Our News, Your News
By Cindy M. Carter, November 29, '09
I couldn't resist this one. Joel Martinsen of Danwei.org castigates, illuminates and pulls out some photos from the archives to illustrate past slogans from the Gate of Heavenly Peas.
(Here's a link to the same, if you're blocked by the ornamental firewall.)
"Gross [of online magazine Slate] must have a particularly lousy tour guide. First he can’t manage to find a chocolate bar anywhere in China, and now he’s suggesting that explicit mentions of Marx and Lenin once adorned Tiananmen Gate..."
I loved this pre-revolutionary Tiananmen Gate slogan - apparently a favorite phrase of Sun Yatsen's - taken from the Book of Rites:
“The world belongs to the people” (Tianxia weigong / 天下为公)
A question for our translators: this phrase clearly means that each and every one of us has some share in this world, that even the humblest among us is entitled to some piece of the communal pie. But is there any implication of a corresponding obligation, any sense that those who partake of it should also contribute to "building" the pie? I've often wondered about the range of those two characters weigong / 为公. Look forward to hearing your thoughts.
By Eric Abrahamsen, November 25, '09
The University of Oklahoma is on the verge of launching a major initiative into Chinese literature, which comes as a surprise to those of us who were twiddling our thumbs, but has actually been in the making for three years now. This initiative comes in two parts: a series of Chinese books to be published starting in 2011, and the launching of a new literary journal, Chinese Literature Today, a sister publication of the venerable World Literature Today, available in Chinese through Beijing Normal University. The new journal will launch next year, and they're soliciting submission, so have at it. The order of the day is "scholarly articles written to be accessible to a wide readership", ie not just smart but well-written, too.
From the Submissions Guidelines (PDF):
World Literature Today, the University of Oklahoma’s College of Arts and Sciences, and Beijing Normal University are pleased to announce an exciting new scholarly journal focusing on contemporary Chinese literature and culture in partnership with NOCFL. The new title, Chinese Literature Today, will feature articles, literary criticism, and original works of fiction and poetry by accomplished scholars and authors from China and abroad. As the editors of Chinese Literature Today, we would like to invite you to take full advantage of this exciting new opportunity by submitting your work today.
In 2006 World Literature Today (WLT), one of America’s oldest periodicals devoted to world literature, began working with China’s most prestigious College of Chinese Language and Literature at Beijing Normal University (BNU) to produce a special issue focusing on China. WLT celebrated this publication in the summer of 2007 by holding the first “China and World Literature Today Conference” in Beijing. Following these initial successes, WLT and BNU began the more ambitious project of initiating a Chinese-language edition, which was unveiled at the “China and World Literature Today International Conference” held in Beijing in October 2008. Many of the nearly three hundred international and Chinese novelists, scholars, editors, and poets who attended the conference voiced a desire to see more Chinese literature and literary criticism available in English translation. Thus, Chinese Literature Today was born.
Submissions should be sent to the CLT editor at clteditor@ou.edu by December 16, 2009.
Download the full submissions guidelines (PDF) here.
Download the CLT styleguide (PDF) here.
Yang was born in Tianjin in 1915. He went abroad to study at Oxford, where he met his wife Gladys, with whom he later translated classic works of Chinese literature for the Foreign Languages Press.
Their translations included Selected Works of Lu Xun and a complete English version of A Dream of Red Mansions, which the two began in the early sixties and finished in the following decade after a spell in prison during the Cultural Revolution.
Celebrity status, foreign authorship and Mongolian and Tibetan motifs continue to pique China's appetite for fiction. American Stephanie Meyer, vampire novelist, and Guo Jingming, reputedly the Middle Kingdom's best-earning writer in 2008, both boast an impressive four titles within the Top 30 this month. But surviving in the corporate jungle and realizing those enticing white-collar dreams are not forgotten either...
Overseas publishing rights for the Chinese novel, Gold Mountain Blues,have been purchased for English, French, Italian and Dutch editions.
In the tradition of Wild Swans and The Concubine's Children, Gold Mountain Blues is the story of five generations of a Chinese family, from the 1860s to the present. The novel relates the struggles and sacrifices of the laborers who built the Canadian Pacific Railway, and the evolution of the modern Chinese–Canadian identity.
"I'm not sure if The Boat to Redemption can help overseas readers know more about China. It's just a novel centering on the fate of people caught in an absurd time," Su said in an e-mail interview, adding his upcoming novel will be set in contemporary China.
"A nation must have the courage to face its own history, whether it's glorious or shameful, beautiful or gray. Misunderstandings often come from hiding and evasion.
"After all, a novel does not stand for the truth of history, so I'm not afraid of misunderstanding."
By Eric Abrahamsen, November 17, '09
News broke today that Su Tong's novel The Boat to Redemption was chosen by the Man Asia Literary Prize judges as this year's winner. Su Tong was the only Chinese writer on the long list. The book is to be translated by Howard Goldblatt and published in the UK next February by Transworld UK.
Here's an article from the Guardian with more detail. The following is from the press release from the Peony Literary Agency (née Creative Work) which represents Su Tong.
On Nov 16, 2009, the Man Asian Literary Prize announced in Hong Kong the recipient of
the prize. Open to all Asian novels unpublished in English, the prize aims to bring
exciting new Asian authors to the attention of the world literary community.
Su Tong's prolific and provocative oeuvre – six novels including Rice (2004) and My Life as Emperor (2006), a dozen novellas, more than 120 short stories – have earned him a
place at the centre of China's literary scene. His best known work abroad is the novella
Wives and Concubines, which was made into the film Raise the Red Lantern directed by
Zhang Yimou and starring Gong Li. The film garnered an Oscar (1991), and won a Bafta
in 1993. Su Tong's Binu – The Myth Of Meng Jiang Nu (2006), the tale of the girl whose
tears collapsed the Great Wall, sold more than 100,000 copies in China within a month of
publication. It has since been sold into 15 countries.
Boat to Redemption which won the award is a raw, charged and unerringly human
comedy of the revolution. It is the story of disgraced Secretary Ku who has been banished
from the Party and leaves the shore for a new life among the boat people on a fleet of
industrial barges. Refusing to renounce his high status, he maintains a distance – with
Dongliang, his teenage son, from the lowlifes who surround him and he takes on Life,
Fate and the Party in the only way he knows…
For further information, please contact Marysia Juszczakiewicz (in Hong Kong) or Tina
Chou (in Beijing) at:
Email: marysia@peonyliteraryagency.com
Tel: (852) 2167 8887
Fax: (852) 2167 8885
Email: tina@peonyliteraryagency.com
Mobile: 137-1866-7210
By Eric Abrahamsen, November 15, '09
EDIT: We've made a permanent home for the materials we brought to the Frankfurt Book Fair, which you can see by clicking here or following the link under the Explore Paper Republic heading on our home page.
So, very briefly: I and Nicky Harman have arrived in Frankfurt, where we'll be attending the Frankfurt Book Fair through the 28th.
In the near future I'll put up a longer, more detailed post about what we're up to here, but the short version is: we've come with a small packet of seven Chinese books that we think the whole world ought to translate and read. The small version of the packet can be downloaded by clicking here (PDF, right-click to download), and in the next couple of weeks we will be uploading substantial translation samples for each of those books, which can be downloaded separately. Take a look at the packet for now, and let us know what catches your fancy!
Edit
The sample from Han Dong's forthcoming novel Screwed!, can be downloaded here.
Three essays from Liang Wendao's Common Sense are here.
The US President’s upcoming visit to the Middle Kingdom has engendered a ripple or two in linguistic and media circles. Currently, Chinese headline writers refer to the current White House occupant as “Ow-ba-ma” (奥巴马), the first syllable rhyming with “cow.”
Since Obama himself and most native English speakers read the name with a long “O”, as in “open,” China’s version appears inaccurate...
A little later, a voice spoke and the room soon hushed itself—for the launching part of the book launch. The woman speaker soon amazed me with her interpreting of the speech given by Zhou Linfei, the grandson of Lu Xun (Sorry, Mr. Zhou. I know you hate to be introduced in this way, but it’s still a little more convenient than “whose father’s father is Lu Xun”). Zhou was clearly a descendant of Lu Xun, for, with the suit he was wearing, he was like a Lu Xun in a modern version.
By Eric Abrahamsen, November 10, '09
Julia Lovell very kindly consented to give us the following interview, on the occasion of the Penguin Classics' publication of her translation of the complete fiction of Lu Xun.
Edit: Great minds think alike, or at least ask their questions of the same folk – Danwei has also posted an interview with Julia.
Lu Xun occupies a transitionary literary period between the classical writing of imperial China and what we consider modern Chinese today. How did you go about choosing an appropriate voice and register in English? What were some of the resources you turned to?
I suppose that when I started I was trying to recreate Lu Xun's own frame of reference. As is well known, he was a voracious reader of foreign literature. He once advised young writers to "read no Chinese books. Or as few as you can. But read more foreign books"; he even advocated something called "hard translation" that imported foreign syntax into the Chinese language through translation. So I thought that an obvious place to start might be some of the (particularly Eastern European) writers that he was keen on, and whose impact on his writing some scholars have studied: Gogol's "Diary of a Madman", for example. My own academic background is also very much in May-Fourth period writing - so I found it helpful to draw on knowledge of that era and of its ideas about the literature it was trying to create. A big part of the May Fourth vision of a new, modern literature was that it should intervene in life, that it should have an edge of political urgency to it - and that's strongly there in a lot of Lu Xun's fiction and essays.
But finally, and at the risk of sounding lazy, I think that Lu Xun does a lot of a translator's work for him/her. There's a tightly controlled fury bound up in his best, most powerful stories (I'm thinking particularly of pieces such as "Medicine", "Tomorrow", "Kong Yiji") that simply asks to be recreated in the target language. (Though I'm not saying I've succeeded at that.)
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A long-running dispute over Google’s efforts to digitize books has spread this month to China, where authors have banded together to demand that their works be protected from what they call unauthorized copying.
Two Chinese writers’ groups claim that Google has scanned Chinese works into an electronic database in violation of international copyright standards. The organizations are urging China’s authors to step forward and defend their rights.
Chinese poet Li Shizheng, who writes under the pen-name Duo Duo (which is even prettier in Chinese: 多多), has been named the winner of the estimable Neustadt International Prize for Literature for 2010; see, for example, The Norman Transcript's report, Chinese poet awarded Neustadt Prize at OU.
By Eric Abrahamsen, October 30, '09
There's plenty more to say about what went on at Frankfurt, but I said most of it in an article for the Abu Dhabi paper The National, which I will link to and leave it at that!
The editor is, ideally, a stand-in for that “poor, monophone” fiction-reader. Not (or certainly not at Dalkey) a philistine with a machete who wants to dumb knotty prose down. If we can’t make head or tail of a sentence without going back to the French or Spanish or Dutch, something isn’t right—even if, and this is usually the case, the English version is “accurate.”
Just when the long-winded best-seller Tibet Code (藏地密码)– all seven volumes! — had just about fallen off the radar, along comes another heavyweight novel sure to rekindle interest in the region: King Gesar (格萨尔王) by the ethnic Tibetan author Alai (阿来). Meanwhile, Eileen Chang’s Little Reunion (小团员) and Jiang Rong’s Wolf Totem (狼图腾), the tale of the education of a Han intellectual by nomadic herders in Inner Mongolia, now both rank among the Top Ten.
By Cindy M. Carter, October 27, '09
"Jia Pingwa's books contain a lot of Shaanxi dialect that we Mandarin-speakers don't understand, dialect that foreigners are even less likely to understand. Another example is Yan Lianke's Shouhuo [The Joy of Living]. The translation rights were sold in 2004, but the book has yet to appear in translation. The reason is that they can't translate it - they just don't understand the dialect."
-- Southern Weekend (Nanfang Zhoumo) interview with Wu Wei, deputy director of the State Council Information Office and head of China Books International
(This follows an earlier comment thread found here.)
I wouldn't underestimate the importance of Wu Wei's comment. It may have been an off-the-cuff remark, but it came from the head of China's book export program, from the person who is supposed to be the face of Chinese literature abroad. If Wu Wei truly believes what she says, she is either a liar or a fool or both.
The foreign-language translations of Jia Pingwa's Feidu/Abandoned Capital and Yan Lianke's Shouhuo/The Joy of Living were NOT delayed because of a lack of good translators, or a dearth of foreign-type people who couldn't understand the dialect. We need to make this clear.
When I hear these pronouncements from Chinese officials, it reeks of xenophobia and makes my skin crawl. When I hear them from China-based corporate talking heads, it reeks of privileged expatriate insularity and makes me want to tear off talking heads (Jo Lusby, Penguin China: “The main challenges are ensuring good translations...” “The greatest problem is finding a good translator. It lives and dies simply in the translation...”).
Yes, yes, yes...books live and die in the translation...so why don't you cadres or talking heads ever deign to pick up the phone and actually speak to one of the up-and-coming generation of China-based translators who live in your city? When was the last time you managed to come up with an advance sufficient to support the translation of a 300 or 400-page novel? How long could YOU survive on an advance of a few thousand dollars? When will the parties who stand to profit from books in translation start pulling their weight? You get what you pay for, my friends, and you reap what you sow.
The reasons Jia Pingwa and Yan Lianke's works weren't translated earlier are complex. Some of their books were banned or appeared in expurgated versions in China. As such, they didn't make the best-seller lists. They didn't appear on the radar of foreign publishers soon enough. When they did, publishers jumped on the most controversial banned works (Serve the People, which is to Yan Lianke what The Names is to Don DeLillo) without regard to literary quality. The advances were abysmally low, so the translators had to borrow money, dig into their own pockets or rush the translations (sometimes all of the above). The foreign-language sales were disappointing, thus reinforcing the perception that Chinese fiction is a loss-leader in English-language markets.
But I don't believe it has to be this way. I think there has to be a better way.
2010 will mark the largest crop of emerging Chinese-to-English translators the world has ever seen. 2010 will be an amazing year in Chinese fiction, poetry, music and film. So why is no one buying?
Su Tong has been shortlisted, along with four other authors, for the Man Asian Literary Prize, for his book The Boat to Redemption 《河岸》.
Reports The Independent:
"Foreign publishers snapped up the copyrights to 1,300 Chinese books, according to a representative of China's delegation to the Frankfurt event, and Chinese firms bought the rights to import 883 titles from overseas.
"Among those Chinese publications picked up for the overseas market were everything from a series of history books titled Cultural China, to the Scientific and Technological Development Roadmap, to Tibetan author Alai's popular novel King Gesar."
The best known ethnic Tibetan novelist writing in Chinese in the PRC today, Alai (阿莱) penned Red Poppies (尘埃落定) and it long ago appeared in English thanks to Professor Howard Goldblatt's translation. China Daily tips Goldblatt as the most likely translator of King Gesar (格萨尔王) too, but this has not been confirmed.
By Nicky Harman, October 21, '09
Left, standing: Eric Abrahamsen, (seated centre) Li Er
By Cindy M. Carter, October 20, '09
Wanted to to share a few short passages from Yan Lianke's novel. The first is a dream sequence; the second, a poem. The translation is almost finished. Only a week to go, as I race toward the finish line (and try not to stumble).
-C
The night the tomb was robbed, grandpa had a dream:
The sky was filled with bright red suns. There were five, six, seven, eight, nine of them, crowding the sky and scorching the plain below. Drought had left the soil parched and cracked. Across the plain and well beyond, crops had died, wells run dry and rivers vanished. In an effort to banish the suns from the sky, to rid the sky of all the suns but one, strong young men had been chosen from each village, one man for every ten villagers. Armed with pitchforks, spades and scythes, they chased the suns across the plain, trying to drive them to the ends of the earth, topple them from the sky, and toss them into the ocean. Because surely, one sun in the sky was enough.
As grandpa stood at the entrance to the burial chamber, he remembered a bit of doggerel he'd heard as a child. It was an old folk saying here on the plain, a truism passed from generation to generation:
When graves are robbed of treasure,
there's not enough treasure to go around.
When graves are robbed of coffins,
there are too many coffins to be found.
By Eric Abrahamsen, October 19, '09
Thursday night was China Literature Night, the largest gathering of Chinese writers during the fair. Mercifully, most officials had gone home at this point, and we enjoyed the rare treat of a major cultural event that did not begin with long-winded speeches by someone with a title. It was a thrilling sight for a Chinese literature fan: the front row of seats were occupied by Liu Zhenyun, Su Tong, Xu Zechen, Li Er, Ah-Lai , Yu Hua, Mo Yan, Tie Ning – I'm finding it difficult to avoid the words "power lineup". They jumped right into it. The first round was a conversation between Tie Ning and a German sinologist named Ulrich Kautz. I'm not too familiar with German sinologists, but he had snow-white hair, a Zhongshan suit, and a bit of an attitude – clearly a sinologist.
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