Our News, Your News
By Eric Abrahamsen, April 25, '08
We here at Paper Republic strive to bring you the latest and greatest in Chinese language usage, and we’d be criminally unhip if we failed to alert you to the most recent Really Cool Thing on the internet: 囧.
This little beauty is pronounced jiǒng. It is a very old character, appearing on turtle shell inscriptions (甲骨文) from thousands of years ago; while it has many meanings, the most basic is light coming through a window, rather evident from its shape. The more leet among you, however, will note that its also shaped rather like a frowny face: that’s right, 囧 is the hip new way of saying 郁闷 (yùmen, to be bored or depressed or down). Can you feel the grandeur of 5,000 years of history? Read on for advanced usage.
By Eric Abrahamsen, April 21, '08
After an evening spent sipping Qingdao and grumbling about the low profile of Chinese literature abroad, we're generally forced to concede that baby steps are the only practical solution to the problem. There's a chicken-and-egg dynamic going on with publishers – they won't publish a book in translation if the author has no name recognition, but without publication authors have precious little means of getting recognized. Realistically, what's needed is a slow-drip campaign of small-scale publication, word of mouth, and literary journalism. It will be slow, but it's the only way that the attention of publishers and readers can be drawn to a wider selection of Chinese fiction.
So it's good to see two recent advances in that campaign. First was the Olympic Voices from China issue of Words Without Borders: a collection of translated short stories drawn heavily from some of China's better female writers: Sheng Keyi, Ye Mi, Liu Sola and others. Not all of the translations are top-notch, but it's good to see these writers represented. Sheng Keyi's Little Girl Lost got good treatment; you can hear the strangeness of her Chinese in places: "Ripples spread from the doorframe as water slid back from both sides, showing off the bright slickness of his skin."
The other is a books issue of Public Radio International's The World program. The contributions are knowledgeable, ranging from an article on China's Nobel Prize complex, to a review of Zhu Wen's I Love Dollars, to an interview with Yu Hua. Our Cindy and our Brendan are in there too!
I suppose only incremental progress is real progress…
By Eric Abrahamsen, April 8, '08
The pre-dinner hour at Moganshan was often given over to talks and presentations by various course participants; the group leaders one evening, the writers the next. These presentations could be eye-opening in terms of the widely-varying approaches people take to this business – Bonnie McDougall and Howard Goldblatt, for instance. There was almost a kind of glee in the way Bonnie described her translations: leisurely, considered, I think she even described herself as spoiled in being able to pick and choose, freed by her position at the Chinese University in Hong Kong. Howard, on the other hand, was very much the harried professional man, and talked of funding and negotiations, work he'd taken to make the rent. Bonnie goes patiently from beginning to end; Howard generally starts somewhere in the middle and jumps around. Howard hates the second draft more than anything; Bonnie goes and reads a book until the aha! moment comes.
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By Eric Abrahamsen, April 7, '08
With all the excitement going on these days, staying home and translating the words of dead authors can feel a little irrelevant, if not actually escapist. I'm neither a Qing historian nor a diplomat, so won't stray too far from my comfort zone of language and literature, but I do think there's something to be said about the Chinese responses of rage to the reporting of the foreign media.
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By Nicky Harman, March 28, '08
It wasn’t all work and no play…
Some of us went to a local restaurant.
The local produce was fantastic. Here’s the menu:
Cold Starters 冷菜
Pickled bamboo shoots (bamboo grows everywhere and gets into everything).
Wild ‘herbs’ 野菜 with chopped beancurd (the herbs were about the size and thickness of chives, and had a slightly astringent flavour).
Warm salad of chicken giblets.
Salad of cucumber slices.
Fried dried fish slivers.
Hot dishes
Soup of chicken and terrapin.
Red-cooked wild boar.
Red-cooked wild rabbit with bacon.
Red-cooked game chicken (野鸡 unspecified, maybe partridge).
Scrambled eggs with fungi of some sort.
Deep-fried fishes (about the size of whitebait) mixed with lots of deep-fried bay leaves and chilli peppers.
Stir-fried greens and various other dishes of stir-fried vegetables, more or less 野.
Local beer; local tea; local grain spirit (白酒).
Total cost 100 RMB, which including treating our leader, author and helper.
Wow!
By Eric Abrahamsen, March 28, '08
"PEN believes there are currently 38 writers and journalists imprisoned in China for exercising their right to speak and write freely, as guaranteed under Chinese and international law. We are concerned that, despite official pledges to respect essential rights in this Olympic year, Chinese authorities continue to harass and detain writers in violation of their right to freedom of expression."
By Eric Abrahamsen, March 28, '08
The night of March 23, a Sunday night in the brand-new Grand National Theatre, where the National Centre for the Performing Arts was putting on a version of Puccini's Turandot. Ping, one of the emperor's three ministers, stands forward to lament, "O China, o China, che or sussulti e trasecoli inquieta" ("O China, O China, now always startled and aghast, restless"), and what comes up on the Chinese subtitle screen? "O World, O World, now always startled and aghast…"
Because we've become fragile to the point where words of a fictional character in a Western opera written in 1920s are sufficient to bring us down. Or are our national feelings so easily hurt? Or is it part of the gentle campaign to blur the edges of things, to recast what's seen and heard in a way that leaves a false impression, while stopping short of out-and-out dishonesty?
Funny how these little things can touch off the rancor you've otherwise kept well in check…
By Eric Abrahamsen, March 28, '08
The arena: The second floor of the Baiyun Hotel, an enormous official meeting hall some of us have dubbed the Great Hall of the People, complete with velvet curtains, raised podium, and (apparently) refrigerated wooden chairs.
The contestants: Jiang Rong, author of Wolf Totem, and Howard Goldblatt, translator of that novel into English.
The grudge: Billed as a conversation between translator and translatee, the event was actually a chance for Jiang Rong to air his grievances about Howard Goldblatt’s translation. The two are actually pretty chummy, but neither was averse to a little dustup – Goldblatt started off by essentially leaning back, folding his arms, and saying “do your worst”.
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By Eric Abrahamsen, March 20, '08
The awards are out! PEN has announced the recipients of the 2008 awards; China is represented by Andrea Lingenfelter, who won a grant to translate Annie Baby's Padma, "the story of two disaffected city-dwellers who set out on a quest-like trek in a rugged and remote area of Tibet." No publisher has picked this up yet, but word is the award itself has generated a lot of interest. Congrats!
By Eric Abrahamsen, March 20, '08
The first thing you learn from group translation is how vital privacy ordinarily is to this kind of work. Laboring in solitude, in whatever state of disarray or distraction you please, is a luxury – and something of a necessity. As a general rule the first three drafts of anything are execrable, and being able to drown those drafts in the confidence that no one will ever know they existed provides such peace of mind. Silly ideas surface and subside without being much exposed to the light of rational judgment, and the final forms of things are gently extracted from this unarticulated mess.
It’s alarming, to say the least, to be given a chunk of a Chinese novel and asked, “So, how would you translate that first sentence?” while everyone in the room watches you. I think we all started out more or less aghast that we’d be asked to perform, in a sense – if we were comfortable with that we’d have gone into interpretation. But, of course, there are salutory things about this public disrobing – most immediate is the way it zaps your emotional investment in your translation. You stammer out something far, far inferior to what you might have produced had you been sitting alone at your own desk in your boxer shorts, and then everyone in the room tears it apart. Three rounds of that and you no longer regard your words as your own. Which, of course, they weren’t to begin with.
We’re doing about six sentences an hour on Tie Ning’s Dayunü (大浴女), chewing over every article and preposition, dueling for adverbs, and the main lesson so far has been one I’ve learned over and over, and will probably continue to learn until I give up on this altogether: You’ve never thought hard enough about what you’ve written.
