Our News, Your News
By Lucas Klein, May 19, '09
In a comment to my post on May 4th & Chinese Literature in Translation, talking about disparities in how different genres of Chinese literature are represented in English, I wrote:
find me one English translation of a single-author collection of poems by a poet living in China.
I was thinking that someone might mention books by Taiwanese poets Shang Qin 商禽 or Hsia Yu 夏宇, both translated by Steven Bradbury (and published by Zephyr Press, a great small press with a large repertoire of translations from the Chinese). And I knew of other works in progress of mainland authors, still awaiting publication.
But I didn't expect that another answer would come from Tibet. This morning I opened my mailbox and found a package sent by A. E. Clark, with a book of his translations of Tibetan-Chinese poet Woeser, Tibet's True Heart, published by Ragged Banner Press.
Woeser writes in Chinese and now lives in Beijing, but her writing is infused with the complexities of her Tibetan cultural background. I haven't yet read Tibet's True Heart, but I look forward to reading Andrew Clark's English versions of her poems.
Sample poems and more recent writing of Woeser can be found on the Ragged Banner website.
The list of China's Top 30 best sellers for March 2009 is out, lead by Han Han's A Daydream (他的国), with the top ten also featuring Chinese translations of books from the West such as Bernhard Schlinks' The Reader and Meyer Stephanie's Twilight Journals.
But several of the best sellers are part of a series written in Chinese, such as The Story of Lala's Promotion (two volumes), Soldiers and their Commanders (two), and The Tibet Code, a five-volume classic which still hasn't dropped off the charts.
In an experimental project, the Guardian is collaborating with Yeeyan, a ground-breaking community translation website, to offer Chinese language versions of a selection of articles daily.
Yeeyan is a network of volunteers who translate material which they think would be of interest to a Chinese audience. The selection of Guardian articles for translation is made by Yeeyan members. You can see all Guardian articles available in Chinese here. Where you see this link - "阅读中文 | Read this in Chinese" - on Guardian stories in English, you can follow the link to a Chinese version. For all Guardian coverage of China, plus reports from Danwei, a Beijing-based website on media and urban life, go to guardian.co.uk/china.
Don’t let media in the West fool you—talking about sex in China is not taboo. But apparently references to female genitalia and orgasms are still big no-nos.
To see how such touchy subjects are handled in Chinese media, let’s take a look at what happened to the Guardian’s “China to Open First Sex Theme Park” (May 15, 2009) when it was translated and published in China's leading digest of international news, Cankao Xiaoxi.
"The first time I met Mao..." Mr. Yang said with a clipped British inflection, sounding rather like a seasoned raconteur who needed no prompting to start telling an oft-repeated tale, "the Chairman asked me if it was really possible to translate Chinese into English. He was really puzzled by that. Mao had a good mind, but he was not skilled at foreign languages..."
By Nicky Harman, May 15, '09
The Drawbridge welcomes submissions, translated from Chinese, for its upcoming issues, Silence and First Love.
The Drawbridge is an independent literary and cultural quarterly based in London, with a worldwide outlook. You can get a sense of its scope at its website. Each issue casts a broad net around a specific theme. The Silence issue publishes in August, with a text deadline of 26 June. The deadline for FirstLove (November) is 11 September. Short fiction and non-fiction equally welcome. Target length 1,200-2,000 words.
The Drawbridge is unable to offer a fee for contributions,but any published work reaches up to 15,000 intellectually curious and internationally aware readers, including many UK and international publishers and agents.
Contact the commissioning editor, Mark Reynolds:
mark@thedrawbridge.org.uk
The ideograms, which Pound turned into an obsession, that make up some (though far from all) Chinese characters; the very notion of words as single characters, rather than permutations of an alphabet; the tones that determine the meaning of words, and whose patterning is a central element of Chinese verse; the attenuation or absence of many features of English grammar, including pronouns and tenses--all these factors make it impossible for the reader of an English translation to have any accurate sense of how a Chinese poem sounds, moves, and feels to a Chinese reader.
My friend Wen Huang — translator of Liao Yiwu’s The Corpse Walker and Xianhui Yang’s Woman from Shanghai — contacted me this morning about the article below that Liao Yiwu wrote in remembrance of the one year anniversary of the devastating Beichuan earthquake.
Along the way, there are endless reverses of fortune—Song Gang ends up marrying Lin Hong, Baldy Li’s grand schemes bankrupt him and lead him to collecting trash—and numerous side stories that give this novel a sort of Dickensian quality, allowing Yu Hua to really sketch out Chinese society both during and after Mao. The epic scope of the novel, along with Hua’s ability to shift from warm humor to sheer horror in the same sentence, are the real high points of this book. It’s easy to get sucked into Hua’s world, even when the reader knows exactly what’s going to happen next, which is true a good deal of the time.
By Eric Abrahamsen, May 11, '09
St. Jerome may be the patron saint of all translators, but for those of us working in Chinese literature, David Hawkes is something like a living buddha. His work on the first 80 chapters of The Story of the Stone would be enough, but there's also Songs of the South (translations of Qu Yuan and other 楚辞), and A Little Primer of Tu Fu, an authoritative introduction to the Tang dynasty poet Du Fu.
Hawkes, now long retired, lives in Oxford, and when we were in London recently, we made a special trip up to the original college town (absolutely beautiful) to pay him a visit. He and his wife graciously received us, and fed us, and we had two short hours to talk about China and Chinese literature. We exchanged reminiscences about Beijing – apparently we have lived in spots only a few blocks apart – which I later had to re-evaluate when I realized that the last time he was in Beijing it still had its city walls, and he arrived there by steamship.
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By Eric Abrahamsen, May 11, '09
The following is a translation of this article from Caijing magazine, entitled 译书有禁区 (Book Translation's 'Forbidden Area' in China).
Here's a comment left by a netizen on this writer's blog post, 'Huiyuan is a Foreign Enterprise':
"Is there a Chinese language version of Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics? Can you buy it on the Mainland?"
My blog post described a few ideas from a new book by Professor Huang Yasheng, at MIT's Sloan School of Management (Yasheng Huang, Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics: Entrepreneurship and the State, Cambridge University Press, 2008).
Professor Huang is an overseas-Chinese scholar, and his book is written in English. But I must agree with the commenter's point: there's little chance that a Chinese translation of the book could be published.
In fact, very few books published abroad by overseas-Chinese scholars are translated into Chinese, particularly when the books are written on the subject of China. Some scholarly works are translated into Chinese, but with some of the contents altered. Of course, works by non overseas-Chinese also meet with the same treatment.
I'll give a few other examples of which I'm aware:
In 2005, Hu Danian, professor of history at the City University of New York, published China and Albert Einstein through the Harvard University Press (China and Albert Einstein: The Reception of the Physicist and His Theory in China, 1917-1979, Harvard University Press, 2005). One year later, Professor Hu translated his own book into Chinese as 爱因斯坦在中国 (1917－1979), adding quite a bit of newly-discovered historical material, and it was published by the Shanghai Science and Technology Education Publishing House, part of the Shanghai Century Publishing Group.
The part of the book describing criticisms of Einstein and his theories during the Cultural Revolution was deleted, and the names of several famous people, including famous scientists, were removed. Interested readers can compare the published versions with some chapters available online:
http://www.tecn.cn/data/18249.html
The Chinese Century: The Rising Chinese Economy and Its Impact on the Global Economy, the Balance of Power, and Your Job (Wharton School Publishing, 2004), by Professor Oded Shenkar, Ohio State University's School of Business, was published in Chinese in 2005 by the People's University Press. But the chapters on intellectual property rights were deleted altogether, because the translator did not agree with the writer's point of view.
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The Chinese author discusses his novel "Brothers" and life before and during China's economic boom.
The National Endowment for the Arts today announced that Copper Canyon Press, an internationally renowned nonprofit literary publisher, will be the U.S. publisher for its International Literary Exchange with the People's Republic of China. NEA International Literary Exchanges support U.S.-based presses in publishing and promoting contemporary anthologies in translation. Based in Port Townsend, Washington, Copper Canyon will receive $117,000 to support the translation, publication, and promotion of a bilingual anthology of work by 30-40 Chinese poets born after 1945.
Expected to be published in spring 2011, the anthology will be edited by award-winning poet and editor Qingping Wang, who also will write the introduction to the volume. The anthology will be co-translated by noted Chinese literature scholars and translators Howard Goldblatt and his wife, Sylvia Li-chun Lin, who jointly received the American Translators Association Translation of the Year award in 1999 for their translation of Notes of a Desolate Man by Taiwanese novelist Chu T'ienwen.
Via Three Percent.
Han’s magazine, which still doesn’t have a name to avoid imitations, is presented in this blog post. A very Chinese and a very “hanhan” announcement, interesting for several reasons. But before I speak of it let me give some background on Han Han. I’ve been planning to write about him for ages, and never found the time until today.
As an avid reader of the blogosphere since 2002, not a whole lot said was new to me (which makes sense since the primary audience was supposedly people in marketing/publishing—although most all of the questions were from translators). But as a student of literary translation, it was good to hear more about the active role that translators can take in promoting their books. This was actually the first question of the session and the individual made the point that translators already have to know about promoting their work to get publishers interested in the first place, but asked about what translators can do to promote their books to the public.
By Lucas Klein, May 4, '09
To commemorate the 90th anniversary of the May Fourth Movement, the South China Morning Post runs an article investigating
Left on the Shelf: Ninety years after the May 4 movement spawned a host of Chinese literary giants, Ben Blanchard examines why mainland writers remain largely unread internationally
As a tribute to the May Fourth Movement goes, it's no last-year's Sunday New York Times Book Review, featuring four new translations of Chinese literature, but then again, May Fourth doesn't fall on a Sunday this year.
What the South China Morning Post article does raise, implicitly at least, is the question of World Literature and its relationship to Chinese literature.
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By Eric Abrahamsen, May 3, '09
20,000 RMB for 34,000 WORDS (but lots of repetition, conversations mostly). Subject: three smart, funny modern women in contemporary Beijing. If you can finish the first draft by MAY 11th, there's a 5,000 RMB bonus.
Payment upon completion of final subs. Minimal interface with director required – maybe none at all.
Chris Barden is project managing this and will proof the final titles.
Contact directly: chris@hutongrobot.com
13911163683
By Nicky Harman, May 2, '09
The last literary event we organised took place in Edinburgh, Scotland on 27 April 2009. Tommy McClellan invited Han Dong to give a lecture on contemporary Chinese literature at Edinburgh University. (Nicky Harman translated it, and we read it in tandem, a paragraph in Chinese and a paragraph in English.) After questions, there was a translators' discussion, including Esther Tyldesley and Eric Abrahamsen. Click here for the lecture in Chinese and here for the English translation.
By Nicky Harman, April 26, '09
On Thursday 23 April we organised East meets West: Authors Talking to Authors - the most ambitious of our events in London. For the film of the event, click here. We brought together four authors, three based in the UK and one Chinese author – Han Dong, and to talk about writing, in a bookshop in Central London (Oxfam Bookshop, 91 Marylebone High Street, for you Londoners). It was to be a cross-cultural sort of discussion and we were aiming at a general audience, the sort of person who loves books but hasn't any specialist knowledge of 'world literature'.
From left: Aamer Hussein, Xinran, Richard Lea
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If you're the sort of person who's going to like Brothers, you'll know it by the 11th of its 641 pages. Having introduced the novel's tycoon hero, "Baldy Li", fantasising about space travel on a gold-plated toilet, the first chapter cuts back to his first notable achievement: spying on women who are defecating into a maggot-filled pit latrine. Gilded lavatories and cloacal voyeurism might be your thing; if they're not, then read no more, because things are only going to get worse.
Shuiru Dadi tells the tale of a multi-ethnic settlement in Lancangjiang Canyon—Gateway to Tibet—beset by battles between arrogant French Catholic missionaries, incompetent Han officials and their marauding troops, Naxi Dongba Shamanists, and the dominant Tibetans, not all of whom lead pacific, vegetarian lives in the local lamasery.
Chinese Books, English Reviews interviews Fan Wen (范稳), author of Shuiru Dadi (水乳大地). Nominated for the 2008 Maodun Literature Prize, the novel has sold nearly 50,000 copies in China, and Éditions Gallimard has acquired the rights to the French version...
By Nicky Harman, April 23, '09
Well, Eric and I have ‘done’ the London Book Fair, all three days of it, met 14 publishers, contributed to two seminars, drunk innumerable cups of coffee… and survived (just) to tell the tale. We did a short presentation to each publisher on what Paper Republic had to offer them, and listened to what they had to say about publishing Chinese books in translation. It was interesting that different publishers were looking for different kinds of books. (Encouragingly, a few are prepared to consider 'literary fiction’, the brilliantly written work, even though most of them said that what sells well is the main consideration.)
In a nutshell, they reinforced what we already knew:
- There’s a lot of interest out there in Chinese fiction, but few books actually make it into translation – and that isn’t going to change fast.
- The fact that most publishers can't read the texts in the original and contact the authors direct is a huge barrier.
More…
By Eric Abrahamsen, April 22, '09
Announcements have been made for the 2009 PEN Translation Grants, though the press release has not yet appeared online, we'll link to it when it does. The only Chinese-language grant went to my translation of Wang Xiaobo's collection of essays, My Spiritual Homeland. You can download a PDF translation of "The Silent Majority", one of the essays from this collection, by clicking here. This essay was originally published in the Asia Literary Review.
