By Eric Abrahamsen, February 19, '10
The winner of the 2009 Dangdai Literary Prize was announced a couple of weeks ago (sorry, we've been eating dumplings in the northeast).
The shortlist included:
A Word is Worth a Thousand Words took the prize; Liu Zhenyun was also the winner of the 2007 prize with My Name is Liu Yuejin.
Translators from under-represented languages such as Arabic wield considerable influence over what books reach a western public. Johnson-Davies says: "Arabic translators have more power and more responsibility [than translators from other languages] because they decide what should be translated."
By Eric Abrahamsen, February 18, '10
The first of its kind, the new Creative Writing MFA program at City University in Hong Kong is aimed at Asian writing in the English language. From the program description:
Its mission is to provide the best education possible for aspiring creative writers and teachers of creative writing, with a special focus on Asian writing in English as well as literature in English concerned with Asian themes.
The program is "low residency", and classes are taught by an international faculty of writers and teachers. Prospective students (who should already have a certain level of achievement in their chosen genre) should apply by the deadline of April 15.
This Animal Planet-style short film shows "indoor animals" in their natural habitat who are suddenly confronted by government efforts to "protect" them from the Internet. Features a cameo by well-known twenty-something author and blogger Han Han.
NPR podcast on subtitle translation features interviews with my hero/Linda Hoaglund (Japanese-English film translator; 90+ films including Kurosawa and Miyazaki), Tim Sexton (screenwriter, Spanish-English translator for Almodovar) and Peter Becker (The Criterion Collection). How familiar are these words by Hoaglund: "I would be listening to the Japanese, reading the subtitles in English, and furiously revising them and editing them, so I would come out just completely exhausted and wishing that I could just crawl inside the screen and rewrite them..."
Yes, though we’ve been covered in places like The Guardian and The Independent, there’s a lot to make the University of Rochester’s Best Translated Book Award feel inadequate, but there’s one very important thing we’ll never feel inadequate about: the books—we have outstanding books that most people have probably never heard of. The Pulitzer is all well and good, but does it have a Russian surrealist writing about a commie Eiffel Tower that runs away and commits suicide? Or how about an asshole B actor on a Brazilian soap opera who gets his kicks by giving graphic interviews to innocent female journalists? Does it perhaps have a metafictional novel told in the form of an interview about said novel? Or even a comic, quasi-philosophical romp about an Argentine high-rise apartment building that’s under construction and infested with ghosts?
After a long year of reading and judging the best literature translated into English in 2009, we—the few, the proud, the obscure judges of the Best Translated Book Award—have are proud to announce our ten finalists.
What seems doomed to disappear, or at least to risk neglect, is the kind of work that revels in the subtle nuances of its own language and literary culture, the sort of writing that can savage or celebrate the way this or that linguistic group really lives.
By Eric Abrahamsen, February 10, '10
Ball Lightning, one of the best Chinese science fiction novels of the past few years, is a fast-paced story of what happens when the beauty of scientific inquiry runs up against a push to harness new discoveries with no consideration of the possible consequences.
Joel Martinsen's sample is not currently available, as the piece is under consideration for publication.
By Eric Abrahamsen, February 8, '10
More reading material: a sample translation of the first chapter of Sheng Keyi's Northern Girls. Edit: the English translation of Northern Girls will be published by Penguin in 2012, so I've removed the sample.
From the promotional materials we took to Frankfurt 2009:
"Sheng Keyi's first full-length novel, Northern Girls is drawn from her experiences as a job-seeking migrant in the early 1990s. Its main character, Hong, is no different from the thousands of other country girls who are moving to Shenzhen to seek work, with one exception: she has an extraordinarily full bosom. She finds herself caught up in the chaos of Shenzhen, a city that hardly existed ten years previously, where the mad rush of economic growth has destabilized moral norms and shredded the fabric of society. With hardly a thought in her head but to make her way in the world, she discovers that her body has already opened some doors and closed others, shaping her fate before she's even had a chance to gain her footing.
"After arriving in Shenzhen Hong and her friend drift at the edges of society, working in hair salons, shops, factories and hotels, owning absolutely nothing in the world but their labor and their bodies. As migrant worker girls they are doomed to be scorned by local women and humiliated by local men, but as Hong's companions slowly begin to turn down the path of least resistance, Hong herself sticks to her own idiosyncratic principles, stubbornly insisting on her own brand of integrity, and the bosom that has caused her so much grief becomes a symbol of her irrepressible vital force."
By Canaan Morse, February 8, '10
This absurd little floater is actually a year old, born when a Facebook status "Happy 牛 Year!" tickled my four-year-old gooberish sense of humor and inspired a poem even worse than this one. Somehow, it all came groaning back to me two nights ago, and strange motivation turned it into more than a poem--a contest!
The Entry: One poem of any reasonable length.
The Requirements: Poem must be macaronic (dual-language...isn't my vocabulary impressive? Of course it is). It must include all twelve character signs of the Chinese Zodiac, and those characters must interact with the English in such a way that the two become fundamentally connected to each other; for example, the poem below inserts characters into English words and sentences in such a way that an English speaker could reasonably guess at the pronunciation of the characters from the English sounds they substitute (Yes, yes, I know; this is just a game). Yet mine is only one method; I'm sure there are much cleverer ways of making said connection, and they are welcome!
The Deadline: February 14th, First Day of the New Year! Duh.
The Prize: A beer at the Bookworm (or four Tsingdaos at 平民 restaurant of your choice) bought by yours truly. If nobody enters, I'll just buy myself a case of Yanjing and drink in my apartment...so, par for the course.
All poems to be judged utterly subjectively and by vote. My entry, which shouldn't be hard to beat, totally counts.
**
By Eric Abrahamsen, February 7, '10
Mo Yan's newest novel, called Frog, is ill-served by its publicity billing: "A novel about the One Child Policy and population control!"
Unappealing as that sounds, Mo Yan is too accomplished a writer to simply dress up an historical tract as a novel, and Frog is in many ways a good read. The first thing I noticed was that he had abandoned the baroquely florid storytelling style of Life and Death are Wearing Me Out for a more traditional Chinese narrative, a descendent of the "gather 'round and I'll tell you a story" style more often associated with Su Tong. In this case, the book is narrated by a Communist Party member whose aunt – once known in their rural county as a miracle midwife – is one of the first implementers of the new planned-reproduction policies of the late 70s and early 80s.
The aunt is the heart of the story – her determination to carry out what she sees as a vital new policy, her demonization by rural families hell-bent on raising sons, her eventual reconsideration and regret. Mo Yan is still a master of the scene, of the dramatic moment, and there are many throughout the book: starving children discovering, with shuddering wonder, that coal is good to eat; the death of a pregnant woman who has plunged into a turbulent river rather than let the planned-reproduction team drag her back for a forced abortion; the same team demolishing the houses of neighbors of an anti-abortion holdout, in order to turn the whole community against the law-breakers.
Balcom compares There’s Nothing I Can Do to the writings of Sherwood Anderson, William Faulkner, and Erskine Caldwell, and goes on mention that “Cao once commented that the entire book is concerned with the basic instincts for food and sex.” Given that description and a cast of characters which consists entirely of rural Shanxi peasants, you might expect the book to be a bit earthy. You’d be right. For one thing, the residents of the village of Wen Clan Caves (based on an actual village the author worked in during the Cultural Revolution) certainly know how to curse, and the details Cao chooses are frequently tactile and visceral—types of food are always explicitly named, bodily functions are not at all hidden or hurried. But a more important aspect is the evocation of the peasants’ stifled emotional and intellectual lives, which is just heart-breaking.
“Translation rewrites a foreign text in terms that are intelligible and interesting to readers in the receiving culture. Doing so is akin to committing an act of ethnocentric violence by uprooting the text from the language and culture that gave it life. Translating into current, standard English at once conceals that violence and homogenizes foreign cultures,” says Venuti...
Book reviews of books by foreigners about China can be translated, even if the books themselves might not be published in the PRC. But there’s a certain art to it...
By Cindy M. Carter, February 2, '10
Let me tell you a story. I am the chief editor of a magazine which has yet to be published. The Constitution states that every citizen has the freedom to publish, but the law also says that the leaders [have] the freedom not to let you publish. This magazine encountered certain problems during the review process. There is a cartoon drawing. In it, there is a man without clothes -- of course, this is unacceptable because the law says that we cannot exhibit the private parts in a publicly available magazine. I agree with that and I don't have a problem with it. Therefore, I intentionally created an extra-large magazine logo to place at the illegal spot of the cartoon. But unexpectedly, the publisher and the censor told us that this was unacceptable too -- when you cover up the middle part of a person, you are referring to the "Party Central" (note: "party" is a homonym for "block/shield" and "central" can mean either "center" or "middle"). My reaction was like yours -- I was awed and shocked. I thought to myself, "Friend, it would be so wonderful if you could put your awe-inspiring imagination into literary creation instead of literary censorship."
*I use this story to tell you that everybody has good imagination. Yet we can only imagine many things but we cannot do them, we cannot write about them and we cannot even talk about them in many situations. We have too many restrictions. This is a restricted country. How can a restricted country produce a rich and abundant culture? I am a comrade who has few restrictions. But when I write, I cannot help but think: I can't write about the police, I can't write about the leaders, I can't write about government policies, I can't write about the system, I can't write about the judiciary, I can't write about many pieces of history, I cannot write about Tibet, I cannot write about Xinjiang, I cannot write about assemblies, I cannot write about demonstration marches, I cannot write about pornography, I cannot write about censorship, I cannot write about art. *
English transcript of speech, with video links (on ESWN)
The full schedule for the 2010 Bookworm Literary Festival (running March 5-19) is now online.
By Cindy M. Carter, January 30, '10
(I know, I know, but someone had to post this at some point. Figure it might as well be me.)
Author Eveline Chao and illustrator Chris Murphy serve up some naughty, naughty Mandarin in Niubi: The Real Chinese You Were Never Taught in School. 160 pages of handy up-to-date profanity and text that includes Chinese characters, pinyin, tonal marks, pronunciation guides and dubious etymologies. Fun for all ages.
ChinaSmack has good scans of text and illustrations from the book, and spirited Chinese and English commentary from readers.
Here's the Amazon link, and a link to an old Paper Republic discussion thread in which we hashed and mashed "The Unspeakable Bi".
By Eric Abrahamsen, January 28, '10
The Grayhawk Agency in Taiwan is calling for translation sample submissions for Mai Jia's book Decoded. Any translators interested in submitting a sample for this book, please email a query to submissions@paper-republic.org, and we'll send you two novel extracts to choose from, as well as more background information on the book and author. Please send your inquiries within the next two weeks.
The Grayhawk Agency will be accepting samples through the first week of March, following which two translations will be chosen (one for each of the two extracts) to be used with the promotional package, and recommended to publishers. Translators whose samples are chosen will be paid $300.
The Grayhawk Agency's most recent sale is Zhang Ling's Gold Mountain Blues.
When former Czech president Vaclav Havel knocked on the door of the Chinese embassy in Prague to demand the release of the writer Liu Xiaobo, I had an eerie sense of deja vu. Thirty-three years ago, Havel helped initiate Charter 77, the landmark document that crystallised the ideals of all the dissidents - and many others - trapped behind the Iron Curtain.
Havel, of course, was rewarded with a long jail sentence for his efforts. Now Liu has been sentenced to 11 years imprisonment for much the same crime: initiating Charter 08, perhaps the bravest attempt yet to chart a peaceful way forward to freedom for China.
History is said to repeat itself, first as tragedy, second as farce. And it is indeed farcical for Beijing to try to suppress the yearning for freedom in the same brutal ways that Soviet-era communists once did. Jailing Liu on the absurd charge of trying to overthrow the Chinese state is typical of the type of thinking found in the closed societies of 20th-century communism, where the state asserted its absolute right to judge every thought and every thinker...
China Daily article discusses Han Han's new literary magazine Chorus of Soloists and his purported rivalry with author/literary impresario Guo Jingming.
It’s great news for China sport fans: for the first time ever, two Chinese female tennis players have made it into the semi-finals of a Grand Slam tournament at the Australian Open. Media coverage in the PRC is, understandably, ecstatic.
The only hitch is that these two just happen to be women who have said “No” to China’s state-run sports monolith. They choose their own schedules and coaches, and—eat your heart out, Yao Ming!—they get to keep most of their prize money.
Cankao Xiaoxi (参考消息), China's leading digest of international news, steps in to perform a bit of plastic surgery...
Appearances to be made by Ha Jin, Guo Xiaolu, Leung Man Tao and French authors Francois Place, Anne Cazor, Nicole Lambert, Maris Treps, Patrick Bonneville, Max Ducos...
While other forms of scholarship are more obvious—every critical act flagged or footnoted—translation, too, "is a serious intellectual enterprise," says Ms. Porter, who has just finished her year as the MLA's president. "A translator is the most intimate reader of a text, sort of the consummate interpreter, the ultimate comparatist."
Beijing Normal U and Tsinghua U have both inked agreements to Spread the Word -- read all about it...
By Cindy M. Carter, January 24, '10
From March 5-19, 2010, the Beijing Bookworm will be holding its annual literary festival. During the same period, Bookworm locations in Chengdu and Suzhou will also be hosting authors, readings and events. Here's a tentative schedule for some Chinese authors who will be doing readings/Q&A sessions at the Beijing location (PLEASE NOTE that this is a TENTATIVE schedule - check Bookworm site for updates and ticket prices.)
Sunday, March 7, 3 pm - Li Er - 李洱
Sunday, March 14, 6 pm - Yan Lianke - 阎连科
Monday, March 15, 7:30 pm - Bi Feiyu - 毕飞宇
Tuesday, March 16, 12:30 pm - Hong Ying - 虹影
Tuesday, March 16, 8:30 pm - Miao Wu and Xu Zechen - 徐则臣: Chinese Urban Fiction
