Our News, Your News
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)."
From Todd Gitlin's review of Ha Jin's The New Fall (in The New Republic):
'Jin's forte is to begin with a cliché of “the immigrant experience” and then, with a light touch, to upend it, or stretch it to the breaking point, or chuckle over it, or recover the sweetness in it. His dominant tones are wistfulness and affection: beiges, tans, and grays. His writing is modest and unobtrusive, not brutalist, not sardonic, not choked with the knowingness that is all the rage in the wilderness of fiction today. He doesn't crash his way into a reader's consciousness, or pirouette. His sentences read like sentences held at a distance.'
In the run-up to Obama’s White House meeting with the Dalai Lama, Isaac Stone Fish (Newsweek’s Beijing correspondent) penned an interesting piece that argues that China’s rule has indeed brought indisputable benefits to the Tibetans. It's all part of a grand "bargain" between the Chinese government and the people of Tibet.
Check out how Cankao Xiaoxi translates and repackages the piece for the Chinese masses...
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.
Previously…
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.
**
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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.
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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)
Chinese transcript of speech, with video links (on Dapenti)
