Our News, Your News
By Eric Abrahamsen, August 23, '07
Cindy and I are currently working together on a subtitle translation project, for the short documentary films coming out of Ai Weiwei’s Fairytale project. Among the 1,001 Chinese people that Ai Weiwei shipped to Kassel, Germany, fifteen or sixteen filmmakers were included, and they’ve produced a series of small films about certain of the ‘artists’.
My first short film centered around Gouzi and Zhang Chi, which was a pleasant surprise as I’ve only known them, Gouzi in particular, by their writing. Gouzi is mostly famous for being drunk, it seems, and in fact the whole hour-long spot is sodden (the first shot is Zhang Chi blarging in someone’s bathroom). Most of it takes place at group dinners in various restaurants and living rooms around Beijing. The subjects represent a certain slice of Beijing’s literary community – 35 to 50, once hot young bloods, all devastated in one way or the other by the events of June 4th, 1989.
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By Eric Abrahamsen, August 21, '07
I'm re-reading George Steiner's After Babel, one of the great theoretical texts on translation, and this passage made me laugh:
Thus any light I may be able to throw on the nature and poetics of translation between tongues has concomitant bearing on the study of language as a whole. The subject is difficult and ill-defined. Regarding the possible transfer into English of Chinese philosophic concepts, I. A. Richards remarks: 'We have here indeed what may very probably be the most complex type of event yet produced in the evolution of the cosmos.'
By Cindy M. Carter, August 9, '07
I'm blowing off deadlines left and right, so don't have time to do a full translation of this chapter. Even though I'm not really in the game, just wanted to toss in a few low-denomination chips and support the translation of this tremendously influential and unfairly neglected Chinese author....long live Wang Xiaobo! And wansui to Brendan, Eric and Feng37 for bringing his words to life.
Her reasoning went like this: although everyone said that she was a slut, Chen Qingyang felt that she was not, because to be a slut you had to sleep around, and she had never slept around. Although her husband had been in jail for over a year, she had never slept around in his absence, nor had she slept around prior to his imprisonment. For this reason, Chen Qingyang simply couldn't understand why people insisted on calling her a slut.
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By Eric Abrahamsen, August 1, '07
Yesterday Bookslut ran an interview with Didi Felman, editor of Words Without Borders, on the joys and travails of running an indie webzine. In the midst of it she dropped a hint that WWB had an upcoming feature entitled 'Olympic Voices from China', so if any writers are currently reading this, hurry up and write something… Olympic? (via Three Percent)
By Eric Abrahamsen, July 29, '07
Yan Lianke is quite the interview subject! Australian paper The Age just ran a very long piece on Yan, which gives a wider window on his early development and attitudes towards writing than previous articles. He also mentions his current work in progress, possibly to be published next year:
The work in progress is an unflattering fable, "funny and ridiculous", about China's contemporary intellectuals, who Yan believes have been co-opted by the Government. "They lack the courage to face up to the real situation," he says.
Asked what the real situation is, he replies promptly: "Chaos. China is in chaos, politically, economically, medically, morally and some people are the beneficiaries of this chaos, including intellectuals. Those at the grassroots, the masses, are the ones suffering, but in facing this kind of situation Chinese intellectuals can't see clearly."
In the past, Yan says, there were great pressures on writers and it was understandable to some degree that people didn't dare speak out. But now, he says, there is no excuse. "Now it is a self-imposed censorship, so the situation is more tragic."
By John Kennedy, July 29, '07
All the needles in the brigade clinic were worn down and bent crooked, and they tended to take chunks of my skin with them. Eventually my back came to look like I’d been caught in some crossfire; the scars still haven’t faded since.
By Brendan O'Kane, July 28, '07
I suppose everybody hears the author's voice slightly differently when they're reading a novel. The translations in Wang in Love and Bondage didn't speak with the voice I'd heard when I read Wang's writing, and I thought it would be an interesting exercise to organize a group effort to re-translate 黄金时代, the novella that Wang was fondest of. Wang's widow 李银河 Li Yinhe kindly gave her permission, and so we were off.
Truth be told, she even admired whores a bit. It wasn’t a question of whether whores were good or bad; it was that she simply wasn’t one, the same way a cat isn’t a dog. If everyone goes around calling a cat a dog, the cat’s bound to start feeling out of sorts, and now that everyone was calling Chen Qingyang a whore, she was completely unnerved, as if she didn’t even know who she was anymore.
Download this as a PDF. [No longer downloadable, sorry]
By Eric Abrahamsen, July 28, '07
Before we get started here, a disclaimer: we didn’t start this site to snipe at existing translations, or hint haughtily that we could have done better ourselves, had only the gods of publishing smiled on us, rather than some other. Sour grapes have we none. And yet, the pain of seeing a favorite book or author to which justice has not been done… O, how the fingers itch to make amends! And so some of us have put together our own versions of the first chapter of Wang Xiaobo’s 黄金时代, not because Wang in Love and Bondage was so terrible, or our translations so much superior – think of them rather as fond tangents sprung from a work we found adept enough for inspiration, but not satisfaction. We offer them in the spirit of giving. They are also short, so as not to bore.
That spring, the team leader said I’d blinded his dog’s left eye, and now she looked at you cock-headed, like a ballet dancer. Since then he’d been making life difficult for me.
This download has been removed.
By Eric Abrahamsen, July 25, '07
A few days ago the Man Asian Literary Prize (aka the Asian Booker) announced the long list for its 2007 prize. Amid a large number of Indian candidates were a few familiar names: Mo Yan’s Life and Death are Wearing Me Out, Xu Xi’s manuscript Habit of a Foreign Sky, Guo Xiaolu’s 20 Fragments of a Ravenous Youth, and Jiang Rong’s Wolf Totem. Fleeting Light by Taiwanese writer Egoyan Zheng is also up there.
Five out of twenty-three: not a terrible showing for China, though clearly we’re not cranking them out like the Indians are (apparently two-thirds of submissions came from South Asia). It’s a happy day for Howard Goldblatt as well – the English versions of Wolf Totem and Life and Death are Wearing Me Out are both his handiwork.
The three-judge panel will select a five-book short list in October, and announce the winner November 10th in Hong Kong.
By Eric Abrahamsen, July 23, '07
There's a lengthy interview with Howard Goldblatt posted on Full Tilt, a "journal of East-Asian poetry, translation and the arts" put out by the English Department of the National Central University in Taiwan. It's the longest interview with Goldblatt I've seen.
No, the thing that's really killing translation in our field is literalism. Too many translators are afraid of the text, especially when they're first starting out. And I understand that, because I was too. They're all afraid of the text. You need to overcome your fear of the text, put some distance between you and it.
Good advice! (via danwei)
