inmates, who lovingly nicknamed him the Big Idiot for his stubborn unwillingness to shut up.
That said, I wouldn’t say that doing commercial translation is all bad. Sometimes it is just bad writing that irritates me. When I translate such bad writing, I risk turning into a violent person. Once a friend of mine asked me for help translating a commercial for a company. The writing was so bad, so full of grandiose nonsense that it caused me to have very bad thoughts. I wanted to personally seek out the writer and persecute him with some torture of my own invention, which would involve hanging on the tree and the use of whips. Or send him to the Derek Zoolander Center for Kids Who Cannot Write Good.
By Eric Abrahamsen, February 24, '10
The Chinese writer Mo Yan has kindly agreed to answer questions by Oriental Hemisphere (Vostochnoye Polushariye), Russia's biggest website on the day-to-day life, history and culture of the Far East and South East Asia, in connection with forthcoming publication of Mo Yan's 酒国 (The Republic of Wine) translated into Russian by Igor Yegorov (aka yeguofu). English translation courtesy of Igor Yegorov.
Question: Has your recent visit to Russia left you with new impressions? Has your notion of the country changed, compared to that of the past?
Answer: I visited Russia for the first time in summer of 1996. It was a two-day tour in a small town next to the Chinese frontier city of Manzhouli. My impressions of that day fitted badly with the notion of Russia that I had formed while reading books by Russian authors. It was not until 2007 when I went to Moscow to take part in the Year of China Book Exhibition that I fully appreciated the space and grandeur of the country. The vast Russian expanses which seem to have no boundaries, conceal the boldness and a big way of the country combined with its delicacy and soft beauty.
Q: What do you feel about Russian literature and who is your favorite Russian author?
A: Russian literature was first of all foreign literatures that I got acquainted with. When still a child I read The Tale of the Fisherman and the Fish by Pushkin in my elder brother's school textbook, then I went through The Childhood (My Universities) by Gorky. Of course, like any Chinese youth of those times, I read How the Steel Was Tempered by Nikolai Ostrovsky. My favorite Russian author, Mikhail Sholokhov, and his novel Quiet Flows the Don have added a lot to my formation as a writer.
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Christopher Corbett’s new book, “The Poker Bride,” documents one aspect of that transformation: the little-known story of the tens of thousands of immigrant Chinese who arrived in the West over the next decades, hoping to strike pay dirt. Though some became wealthy, theirs is generally a horrific tale of violence, exploitation and sex slavery. It culminated in one of the most shameful chapters in America’s sad history of racial prejudice.
By Dylan Levi King, February 20, '10
Jia Pingwa's novel Qin Qiang (The Writers Publishing House, 2005) won last year's Mao Dun Literary Prize and is another masterpiece by the prolific author, whose works are still mostly unknown and untranslated. What is there to appeal to translators and potential readers in the book? When are we going to see it in translation?
From the first half of the book, romance, rats and local politics in rural Shaanxi:
I still remember the rat that crawled out of the sewer. I raised him as a pet. He'd climb on the ceiling rafters and dance for me. After he was tired of dancing, he'd look down at me. His eyes were all pupil, dark black pupils that glinted with mischief. Cats knew not to venture close to my home. After my father died and I was left alone, nobody knew how I spent my time. But the rat knew. Each morning, I'd wake up and place three sticks of incense in front of the portrait of my deceased father, then sit down to write in my diary. In Qingfeng Jie, I was probably the only one who was writing away at a diary. From the incense burner, a ribbon of dark smoke slowly curled upward. It lengthened, reaching up to the rafters, where the rat watched me write. The rat thought it was a string and he leapt out, hoping to slide down it, to the table. Pow, he crashed down into the incense burner.
I've heard people say that rats are smart but they can be pretty dumb, too. This rat was rather fond of me, actually. But one of the reasons he stuck around for so long was because my house always had something to eat. I heard that last year when Mao Dan from Dong Jie got sick, he had to sell everything to pay the doctor bills. Every rodent that had previously made a home in his house escaped as soon as the food was gone. What I wanted to say is: this rat was civilized. He even chewed up the pages in my diary, the ones about Bai Xue. I looked at him in wonder, You know that I miss Bai Xue? Rat, if you can understand me, run to Bai Xue and tell her how I feel. He immediately took off to Xia Tianzhi's home and Bai Xue's bedroom. The rat climbed up and down the mosquito netting that was wrapped around her bed. Bai Xue looked up, "A little thief, eh?" She used an empty makeup box to trap the rat inside. The box still had a bit of foundation powder inside. With the powder spread over his fur, the rat pitifully squeaked, "Yin Sheng misses you! Yin Sheng misses you!" Bai Xue didn't understand what my rat trying to tell her.
After a while, the rat wandered into the main room of the house, where he found something else to chew on: one of Xia Tianzhi's scrolls of calligraphy. The one that my rat chose to chew had been scrawled by the director of the county's cultural research insitute. When Xia Tianzhi discovered the holes in the scroll, he shut up the windows and the doors and trapped my rat inside the room. He tossed the rat to the mute to look after. The mute carried the rat outside, doused the tiny body with kerosene, set it on fire and tossed it to run in the big courtyard in front of the theatre. The rat immediately burrowed into a heap of wheat straw. The straw immediately caught on fire.
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Shanda Interactive (SNDA.NASDAQ) has taken a controlling stake in Chinese online literature website ReadNovel.com. Hou Xiaoqiang, Shanda’s CEO, said that the company’s literature division, Shanda Literature, will make additional future acquisitions, but will not interfere in ReadNovel.com’s operations. Shanda did not disclose a price for the deal.
Bei Dao’s early work was rarely overtly political. But as Mr. Weinberger writes in a perceptive biographical note, his poetry’s “assertion of individual sentiments and perceptions, of imagination itself, was considered subversive in a collectivist society.” Bei Dao’s poem “The Answer,” Mr. Weinberger notes, was the “Blowin’ in the Wind” of China’s democracy movement of the late 1970s.
By Cindy M. Carter, February 19, '10
Bruce Humes presents a chapter-by-chapter synopsis of Zhang Chengzhi's 鲜花的废墟 (En las Ruinas de la Flor: Viajes por al-Andalus).
"Zhang Chengzhi (张承志), the white-hot Red Guard who mastered Mongolian and Japanese—and then converted to Islam—has just launched En las Ruinas de la Flor: Viajes por al-Andalus (鲜花的废墟). His new Chinese-language travelogue takes us through Moorish Spain, Portugal and Morocco in search of the golden age of Islam in Europe (8th-15th centuries)."
