Our News, Your News
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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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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:
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Saturday, Sep 5
3pm The translation process: the changing roles of author, translator, agents and publishers.
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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.
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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.
