Our News, Your News
By Lucas Klein, March 16, '09
In the comments following the recent and ongoing discussion on book reviewing, Paper-Republic contributors have raised the issue of footnotes. Cindy Carter first wrote,
I've often wondered if it might not be a good idea to return to endnotes in fiction translation. Readers who want to crack right through can do so and not get hung up on the fine print at the bottom of the page, but those who crave more cultural or historical background can flip to the back and read what could well be some fascinating tidbits.
Bruce Humes responded in the affirmative, but also asked,
But how are the footnotes presented? Where they are placed -- on the page itself, at the end of a chapter, or at the back of the book -- what sort of information do they contain, and how they are written are all very important.
Bruce's questions are certainly essential to deciding whether we want to allow footnotes into our translations. Likewise is his admonition against those who would "argue that it is the translator's job to remain 'invisible.'"
The issue seems to be centered around "academic" versus "popular" translations, or publications of translations, and how footnotes have been conceived as a hallmark of academic writing. But while that's certainly true, I wonder if a look at publishing history in Chinese can't help us figure something out about how to use the footnote when we translate.
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Chinese novelist Mo Yan was awarded the first Newman Prize for Chinese Literature in the Sandy Lightwell Gallery at the Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art on the University of Oklahoma campus the night of March 6.
Peter Gries, Harold J. and Ruth Newman Chair in U.S.-China Issues director and associate professor...noted that there is disappointment present among many Chinese that the first ethnic Chinese to win a Nobel Prize for literature in 2000, Gao Xingjian, is based in France, but expressed pride that the Newman Prize "is the first major American-based prize for Chinese literature. "
We'd like to see more of this: at Paper Republic Bruce Humes posted about Brothers & How Reviewers Review, discussing Jess Row's review of Yu Hua's Brothers in The New York Times Book Review -- and got comments from both translator Eileen Chow and reviewer Jess Row.
An interesting discussion, too, especially regarding what one can/should expect from American readers of Chinese fiction...
According to January 2009: Top 30 Best-selling Children’s Books:
Translated yarns: Fully 1/2 of the Top 30 were originally written in a foreign language...
Serial novels and novelists, for one. The latest Tibet Code installment-- volume 5! -- now ranks high on the list of Top 30 Works of Fiction, like all four of its predecessors. And 3 different novels by Guo Jing-Ming are apparently being snapped up like hotcakes nationwide...
“The Vagrants” begins on March 21, 1979 — the spring equinox — which is this careful writer’s way of telling us that a long winter of privation and darkness may be giving way, at last, to the blossomings of spring. It is set in one of the new nowhere towns of Mao Zedong’s China, 700 miles from Beijing, a bare, rationed place of small factories and overcrowded shacks laid out in anonymous rows. Eighty thousand people live in Muddy River, essentially migrants from the countryside, and, almost in the manner of a documentary filmmaker, shooting in black and white, Li homes in on a few typical souls whose names alone give you something of the settlement’s flavor: Old Hua, Teacher Gu, a dog called Ear, a deformed 12-year-old girl called Nini and a teenage boy as brutish and unassimilated as the name he brandishes, “Bashi.” All are victims of a crippled society that has effectively outlawed humanity and made innocence a crime.
Some of Xinran’s interactions are extraordinary. She locates practitioners of vanishing Chinese crafts — including lantern makers and the “news singers” once widely found in traditional tea houses — and meets a 90-year-old survivor of the Long March. She interviews General Phoebe, a Red Army commander born in Ohio, who managed to survive the Cultural Revolution with her rank, health and self-esteem intact. Mr. and Mrs. You, married petroleum engineers who helped tame the remote Daqing oil fields in northwest China, describe sleeping outdoors in sandstorms and surviving on an improbable diet of grapes and melons.
But the problem isn’t just a matter of idiom. “Brothers” simply doesn’t fit into any narrative category familiar to the Western reader. It begins as a sentimental family-epic-cum-romantic-comedy: Baldy Li and his stepbrother, the sober and dutiful Song Gang, are orphaned during the Cultural Revolution. They then fall in love with the same woman, the beautiful Lin Hong, whom Song Gang finally wins over and marries after a byzantine “Cyrano de Bergerac”-style struggle. But in the beginning of the second volume, the novel morphs into broad historical satire. Bereft and humiliated, Baldy Li turns his attention to making money, builds an empire as China’s foremost trash collector and scrap dealer, and uses his fortune to create an all-virgin beauty competition in order to prey on its contestants, yet ultimately finds that his rapacious sexual appetite is only making him miserable.
By Lucas Klein, March 6, '09
More for the files on how translation intersects with censorship:
How Beijing Butchered Sean Penn's "Commie, Homo-Loving" Oscar Speech
and the original article from Shanghaiist:
CCTV says no to commie homo-loving sons of guns
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By Eric Abrahamsen, March 6, '09
The following was provided by Stacey Duff, Art Editor of Time Out Magazine.
Celebrated Norwegian writer Olav H. Hauge has been translated into Chinese by Beijing-based poet, Xi Chuan. Xi Chuan translated the work in collaboration with Norwegian professor Harald Bockman and Norway-based Chinese translator, Liu Baisha.
Photo courtesy of Gøril F. Borgen/The Norwegian Embassy in Beijing
Hauge spent his entire life working as a fruit farmer. Reading these poems, you immediately sense a closeness to the land. Frequent appearances are made, for instance, by the sea, the moon and the wind. Hauge's earthiness is furthered by the fact that he spoke and wrote in the dialect of Western Norway, where he lived.
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Like most English-speaking students of Chinese literature, I first encountered Chang in her own English version of The Golden Cangue (金鎖記), and in the long passage from Jasmine Tea which C.T. Hsia (夏志清) included in his seminal history of modern Chinese literature,” Kingsbury said. “Those stories made a strong impression but, to tell the truth, I didn’t really understand why Hsia had praised her so highly until I read Love in a Fallen City in Chinese.
The forbidden love for the book has become a motif of the memoirs and literature of the Mao years (1949-76), when banned volumes, stealthily read, offered the promise of freedom for captive minds. Kang Zhengguo’s gripping and poignant memoir, “Confessions: An Innocent Life in Communist China,” intelligently and fluently translated by Susan Wilf, revolves around one man’s passion for bound volumes of all kinds — classics of warfare and poetry, adventure novels, foreign fiction, and Kang’s own diligently kept diaries. Books are the cause of his political troubles, catalysts for his misadventures, his deepest solace; ultimately, they become his ticket out of China to a position as a language teacher at Yale.
“Song [of Everlasting Sorrow]” is a wonderful entry point into the world of contemporary Chinese literature, but it does much more than simply tell the reader things they “need to know about China.” I think the book tells us things we need to know about the human condition, about relationships, desire, our dreams vs. the everyday, and the weight of time and history on the individual. The novel may be set in China, but this is truly one of the masterpieces of world literature (at least the original is, I can’t speak for the translation!) and really speaks to much larger themes.
Yan Lian-Ke's take on his fellow Chinese ‘intellos':
"Je critiquais le silence et l’inaction des intellectuels qui se disent 'il n’y a pas moyen d’agir, dès lors on n’agit pas'… Et ils cherchent tous à s’intégrer dans le système. Les intellectuels sont victimes à la fois de l’attrait du marketing et de la répression politique."
While researching Oscar screeners last month, I stumbled on a remarkable example of online collaboration in China that's completely undiscovered here. In short, a group of dedicated fans of The Economist newsmagazine are translating each weekly issue cover-to-cover, splitting up the work among a team of volunteers, and redistributing the finished translations as complete PDFs for a Chinese audience.
By Cindy M. Carter, February 27, '09
An excellent podcast features Bill Marx of Public Radio International/PRI World Books interviewing John Donatich, director of Yale University Press. Topics include the Margellos World Republic of Letters, a newly-endowed fund to support the translation of foreign literature into English (C-E translators, take note!), the dearth of book coverage in mainstream western media and the role of university presses in publishing and promoting translated literature.
By Eric Abrahamsen, February 24, '09
…with nine members of the extended family and only one child, five-year-old Zhang Xinyu, who naturally becomes the center of attention. Sing us a song, Zhang Xinyu! Come give your auntie a hug, Zhang Xinyu. Zhang Xinyu, what do you call everyone here? The poor child has to go around the table and recite everyone's kinship to him: What's so-and-so's name, and what do you call him/her (你管他叫什么)? 老姨姥 (maternal grandmother's youngest sister)… 老舅姥爷 (maternal grandmother's youngest brother)… I'm slumped in my chair, worried I'll be tested next – after four years I know the names of almost no one in my wife's family (no one ever uses them!), and still occasionally forget which is aunt number two and which is aunt number three. I call according to my wife's position in the family, which makes things easier, but still I could never compare to the five-year-old Zhang Xinyu. He goes around the table, acing each one except for my mother-in-law, whom he calls 老舅妈 (mother's youngest brother's wife), instead of 老舅姥姥 (maternal grandmother's youngest brother's wife) – he's heard his mother call her that, and gotten his generations wrong. He comes around to me: What's his name? "Eric." What's his Chinese name? "陶建." What do you call him? "小姨父 (mother's female cousin's husband)." And what else do you call him? "美国大个子 (the big American)." Well done, Zhang Xinyu…
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Mr. Yu is concerned that his critics are no more independent thinkers than their counterparts in the Cultural Revolution, which ran from 1966 to 1976 -- while Mr. Yu was growing up. In those days, China turned into a totalitarian madhouse focused on the personality cult of leader Mao Zedong. Now, over the past three decades, China has embraced capitalism with the same level of fervor. "China has these huge bubbles," he says. "The Cultural Revolution was the world's biggest revolutionary bubble and now we have the world's biggest capitalist bubble."
The problem with writing about today's China, he says, is that change is so rapid it's almost impossible to do it justice. "China's changes are like hundreds of years of European history compressed together," he says "The Cultural Revolution was like our dark ages. Now we're in the 21st century, just like the West. From one era to the other, it's almost too fast."
Yiyun Li's 2005 debut story collection A Thousand Years of Good Prayers earned her comparisons with Chekhov and Alice Munro. Her first novel, The Vagrants, draws heavily on the art of the short story as it follows a disparate group of citizens of the industrial town of Muddy River over three months in 1979. It is three years since the death of Mao, and in the capital there are glimmers of hope for those who dream of greater freedom - a democratic wall has been erected, where people can express their views of the Party without fear of reprisals. But in Muddy River, provincial officials are nervous that rumours from the capital will lead to unrest.
The new system, which went into effect at the start of this year, issues book numbers on a per-title basis, eliminating the surplus ISBNs that could be sold off to unlicensed cultural companies. Established relationships between officially-recognized publishers and private book studios were not expected to suffer under the new system, but the prospects for purveyors of inferior-quality and harmful books were not so hot.
[Murong Xuecun] also is viewed as a pioneer of what has become nothing short of a literary renaissance online in the country, particularly among young Chinese writers. This is a constituency that has struggled to find a platform for their work in a publishing industry that is viewed as conservative as it often faces state censorship. Instead of remaining silent, a new generation of authors has found its voice on the Web.
First, one pays for the injustice he does. If you play with fire all the time, you will get burned. This is a rule of history. It often takes a long time for the rule to manifest itself. But in the case of CCTV, it took effect immediately. Although it is a news agency, CCTV has no journalistic standards or morals. It would have been an illegal entity in many other countries in the world, if it did what it is doing now in China.
By Eric Abrahamsen, February 14, '09
Renditions, an international journal of translations of Chinese literature into English, is looking to hire an Assistant Editor; see this link for application details.
By Lucas Klein, February 13, '09
An article from The Economist titled “The Little Red Bookshop” was recently emailed to subscribers of the MCLC List (the email listserv of the Modern Chinese Literature & Culture resource center, and the source of a good deal of the announcements we make on Pap-Rep). The article notices a possible resurgence of leftist thought in China, centered around a bookstore called Utopia, “the term used to describe those nostalgic for Mao Zedong’s rule and worried that the country is abandoning its communist principles.” For anyone familiar with Marxist ideology, though, “Utopia” is a strange name: wouldn’t those really nostalgic for the pre-Reform & Opening-up era believe that Marxist-Leninist Mao Zedong Thought was the only outcome of the capitalist class struggle, and therefore an embodiment of Scientific, not utopian, Socialism?
But “Utopia” attracts attention not only because of its false poli-sci consciousness. Following the posting of the original Economist article, somebody sent in a reply about the translation:
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Critics are already lauding Brothers by comparing it to Bonfire, but one is authentic Dickensian down and the other is serviceable fiberfill — and, in this instance, it's not the Chinese product that's the knockoff.
Live: Mo Yan, Howard Goldblatt, Xi Chuan, Rabih Alameddine (Lebanese author of The Hakawati), launch of Wang Gang's "English" and much more during March 6-20 -- tickets on sale now!
By Eric Abrahamsen, February 5, '09
Has a whole year gone by already? Applications are currently being accepted for the 2009 Chinese-English Literary Translation course, to be held in balmy Suzhou between March 15-21, by the good graces of the Penguin Group, Arts Council England, the General Administration of Press and Publications and the University of Western Sydney. We had a blast last year, you should apply. Details to follow:
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By Lucas Klein, February 5, '09
Last night I met the translator of Mò Yán’s 莫言 Red Sorghum 紅高粱家族 (English translation by Howard Goldblatt) into Romanian. Copping to the Translator’s Invisibility I’ll leave the Romanian translator unnamed—I hesitate to speak with that authority when I haven’t conferred with him about what I’ll be writing, and I’m not sure I could spell his name correctly anyhow—but I will say that he’s primarily a scholar on the Wénxīn diāolóng 文心雕龍 (Carving Dragons from the Literary Mind) and his previous translations into Romanian include the Lǎozǐ 老子, or the Dàodé Jīng 道德經.
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Instead of using hanzi directly, let's invent a new system-- we'll call it yingzi, "English characters"-- that would work for English exactly as hanzi works for Chinese.
By Eric Abrahamsen, January 30, '09
*The following is the translation of a blog post by Li Yinhe (李银河), widow of the writer Wang Xiaobo (王小波).
Some publishers came to talk about a manuscript, and left me one of their own books as a sample of their work. The writer's name is Feng Tang, both of which characters you can find in the Hundred Names [a compendium of the most common surnames in China]. My guess is that his father was surnamed Feng and his mother surnamed Tang; I've met other people who got their names that way. The title of the book is You Live and Live and Then You're Old (活着活着就老了), which caught my eye. I looked through it and it's excellent, I couldn't put it down once I'd started, and read it all the way through in a day and a half.
Apart from a few later pieces about Beijing and Hong Kong that weren't that good, and apart from a few places where the same phrases were used repeatedly in different essays (was the writer too busy to read the whole thing through before publication?), and apart from some harsh evaluations of Wang Xiaobo, the book was very, very good.
In it he mentioned laughing out loud twice while reading Wang Xiaobo's books. Reading someone's books and laughing however many times: I'll borrow this phrase, and say that I laughed out loud seven or eight times while reading his book. I developed asthma after I came back to China in 1988, and though it got better it never entirely went away: I have an athsma attack every time I have a laughing fit; listening to crosstalk is a risky business for me. This book nearly did me in; there were eight times I almost had an attack. If I ever have the opportunity to meet this person I'll have a bone to pick with him.
In the book he divides writers into those who "spit out" one book, those who "spit out" two books, and those who "spit out" many books. His use of the word "spit" hit me like a thunderclap: I had once imagined that real literature might be in my future, but the word "spit" dispelled my fantasy for good. I asked myself if I really had anything I needed to spit out, and concluded that I should just stick to my sociology, and enjoy life in my spare time.
They say that the media is in the hands of the generation born in the 1970s. Of the people mentioned in Feng Tang's book, I've read the writing of Luo Yonghao [whose Bullog blog site was recently shut down] and He Caitou; they must be approaching 40 now. They're 20 years younger than us, a whole generation. They've already become the pillars of modern China's intellectual world; we should have respect for our juniors.
