By Eric Abrahamsen, July 30, '08
The Guardian continues its foray into Chinese letters with a brief reading and audio interview with Zhu Wen:
"I am a quite ordinary person. Ordinary means, I think, [someone who] can't express what he feels. In China it's rare that people could do that, they keep silent. Speaking out, and facing the reality of China, is a writer's job. You must do it.
By Cindy M. Carter, July 29, '08
Claire Li's post on the Make Do Studios website analyzes some of the reasons Bertelsmann AG's business model failed in China:
"Why did Bertelsmann's China business fail? Some people say it has to do with the prevalence of pirated books here. But obviously, people who hold this view have not caught on to the state of the book market in China nowadays [...]
"Bertelsmann continued opening bookstores around the country without realizing how greatly the internet would influence people's shopping habits. People buy books on Dangdang and Joyo for its wide selection, low discounts, fast delivery, its payment-upon-receipt system, and freedom from any membership requirements like having to buy a book each month. Bertelsmann, by contrast, not only had a limited choice of books and poorer discounts, but it added another requirement last year that its platinum members had to spend RMB 299 per year or else be bumped down to a lower level. An understandable amendment, since the book club's overhead is high, but nobody wants to be forced to spend money."
Update: Another take on Bertelsmann's China venture (from Chen Gang, a journalist at China Publishing Today)
By Eric Abrahamsen, July 26, '08
"Jin, who teaches English at Boston University, said Saturday he's interested in visiting China but is discouraged by the difficulty of publishing Chinese translations of his English books in the mainland. He said he also applied to become a visiting professor at the elite Peking University in Beijing in 2004 but never heard back."
"Instead, the writer's focus is his new life in France, a country he had visited several times as an interpreter before his exile. He now has French citizenship and said he had no trouble integrating into French society, something he attributes to having grown up with Western culture."
A Defense of Jiang Rong's Wolf Totem:
"Also welcome, in my view, is Jiang Rong’s willingness to merge his tale of environmental destruction with an open discussion of Han Chinese cultural and political imperialism."
By Eric Abrahamsen, July 26, '08
Has it been a year already? The long list for the 2008 Man Asia Literary Prize has been announced; only three of the twenty titles are Chinese. In our corner:
The qualification rules for the competition state that the books need to be submitted in English manuscript, but the English version must not have been published yet. Banished! and Brothers have publication dates, but I hadn't heard that anyone was translating Leave Me Alone, Chengdu. Murong Xuecun's appearance on the list is interesting – he was one of the early internet authors, writing vaguely adolescent stories of youth and urban anomie, but he's taken on a steadily more 'serious' tone. I haven't read Chengdu, but I head it's pretty good. Anyway, if anyone knows who translated either Brothers or Chengdu, leave a comment! The shortlist arrives September 1st, the final winner to be announced at the end of September.
Via Three Percent.
Update: Murong Xuecun's book was translated by Harvey Thomlinson, and there's a lengthy excerpt online here.
By Eric Abrahamsen, July 23, '08
Catherine Sampson, author and longtime China resident, picks her ten favorite China novels (all in English translation, or originally in English).
By Eric Abrahamsen, July 18, '08
From the past fifty years. So says The Times, at any rate. One Chinese book, Gao Xingjian’s Soul Mountain, and that almost certainly because Gao is a Nobel laureate. On the other hand, if I had to vote for a best Chinese-English translation from the past fifty years, I’d be hard-pressed to come up with a definitive champion…
Update: Esther Allen, Executive Director of the Center for Literary Translation at Columbia University, posted this up on the Guardian about the list of 50, in which, alongside ruminations on the books that made the list, she mentions that the recommended translation rate posted on the British Translators' Association webpage is 80 pounds per thousand words of prose! Golly.
By Eric Abrahamsen, July 16, '08
If I'd ever considered hurling my wooden clogs into the guts of Babelfish's machinery (in a Luddite attempt to preserve my livelihood as a manual laborer of the mind) this should bring some comfort.
By Canaan Morse, July 15, '08
He Qifang (1912-1977) was a poet, essayist and revolutionary of the Modern Period, one of the group of well-heeled but oppressed and intellectually voracious young people who, having at one point campaigned for democracy, threw their lot in with the Communist Party once the Nationalists proved themselves incompetent at solving the country's problems. He began as a poet and a creative nonfiction writer, and his first publication Record of Painted Dreams (hua meng lu) is composed of a series of brief but intense pieces of poetic prose, which in their manipulation of tense and image show a kind of sensitivity that is hard to find anywhere else in the literature of that period.
The more I listen to Wolfgang Kubin, the more his opinions unsettle me, but I agree with him in spirit on one point: the sixty years before 1949 produced an incredible amount of original, well-wrought and moving work. Most of it has fallen through and disappeared into the gap that opened up between the last generation of China students and this one, in part due to a lack of good quality translations, which damages its appeal as fashionable literature. He Qifang is an extreme example of a first-class writer who has been almost entirely forgotten.
Below is one of the shortest entries in the Record, entitled The Peddler. I'm gonna take it on faith that it's bad manners to copyright, though I do plan on publishing this later.
By Eric Abrahamsen, July 14, '08
As you might have noticed, we’ve made a few changes to the website. The main thing is that it now runs on a different framework – besides that and a few very small bells and whistles, the most noticeable change ought to be that it's much snappier. The new system will pave the way for future grandiosity, as well.
With any luck the transition will go smoothly – your comments and suggestions are very welcome!
edit: I forgot to mention that, while the old RSS feed address will redirect to the new one, you might as well just subscribe to the new address directly. Sorry for the hassle!
By Eric Abrahamsen, July 12, '08
A week or so ago I attended the press conference for The Next (文学之新), a new literary competition designed to sniff out the newest in Chinese literary talent. Most of you may know this already, but Chinese writers are generally referred to by the decade of their birth. So-and-so is a 70s writer, or an 80s writer, etc. Whether there’s any real utility to this kind of classification I don’t know – I suppose it’s possible that China’s recent history has changed so dramatically, so swiftly, that any given ten-year cohort might actually have something in common.
The 80s writers were the last hit sensation, but the sad truth is that Father Time spares no one and they’re starting to show their age – graduating from college, developing taste in music, having sexual experiences, etc. The Next is the mutual brainchild of the Yangtze River Art and Literature Publishing House, Top Novel magazine, Penguin, Sina.com and the Qidian literature website, and the goal is a return to the purity of the under-25 set. The competition is accepting submissions from now until the end of September, following which comes several rounds of elimination: from 36 contestants to be announced in December, to a grand champion by next July. Each month in between will see another, smaller group of contestants announced in that month’s issue of Top Novel.
This competition is interesting both for the muscle behind it – major foreign and domestic publishing houses, as well as two of China’s largest internet portals – and for the judging panel. Top Novel magazine is an element of the Guo Jingming franchise, and Guo Jingming is the major star power behind this project. Guo, of course, is a definitive 80s writer – possibly the most famous of them, certainly one of the richest, without a doubt the most glittery. He’s on the judging panel, but right there with him is one of China’s hoariest authorities, Wang Meng. Wang Meng is a government writer of the old school: genuinely talented, a smart guy, but also a past master of toeing the line. The rest of the panel includes Zhang Kangkang, Wang Haipeng and Hai Yan – they’re aiming for a mix of market appeal and literary cred.
The press conference was a standard affair – emphasis on the fairness and openness of the competition, and major stress on picking works that are ‘positive’ (积极的) and ‘sunny’ (阳光的). Take heed, ye adolescents! If life sucks and you hate everybody, keep it to yourself! I’ll save the odiousness of ‘sunny’ as a mind-control adjective for another day. My favorite quote came from Guo Jingming, describing his reaction to the submissions so far: “Now I know how my esteemed colleagues on this panel must have felt when they read my writing for the first time. I just don’t understand it.”
