By Eric Abrahamsen, October 19, '09
Here are a few images from the recently-concluded Frankfurt Book Fair, starting with the positive:
This is the main China Forum, where many of the big-ticket events took place. It was well designed, well-lit, interesting to look at, and while most of the displays featured the usual subjects ("trace the transmission of printing technology from China to your country!"), they were the usual subjects done well.
I’ve translated little prose; my love lies with China’s ancient and more ancient poets, whose work I’ve always translated for one reason: to gain a deeper understanding of their poetry. And if errors arise, only the ghosts of the ancients could haunt my dreams. But then I’ve always admired Granta and Bei Dao, and I was intrigued by these two eccentric Chinese artists settling in Chicago, a city I’ve never been to, its whispered name evoking images of Sun Ra in full Egyptian attire. Plus both the journal and author were supportive, the deadline was in a week, and what was life without additional sleepless nights? Not only that, I had also translated one other bit of Bei Dao’s prose (a preface he wrote for a book of poems by Gennady Aygi), was fortunate to have been the in-house editor for his book of essays, Midnight’s Gate, and had actually seen the brothers in action. Wasn’t this just the sort of Erfahrung push a translator needed?
From NYT article about Du Daozheng, editor of the influential political-affairs monthly Yanhuang Chunqiu and the man who secretly recorded Zhao Ziyang's recently-published (posthumous) memoirs:
Mr. Du survives such skirmishes because he is 86, wily and quietly supported by certain party luminaries. He says as many as 100 former party officials back his magazine's attempts to draw lessons from the party's buried past and nudge it toward democratic reforms. Some current officials also sympathize with the effort, he suggests. "Nobody dares close it," he said, lest that provoke a reaction from "old cadres." Last year supporters promised him, "If the magazine closes, we will take to the streets," he said.
The Writer as Migrant collects Ha Jin's three Campbell Lectures, held at Rice University in 2006. Both an exile and immigrant -- Ha Jin left China as an adult and settled in the United States, where he has become an English-writing author --, Ha Jin doesn't delve deep into his own experience, but he does mention it, and it obviously colors much of what he writes here. Early in the first piece he recalls that when he published his first book of poems (written in English):
I viewed myself as a Chinese writer who would write in English on behalf of the downtrodden Chinese.
China, which bans hundreds of books every year, was a controversial choice as the guest of honor at this year's Frankfurt Book Fair. But some of the Chinese authors appearing at the fair, which begins Wednesday, have managed to slip political works past the censors.
A striking woman in an elegant black blouse sits in a bulky chair in the lobby of the Beijing Kempinski Hotel. Her name is Tie Ning and she is the chairwoman of the Chinese Writers' Association, which means that she represents a total of 8,920 state-supported authors.
"Censorship?" she says. "What censorship? Artists enjoy great liberties in China."
Ma Jian, a writer whose expose-style portraits of China's downtrodden are banned at home and who lives in London, hailed the Book Fair's invitation to China as special guest as "a good thing per se."
But he said no one should expect to hear the authentic voice of China from the officials and authors in the Beijing delegation.
"While they cavort here in their beautifully tailored suits, lots of authors are locked up in jail back home," he said.
It is worse for China. Chinese poet Beidao was among those nominated for the prize. I guess he will have to wait. On the map of world literature with Europe right at the center, Chinese literature is an island that is hidden somewhere, to be discovered and understood. We depend on the likes of sinologue Wolfgang Kubin to tell the rest of the world what our writing is about. Unfortunately, Kubin was disgusted with the majority of Chinese literature that has surfaced, especially the vulgar young authors who proclaim to be “writing with their bodies” instead of their minds and hearts. Such “body” authors receive better recognition than their more serious peers, thanks to the cultural reporters that care more about controversies than content. Many pop critics do not read much anyway.
When dissident writer Gao Xingjian won the Nobel Prize for Literature, Chinese netizens were emphatically told that he was French, not Chinese. Never mind that he was born and raised in China, lived there several decades, and writes in Chinese. Now, thanks to the Chinese-language Cankao Xiaoxi, we learn that this year’s winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, German-speaking Herta Müller, emigrated to Germany partly because of harassment by Romania’s bao’an budui (保安部队)...
Early October is Nobel Prize announcement week. It is often an agonizing and even humiliating period for some Chinese who see the prize as the yardstick of our nation's scientific and educational development.
When the occasional overseas Chinese person wins the prize, it somehow accentuates the pain, as it appears to show the Chinese as a race are capable of the highest achievements in science, but we are somehow handicapped by something else, say, our system.
Wang Gang (王刚) author of the novel English (英格力士), a best-selling novel based on the author's childhood in Urumqi, Xinjiang during the Cultural Revolution talks to Danwei's Jeremy Goldkorn. Film shot and edited by Patrick Carr of Mandarin Film.
The addition of a subtitle ("A Novel of Shanghai") to the original Chinese title is a logical choice: the city of Shanghai, with its ups and downs during the tumultuous period from the post-war 1940s to the 1980s, and the firmly articulated cultural identity of its citizens, stands out as the major structuring principle of the novel. In many ways, the novel is a textbook example of "city literature" in the full meaning of the term--i.e., not just writing about the City, but writing that through its style and organization expresses a distinctly urban epistemology.
If US authoress Stephanie Meyer gets a decent cut on the sales of her Twilight series now published in Chinese, she should be mighty pleased -- three of her vampire romances rank among the Top 10 Fiction Best Sellers in the PRC this month. Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner and The Unbearable Lightness of Being still figure among the Top 30, and Eileen Chang's Little Reunion remains hot. Jia Pingwa's newly re-released Ruined Capital -- banned for 16 years -- is selling well. And Du Lala's Promotion, a close-up of office politics in a China-based multinational that falls into the office-lady (OL) genre, will soon be a movie directed by Xu Jinglei and starring Taiwan's Stanley Huang.
By Canaan Morse, October 2, '09
From Lao She's 《四世同堂》, Chap. 14. The setting is Japanese-occupied Beijing, near the beginning of the war. Welcome 中秋.
The space of time right around the Mid-Autumn Festival is Beiping’s most beautiful season. The temperature is neither hot nor cold, and the days and nights are equally balanced. There are no winter sandstorms howling in from Mongolia, nor summer thunderstorms perversely mixed with hail. The sky is instead so high, so blue, so bright, as if it’s smiling down on the people of the city, telling them: in these days, you need fear no threat nor harm from Nature. The mountains to the North and West darken their shade of blue, and in the sunset evenings drape themselves in many-colored robes.
The incident had an air of tragicomedy, and turned into a public relations disaster for the organizers as well as an embarrassment for about all those involved. In a larger sense, the debacle illustrates the paradoxes in the public perception of China in Germany; it also raises questions about the status of China-related knowledge in Europe and its ability to reach and influence decision makers in politics and business.
Translate a bit of Lu Xun into English – win his complete translated fiction! [Competition instructions in Chinese only]
Chinese author and political dissident Liao Yiwu, who was due to attend an event in Berlin connected with the Frankfurt Book Fair, has been banned from traveling to Germany just weeks after the fair's organizers revoked invitations for two other Chinese writers.
Chinese author Liao Yiwu, who is also a reporter, musician and poet, has been banned by the Beijing regime from traveling to Germany, he told reporters on Wednesday.
Hawkes certainly fulfilled his aim. His mastery of classical Chinese and superb rhetorical skills in the English language, alongside his tireless effort, made it possible for him to carry this masterpiece across cultural boundaries and present it to British eyes and minds in its original flavour. To me, his English version is a joy to read; I particularly admire his translation of the opening poem, which carries the central theme of the novel. The full meaning of the poem is revealed only at the end of the story when the pampered young man is reduced from nobility to a poor and lonely outcast, and comes to realize that good times in life are but a fleeting dream. Hawkes tackled this poem beautifully. Let me quote a few lines:
"Men all know that salvation should be won,
But with ambition won't have done, have done.""Where are the famous ones of days gone by?
In grassy graves they lie now, every one."
To exiled Chinese poet and essayist Bei Ling, censorship and self-censorship are like a fatal disease. They destroy an author's feelings, critical faculties and creative power, he said. The remark came in the wake of a decision by organizers of this weekend's symposium, "China and the World" in Frankfurt to meet Chinese participants' demands and not invite him and Dai Qing, a journalist critical of the Chinese government.
The symposium planned in Frankfurt this weekend, entitled "China and the world - perception and reality," was initially intended to clear up misconceptions about the guest country -- China -- ahead of the 2009 Frankfurt Book Fair, which begins in mid-October.
However, Beijing's refusal to let several prominent dissident authors participate in the event has put a damper on hopes that China was interested in an open exchange of thought.
By Eric Abrahamsen, September 8, '09
So that's over with. I have no hard figures or statistical summaries to offer, as I'm more of a "soft sciences" guy and spent most of the fair moderating/participating in/eavesdropping on various talks and conversations, so I'll just leave a few impressions here.
There wasn't an enormous foreign presence. Domestic and foreign exhibitors were in separate halls (except for the booth showcasing Spain, the Guest of Honor), and the foreign hall was decidedly sleepy. I had spoken with several foreign publishers who had threatened to come but didn't – by far the most common reason was money, and the fact that five weeks hence China will be the Guest of Honor at the Frankfurt Book Festival. Why come all the way to Beijing when you can get the best of China next month, whilst attending the world's biggest book fair? Can't say I can argue with this logic.
Despite this, the BIBF organizers made a special effort to bring international exhibitors together. This year was the second in which they held "Ten-plus-Ten" events, where ten Chinese publishing houses get together with ten publishers from one other country and get to know each other. There was even talk of a speed-dating format. I moderated the China-Spain Ten-plus-Ten, and it struck me as something worth pursuing. The two sides are generally so completely lacking in understanding of the other that it can be next to impossible to build relationships or even get a conversation going – this calls for a heavier hand. At first I felt a bit like a chaperone trying to organize a play date between reluctant participants, but things did warm up after a bit, and by the end there was plenty of swapping of name cards and catalogues. More of the same is called for.
There is a fierce curiosity here about what foreigners think of Chinese culture. The little talks I was running were mostly related to the translation of Chinese literature into foreign languages, and there were many, many questions about how Chinese writers are received abroad, and palpable anxiety about why they're not more popular. It was suggested by one audience member that foreign readers who couldn't tell their Wang Meng from their Wang Shuo could be asked to read a short overview of Chinese literature in advance. There were some seriously crestfallen faces in the crowd when Cindy clarified that the three percent problem wasn't that Chinese literature made up a mere three percent of books published in the US, but that literature from all countries around the world had to share that measly percentage among them. I had difficulty handling such questions as "Do you think the anti-corruption genre of Chinese literature would be popular abroad?" and "Do foreign readers only want to read about the Cultural Revolution?" and "I wrote a new version of the Daodejing, do you want to translate it for me?" All in all it was nice to be able to talk about these issues in front of a large crowd. People seemed interested when Barbara Wang (a German translator of children's literature) said that the overbearing didacticism of Chinese children's literature went over like a lead balloon in Germany, and the guy who asked why China hasn't won a Nobel Prize in literature seemed genuinely thoughtful when I said that for one thing, it has, and besides, they give the prize to a writer, not a country.
Good times all around!
For someone as insignificant as I am, I witnessed something that was truly significant. To be more specific, in peacetime three people were hit by bullets and fell to the ground right in front of my eyes.
By Eric Abrahamsen, September 4, '09
A good spot for new on the Fair while it's going on is Publishing Perspectives, which will continue to provide reports over the next few days; I'm not aware of any other English language press with local coverage…
Luggageless, she finds her place, glances at the empty seats opposite her, counts the raindrops on the window, returns to her identity as ‘woman’, is dragged into an eddy of old sorrows. Other passengers straggle onto the train, plant themselves like saplings in their seats, each leafs forth a mood. A round-faced girl sits next to her. The woman has occupied the girl’s window seat but the girl doesn’t mind. The woman has nothing to say to her.
By Eric Abrahamsen, September 3, '09
This nudge from Bruce is timely – the Beijing Book Fair is indeed going on over the weekend, we are indeed attending, and even hosting some events.
The events we think you'll enjoy the most (ie, the ones we're involved in) are four small talks on topics related to translation. The schedule is as follows:
Saturday, Sep 5
3pm The translation process: the changing roles of author, translator, agents and publishers.
Sunday, Sep 6
10am Translating culture: When is simply translating language not enough, and is the translator justified in "helping" his/her readers to understand unfamiliar cultural content?
3pm Foreign perceptions of Chinese literature, and how that affects what books get translated/published, and how they're received.
Monday, Sep 7
10am Translation of foreign literature inside China: Quantity vs quality.
Tickets to get into the fair are 20 RMB. You're all welcome to come and heckle; the events are taking place in Building 8 of the International Exhibition Center (the building where the foreign publishers are located), in the section reserved for countries to display their literary promotion programs. We're right next to the coffee.
Trying to take in the totality of Chinese publishing is a lot like sitting down to a Chinese banquet and trying to figure out what to eat first. With thousands of publishers, both state sponsored and independent, putting out some 300,000 titles each year (about the same number as in the US), there’s a lot on the table. One place where you can get a good sense of the overall scene is at the annual Beijing International Book Fair (BIBF), which takes place this week, from Thursday through Sunday at the China International Exhibition Centre.
The Eileen Chang (张爱玲) mystique continues to move product: Her Little Reunion (小团圆) topped the chart for fiction sales in China during July. Not to be outshined, translations of all four of Stephanie Meyer's Twilight series ranked in the Top 10. New versions of three "oldies-but-goodies" also made the Top 30: Rickshaw Boy by Lao She (1930s)...
Xianhui Yang’s “Woman From Shanghai: Tales of Survival From a Chinese Labor Camp,” a newly translated collection of firsthand accounts that the publisher calls “fact-based fiction,” is about what might be called the Gulag Archipelago of China. Reading it, one begins to appreciate why travelers to North Korea are so reluctant to reflect on human suffering: the reality of North Korea today is too painfully close to a situation endured by the Chinese well within living memory. As the circumstances of the publication of “Woman From Shanghai” help us understand, these are memories that the Chinese state still works hard to suppress.
By Eric Abrahamsen, August 26, '09
Yesterday the Guardian posted the obituary of David Hawkes, translator and scholar, and one of the giants of Chinese literary studies. His translations of the Songs of Chu and the first 53 chapters of the Story of the Stone are definitive, and beautiful, but more than that he was an influential guide and teacher for many of the great Sinologists and translators of the past fifty years. He passed away July 31 in Oxford, aged 86.
John Gittings' obituary contains more detail and personal insight than we, who belong to a different generation, could hope to provide, but I did have the pleasure and honor of meeting Hawkes briefly this past spring, while passing through Oxford. He and his wife Jean were thoroughly gracious hosts; they fed us, showed us pictures of their lives in China at the dawn of the PRC, and talked to us about Chinese literature and translation for the few brief hours we were able to stay. My overwhelming impression of Hawkes was of a translator sustained and nourished by his love of literature, whose humility was touchingly complete, who had reached a point in life where he took everything lightly, particularly those things that brought him joy. When it came time for us to leave he took up his hat and cane to see us off at the bus station, and stood there waving until we had moved out of sight.
I think we're planning a small memorial gathering in Beijing for this Friday (August 28), anyone who's in town and wants to attend please email me.
By Cindy M. Carter, August 22, '09
The Guardian reports that Jean-Jacques Annaud will be directing the film adaptation of the novel Wolf Totem by author Lu Jiamin - better known by his pen name of Jiang Rong. (See full article).
A quote from the Guardian piece:
The Associated Press reported that Annaud would be forced to make an apolitical interpretation of the novel in order to pass Chinese film censorship, with the Beijing Forbidden City Film Company's statement about the project avoiding the book's political messages to describe it as "an environmental protection-themed novel about the relationship between man and nature, man and animal".
This sounds like the real deal, but it does bring back some memories: anyone recall a few years back, when rumours of a Peter Jackson/Weta adaptation of Wolf Totem were flying fast and furious? One imagines that the Jackson version would have been heavy on computer graphics and special effects, while Annaud plans to spend 18 months raising and training the wolves himself.
I'm curious about the screenplay adaptation. Will it be based on the French translation of the novel (Le Totem du loup, by translators Yan Hansheng and Lisa Carducci), or the English translation by Howard Goldblatt, or will they start from scratch and work up a screenplay based on the Chinese novel? Will the film itself have Mongolian dialogue, or Chinese, or both? Not English or French, certainly.
I'm sure we'll be hearing more about this in the months to come...
Dai Wei's comatose state is meant to be a form of resilient protest and resistance to a totalitarian society which enforces a culture of amnesia upon its people, and his persistent remembrance gives a visceral sense of the deeply problematic nature of Chinese society after June Fourth, as one reviewer puts it: "A comatose mind within a terrifyingly vigorous body is the analogy for post-Tiananmen China that emerges from Ma's book." This might be the other meaning of the title Beijing Coma.
By Lucas Klein, August 13, '09
Granted, this post has little to do with China aside from the tangential fact that it involves a question whose stated purpose was for views on Chinese contracts in the Congo.
By now we have all heard of, if not seen clips of, Hillary Clinton's sharp retort to the question, "What does Mr. Clinton think, through the mouth of Mrs. Clinton?” Think what you may of the Secretary of State's reaction, I think we should also pay some attention to the fact that, in the words of the New York Times blog, the video came "packaged in reports, like one from Kirit Radia of ABC News, stating that 'apparently the translator made a mistake.'"
Asia Literary Review publishes the best contemporary writing from and about Asia. The print edition can be found in bookshops throughout Asia and in the US, Australia, Canada, and the UK.
By Nicky Harman, August 8, '09
Banished! A Novel by Han Dong, translated by Nicky Harman, is reviewed on the Modern Chinese Literature and Culture MCLC website by Song Mingwei.
Its initial publication in 1993 by the Beijing Publishing House was accompanied by a media frenzy that sensationalized the book as a modern Jin Ping Mei, the classic Ming Dynasty novel famed for its explicit sexual passages, and hype ranged from the author's rumored million-yuan advance to a million-copy print run, and from speculation about the nature of the book's deleted passages to the avalanche of bootleg versions that soon appeared in streetside book stalls. Feidu was banned before the year was out.
[Also see: Jia Pingwa talks about the reissue of Feidu]
By Nicky Harman, August 1, '09
British Center of Literary Translation Summer School, Norwich, United Kingdom, 19-15 July (with Authors Xin Ran and Translator Nicky Harman)
The BCLT Literary Translation summer course was an opportunity for new entrants to refine their technical translation skills. The course turned out to be a most remarkable journey (thanks to the extraordinary stories shared by our author Xin Ran); and an opportunity to meet (and have fun) with inspiring and like-minded individuals.
What made this translation course most worthwhile for beginners was the chance to work alongside authors and their translators and see them in action. It was a chance for us to appreciate the importance of communication with authors in the process of literary translation. An author “translates” his/her perception of the world into text. A translator translates and bridges the gap between the original text and the foreign readers. Throughout the workshop, we constantly consulted our author Xin Ran on the true meaning or intention behind her words. By setting the scene, background and history for us, Xin Ran made translation into English so much easier.
Translation is usually a lonely exercise. The workshop created a unique setting that is very rare for a translator – a chance to do spontaneous group translation! The chance to discuss and debate about choice of words, language and rhythm was exhilarating - words and ideas fly across the room like flying daggers. Sometimes we get unanimous agreement on words straightaway; other times, even with six minds put together, it took over an hour to search for an appropriate single phrase. Good translation requires dedication and attention to detail – but it's all worth the effort in the end. The thrill when you’ve found the exact right phrase that is accurate in meaning, tone and register is simply magic.
As group leader, I found the whole experience extremely rewarding. BCLT will be running a similar week-long course next year.
