Our News, Your News
By Eric Abrahamsen, January 7, '10
A couple of days ago (we're slow), the Three Percent translation/literary weblog posted their longlist for their 2010 Best Translated Book Award. They've picked their 25 titles based on an impressive (and possibly unique) breadth of reading and understanding of world literature; the list includes some darlings of the international scene (ie Robert Bolano) as well as a hefty representation of relative unknowns. We've got one dog in the race: Cao Naiqian's There’s Nothing I Can Do When I Think of You Late at Night, translated by John Balcom, but of course everyone's a winner…
By Nicky Harman, January 6, '10
I went to the second day of the two-day events to celebrate Gao Xingjian’s birthday at School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London.
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The lawyer, Shang Baojun, said Mr. Liu told him during a meeting that he had filed the lengthy appeal on Dec. 29. The court has 45 days under Chinese law to consider the appeal.
Best Translation You’ve Done to Date:
“I’ll come is
empty talk
I’ll go and then no trace”
Lucas was the first (and I believe only) translator to take my question and reinterpret it in a much more precise, micro sort of way. I was really hoping someone would give us a single line instead of a full work—there’s something powerful about this sort of focus.
Before the family planning policy was adopted, Mo's aunt, referred to in Frog simply as Gu Gu ("aunt" in Chinese), was once considered a godsend who helped deliver little miracles to local families. After the family planning policy was adopted, she transformed into the image of a devil who enforced abortive methods for women pregnant with a second child.
Although Jin is more concerned with the patterns made by small lives under new pressures, there are times when the broader picture comes to the fore. “It’s foolish to think you’re done for,” the downtrodden hero of the title story is told by a friend. “Lots of people here are illegal aliens. They live a hard life but still can manage. In a couple of years there might be an amnesty that allows them to become legal immigrants.” To characters like this, immigration to a land of opportunity proves an occasion of loss as well as gain. They are ordinary people with modest expectations, modest even in what they notice and remember and imagine. This lack of color is reflected in Jin’s quiet, careful, restrained prose — prose whose absence of flourish can, at times, make it all the more eloquent.
By Eric Abrahamsen, January 3, '10
A recent review from the NYT Sunday Book Review begins like so:
Jean-Philippe Toussaint’s wonderfully stylized new novel, “Running Away,” begins with a question: “Would it ever end with Marie?” That’s only fitting for a book that leaves so much unanswered — we never learn the narrator’s name or occupation or, indeed, why his relationship with Marie, his Parisian girlfriend, is tanking. Those aren’t the only riddles, either. From the outset, the narrator fails to divulge why Marie has asked him to deliver $25,000 to a Shanghai associate, Zhang Xiangzhi.
Now I may be afflicted with some occupational disease here, but to me the only thing that stands out in that paragraph is the fact that an author with a French name, writing an English-language thriller, has not only chosen to set part of his international storyline in China, but has given a major character a Chinese name containing two "zh"s and the dreaded "x".
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By Nicky Harman, January 1, '10
- Five Spice Street
By Can Xue
Translated by Karen Gernant and Chen Zeping
Yale University Press, 2009
- Banished
By Han Dong
Translated by Nicky Harman
University of Hawaii Press, 2009
Reviewed by Aamer Hussein, Pakistani short story writer and critic
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Throughout the second half of the 20th century, Chinese literature developed in isolation, with its own traditions and narratives. Living in a communist bubble, writers had to toe the party line, embracing socialist realism and revolutionary romanticism. They didn't begin to experiment with style and form until foreign works began to appear in translation after the Cultural Revolution. In the past 10 years, some Chinese novels, often featuring stories about the dark corners of Chinese society—such as the sex-and-drug chronicles Shanghai Baby by Wei Hui and Mian Mian's Candy—have achieved international recognition, but by and large, contemporary Chinese literature remains unknown outside the country.
“He wrote the documents and used the Internet to publish them in order to slander and urge other people to overthrow our country’s democratic dictatorship and our socialist system,” the verdict said. “…The published documents have been spread through links and republishing. People read them and they have a bad effect. This is the crime of a major criminal and should be severely punished according to the law.”
4 January 2010 is the 70th birthday of Gao Xingjian, the 2000 Nobel Laureate in Literature. To celebrate his birthday, a symposium will be held at SOAS, University of London, featuring a lecture by the author and the screening of three of his films. Mr Gao Xingjian is both a writer and a painter. The symposium will focus on his works and thoughts, and his contribution to fiction, poetry, drama and theatrical art, Chinese ink-painting and film, as well as his theory of art and literature.
By Cindy M. Carter, December 30, '09
According to the 2009 translation database compiled by the literary website Three Percent, there were 348 new translations of fiction and poetry (283 novels and short-story collections; 65 volumes of poetry) on American bookshelves this year. Of the 348 works of literature to reach America from distant shores, only 10 were penned by Chinese authors. One, Dai Sijie's Once on a Moonless Night, was translated from the French. Another - In Such Hard Times: The Poetry of Wei Ying-wu - is a collection of poetry written during the Tang Dynasty. Yang Xianhui's Woman From Shanghai: Tales of Survival from a Chinese Labor Camp, although well worth reading, is a collection of eyewitness accounts presented as fiction (or semi-fictionalized) in order to elude Chinese censors. That leaves us with a total of 7 contemporary Chinese novels translated into English for the American literary marketplace in 2009. Seven. Books. From China. To America.
Compare this to the stats for other translations from various languages published in the U.S. this year: 59 from Spanish, 51 from French, 31 from German, 22 from Arabic (a mark of progress), 18 from Italian, 18 from Japanese, etcetera.
Here's the link to the Three Percent translation databases for 2009 and 2010. And a nice little pie-chart from The Faster Times ("What Are We Translating From?") illustrating the languages from which the 348 books were translated. Chinese works form a minuscule slice of an embarrassingly tiny pie.
Since there were so few Chinese offerings published in the U.S. this year, I can easily list them all here:
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Banished! by Han Dong, translated by Nicky Harman. University of Hawaii Press.
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Brothers by Yu Hua, translated by Eileen Chow and Carlos Rojas. Pantheon.
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English by Wang Gang, translated by Martin Merz and Jane Weizhen Pan. Viking.
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Five Spice Street by Can Xue, translated by Karen Gernant and Chen Zeping. Yale University Press.
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Feathered Serpent by Xu Xiaobin, translated by John Howard-Gibbon and Joanne Wang. Atria.
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In Such Hard Times: The Poetry of Wei Ying-wu, translated by Red Pine. Copper Canyon Press.
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The Moon Opera by Bi Feiyu, translated by Howard Goldblatt and Sylvia Li-chun Lin. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
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Once on a Moonless Night, by Dai Sijie, translated from the French by Adriana Hunter. Knopf.
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There's Nothing I Can Do When I Think of You Late at Night, by Cao Naiqian, translated by John Balcom. Columbia University Press.
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Woman From Shanghai: Tales of Survival from a Chinese Labor Camp by Yang Xianhui, translated by Huang Wen. Pantheon.
By Eric Abrahamsen, December 26, '09
Last week, a friend called me up and told me to show up at such-and-such a place, at such-and-such a time, and to have my nice pants on. It had something to do with the Banyan Tree, one of China's oldest literary websites, but beyond that I frankly didn't catch the drift.
So this morning I went, and here's the deal: The Shanda Company, an online literature/media company which is eating up everything in sight, recently bought the Banyan Tree (榕树下, róngshùxià). The Banyan Tree was started in 1997, early days for the Chinese internet, and in the late nineties and early oughts it was the place to go for Chinese literature online. It's been pretty quiet for the past five years, but as part of Shanda's campaign to own mostly everything (someone offhandedly mentioned purchasing Paper Republic over lunch, good lord), they bought the Banyan Tree and are bringing it back to life. It was a large and loud event, attended by dignitaries such as Wang Meng, Ai Weiwei, Hong Ying, Feng Tang, Xu Xing, Lu Jinbo and a host of other half-writer, half-journalist chimeras.
As it turns out the friend who called me, whom I've always known as a highly-intelligent, deeply cynical journalist and inveterate rager against many machines, is the new head editor of the Banyan Tree. As soon as I've figured what the hell he's up to I will post in more detail, but I wanted to get this up here now, because when you go look at the Banyan Tree website (http://www.rongshuxia.com/) there's just a great big countdown clock to midnight tonight (Beijing time), at which point presumably something magical will happen. So here's this for now, watch the clock, and we'll get you something a little meatier when the fireworks are over.
EDIT: Well it wasn't immediately magical; it looks like most other online literary sites. We're on vacation at the moment, and will have a talk with the editors when we get back in early January. More then!
“There’s a set of readers out there that’s very interested in translations and international literature and is not getting what it wants,” said Chad W. Post, Open Letter’s director. “So we believe our business model can work. American literature has a lot of great works. But English-speaking readers don’t have full access to voices and viewpoints from around the world, and we’re trying to rectify that.”
We are all familiar with personal accounts of the Holocaust and the Gulag, less so with descriptions of the torture chamber that was Mao’s China. That is why Er Tai Gao’s spare, stoical remembrance, “In Search of My Homeland: A Memoir of a Chinese Labor Camp,” is a valuable contribution to the literature of the horrific 20th century.
The Financial Times reports that Mian Mian is suing Google China:
Mian Mian, a 39-year-old author from Shanghai whose realistic descriptions of life with drugs and among prostitutes, gangsters and failed artists, has attracted a large following of young readers, is suing Google for alleged copyright infringement. Sun Jingwei, her lawyer, told the Financial Times that the Haidian People’s Court in Beijing would start hearings on December 29.
Mian Mian filed her complaint on October 23. The author demands that Google apologises for scanning part of her works, deletes the scanned content from its digital library and pays her Rmb60,000 ($8,800) in compensation...
More links:
New York Times: Chinese Writer Sues Google China
China Daily: Writer Sues Google for Copyright Infringement
The international publisher Penguin Books is looking to hire an editor to work on a new list of books on and from China.
We aim to secure 5-10 original works per year, written in both English and Chinese, for international publication. The Editor role will be a broad one: he or she will work on every stage of the publishing process, from identification and acquisition of new works, MS edits, and commissions of translators through to PR, marketing, and managing translation rights.
By Cindy M. Carter, December 15, '09
Chinese blogs, social networking sites and bulletin boards are buzzing about a humorous map of China's "Internet topography" that illustrates how China's netizens (网民, wangmin) are currently under attack from all sides. The title of the map (clever cartographer unknown) reads 网络反围剿形势图, which translates roughly as "A topographical map of resistance to [the campaign of] Internet encirclement and annihilation". Sounds clunky, I know, but it's a riff on a 1930's campaign by Chiang Kaishek and the Nationalists to encircle and wipe out communist base camps (see Wiki entry for more about the encirclement campaigns).
(Here's a larger version of the map.)
Sorry I don't have the Photoshop chops to annotate this map in English, but here are the salient details:
(1) In the center, we see China's netizens (网民) and their territory, indicated in blue. Strongholds include Google, Tor, VPN, weblogs, Web 2.0, Twitter, online speech, social networking, online music, online games, etc.
(2) On the periphery, in red, we see the territory held by various Chinese government bureaus and ministries. Red arrows indicate official encroachments; crossed swords represent recent battlegrounds; blue arrows show where China's Internet users have managed to strike back effectively.
(3) The top left is occupied by the HQ of the Spiritual Civilization Development Steering Commission (中共中央精神文明建设指导委员会), the Propaganda Department (中宣部, or 中共中央宣传部） and the State Council Information Office, SCIO (国新办, or 国务院新闻办公室), all of which are under the control of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party (CCCPC).
Moving clockwise, we pass through the fiefdoms of the Ministry of Public Security (公安部); the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (工信部, or 工业和信息化部); SARFT, the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television(广电, or 国家广播电影电视总局); GAPP, the General Administration for Press and Publications (版署, or 新闻出版总署); MOC, the Ministry of Culture (文化部) and SAIC, the State Administration for Industry and Commerce (工商, or 工商行政管理总局）. Note the red arrows coming from all directions, targeting the small blue corps.
(4) Bureaucratic turf wars: the pair of crossed swords at bottom left shows where the Ministry of Culture and GAPP have clashed over jurisdiction. The red arrows emanating from bottom right illustrate SARFT encroachments into Ministry of Industry and Infotech territory.
Somebody should make a t-shirt of this.
Eveline Chao is the author of Niubi — The real Chinese you were never taught in school. In this video, she teaches Danwei's Jeremy Goldkorn the origin of 'niubi', how to say 'fisting' and other useful phrases in Chinese. Also on Youtube.
By Canaan Morse, December 11, '09
Wednesday’s talk was given under a specific heading, the “Public Intellectual Series Number 1,” and therefore carried a mandate as well as a topic. I won’t say more to that standard beyond that its mandate was fulfilled by a clear, cohesive and relatively comprehensive lecture. Take “lecture” for its older meaning: that form of academic art that distinguishes the professors you remember from the ones you don't.
Before the talk started, Nick distributed to the audience a packet of twelve literary excerpts composed of Chinese poetry, English translations and Chinese-inspired original English poems. The list (copied directly):
Axe Handles, by Gary Snyder
Preface to Wen Fu, by Lu Ji, trans. Achilles Fang
Hearing a Bell in the Mountain Night, Chinese original (Zhang Shuo) and Nick’s translation
Nowhere to Go, Gone by Nick Admussen
Nine Quatrains of Casual Interests (the seventh), by Du Fu, Nick’s translation
In a Station of the Metro, Ezra Pound
DEATH BY WATER, from The Wasteland, by T.S. Eliot
Drip from the Eaves, by Xia Jing, trans. Silvia Marijnissen
Allusion, by Nick Admussen
Tu Fu Watches the Spring Festival Across Serpentine Lake, by Frank Bidart
Ballad of Lovely Women, by Du Fu, trans. David Hawkes (!)
I Had Come to the Four-Doored Room, by Nick Admussen
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The Top Ten run-down for Nov 23-29: Banned mortgage slave saga...Stephanie Meyer mania...Lijiang romance lite...Tibetan epic ballad minus the verse...
The latest entry in Canongate’s Myth Series, King Gesar, has been launched in China (格萨尔王), and the firm has confirmed that it intends to publish it in English within 2011. When King Gesar makes its appearance, it will join other creatively re-told tales commissioned by the UK publisher, including The Penelopiad (Margaret Atwood’s take on Penelope of The Odyssey), Baba Yaga Laid an Egg (Baba Yaga as per Dubravka Ugresic), and Binu and the Great Wall (by China’s Su Tong).
Check out the book review and learn about the "integrated marketing campaign" now underway...
By Canaan Morse, December 8, '09
What: Bookworm Public Intellectual Series 1: Nick Admussen
Where: The Bookworm, Sanlitunr Nanjie
When: Dec. 09, 7:30-9:30 p.m.
Nick Admussen is a PhD candidate in Chinese literature at Princeton University, and is also a published poet and translator. He will be talking about the influence of Chinese poetry on poetry elsewhere in the world, and of the difficulties facing literary translators.
See the Bookworm posting for more.
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By Eric Abrahamsen, December 8, '09
The Foreign Correspondent's Club of China held an event last Friday that was a sort of retrospective on the Frankfurt Book Fair – lessons learned, insights gained, etc. (details here) The four speakers were Michael Kahn-Ackermann, head of the Goethe-Institute in Beijing; Jo Lusby, General Manager (China) of the Penguin Group; Zhou Wenhan, a freelance writer based in Beijing; and Kristin Kupfer, a German freelance journalist.
The discussion, held in the Sequoia Cafe, was good – highlights (from my point of view) included Michael Kahn-Ackermann's point about the enormous disconnect between the official delegation and the Chinese writers who attended. Essentially that the two groups had entirely separate goals, different methods of presenting themselves, and different styles of communication. Jo Lusby continued this with comments that the government would have to learn how to balance its control over "the message" with allowing those people who actually create culture to do their work. There was also a lively debate/argument over the responsibilities of the western press, with one excitable audience member (a journalist) saying, "When we ask Mo Yan if he's a dissident writer he has to answer!"
Zhou Wenhan, the freelance journalist, wrote his remarks out in Chinese, which were then ably translated and read by Jonathan Rechtman. I was impressed with how succinctly and forcefully he presented some very important ideas about how the Chinese government works, and so rather than regale you with half-remembered anecdotes I will paste below, with permission of both author and translator, the English version of what he said:
Kristin has asked me to talk about the strategic issues surrounding the communication between the German and Chinese organizers in a broader sense, but I'm not part of any government think tank or anything, so I can't really say much about the strategic side of things. I can only speak about some of my observations as to how the Chinese government seeks to manage information in all of its interactions with other countries, whether in terms of cultural exchanges, international conferences, or the Olympics.
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