GLLI (16) - Reincarnations: Chinese novels translated into English and into film

By Nicky Harman, February 16, '17

Many libraries stock both books and films – a good film can encourage people to read the book, and vice versa, and it can be very interesting to compare a book with its film, to identify the changes and to understand the reasons behind them. For this blog, I have selected five Chinese novels or novellas available in English translation, that have been turned into films for international audiences. The films are of books by Geling YAN, ZHANG Ling and JIA Pingwa, and I have been lucky enough to translate one book by each of them.

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Spotlight on Paper Republic, our blog for International Literature Showcase

By Nicky Harman, February 15, '17

Everything you wanted to know about us and Chinese-to-English translation! "Spotlight on: Paper Republic: Interview discussing the importance of high quality translators" Our blog on the International Literature Showcase

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GLLI (9) - Writing (and translating) the surreal, part two: the stories of Sun Yisheng - by Nicky Harman

By Nicky Harman, February 9, '17

Surrealist fiction, as exemplified by Franz Kafka and his Kafkaesque absurdities, feels like a very western phenomenon. But it is also a kind of story-telling that some excellent Chinese writers have taken to and given a style and a twist all of their own. Yesterday, I looked at the stories of Dorothy Tse, from Hong Kong. In my second blog on surreal story-tellers in China, I’m writing about Sun Yisheng, one of a small number of independent-minded young authors who have experimented with new styles and stories far removed from the literary realism pervasive in mainland China.

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GLLI (8) - Writing (and Translating) The Surreal, part one: Dorothy Tse - by Nicky Harman

By Nicky Harman, February 8, '17

Surrealist fiction, as exemplified by Franz Kafka and his Kafkaesque absurdities, feels like a very western phenomenon. But it is also a kind of story-telling that some excellent Chinese writers have taken to and given a style and a twist all of their own. Blair Hurley has a nice definition in her writer’s blog: ‘The most chilling or ominous surreal stories are where everything seems normal — until it gradually becomes clear that something is wrong, something is inescapable out of your character’s control.’ In a two-part blog, today and tomorrow, I’ll look at Dorothy Tse and Sun Yisheng, two contemporary Chinese writers who manage that feeling of ‘wrong-ness’, that juxtaposition of the normal and the weird, to perfection. In other ways, however, they are very different from each other and from classic western surreal writing.

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Marsh Award for Translated Children's Literature – Helen Wang wins with Bronze and Sunflower

By Nicky Harman, January 26, '17

The 2016 Marsh Award for Children's Literature in Translation was presented last night to our very own Helen Wang for her translation of Cao Wenxuan's Bronze and Sunflower. Celebrations and congratulations! More news and reviews to follow.

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2016 translations from Chinese

By Nicky Harman, December 4, '16

As usual, we have assembled a list of book-length translations from Chinese into English over the year. Congratulations to all authors and translators! This year’s list is longer than ever, and several books have won international prizes. Your additions, comments, corrections to this list are welcome - please leave a comment below and we’ll update the list. This is our fifth annual list; previous lists are here: 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015...........

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Nominate an organisation for the London Book Fair International Excellence Awards

By Nicky Harman, December 3, '16

In 2015 and 2016, Paper Republic were honourable runners-up. Asymptote won in 2015, Words without Borders in 2016. Anyone can nominate any group/collective/organization...so to put in your nominations, see below.

The London Book Fair and UK Publishers Association are seeking entries from non-UK organisations for The Literary Translation Initiative Award at the LBF International Excellence Awards. Closing date is 15 December 2016.

Organisations that have succeeded in raising the profile of literature in translation, promoting literary translators, and encouraging new translators and translated works should apply/be nominated.

Who is eligible? Any company or organisation operating outside the UK, whose scope of achievement is outside the UK.

This is a great opportunity to follow in some illustrious footsteps, to be recognised by your peers and get some good publicity for your company. The shortlist for the awards will be unveiled in February and the winner announced at a gala awards event on Tuesday 14 March, during LBF.

To enter or learn more about the awards go to www.londonbookfair.co.uk/awards

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Rates for different kinds of translation work

By Nicky Harman, November 20, '16

Remember that page squirreled away on the P R home page, called: FAQ for Translators?

Well, it's been updated here

Thanks to Dongmei for supplying some handy information on signing with a Chinese publisher.

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It's Women In Translation Month - and Paper Republic has been busy...

By Nicky Harman, August 1, '16

August is Women in Translation Month – and we're recommending some excellent women writing in Chinese.
From June 2015 to June 2016, the Read Paper Republic team published a short story/essay/poem translated from Chinese, one a week for a year. For last year’s #WITmonth we published four pieces written by women and translated by women (nos 7-10). The rest of the time, we didn’t pay too much attention to the gender of the writer. So it’s cheering to see that over the entire year, of the 53 pieces we published, 22 were written by women. They are all available online – free to view. Thank you to all our authors and translators.
Also , in May 2016, we drew up a list for The Literary Hub, of 10 CHINESE WOMEN WHOSE WRITING SHOULD BE TRANSLATED: WRITING FROM MAINLAND CHINA, HONG KONG, AND TAIWAN. Read it here: http://lithub.com/10-chinese-women-whose-writing-should-be-translated/

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Foyle Bookshop interview with Xinran and Xu Xiaobin

By Nicky Harman, June 25, '16

"Iron Girls to Leftover Women: What Next for Chinese Women?" is a blog I've just written for Foyles, a mega-bookshop in London (and elsewhere) with an impressive website including regular blogs. I approached them because I knew they'd ordered some copies of Xu Xiaobin (徐小斌)'s Crystal Wedding and I wanted to do some promotion for the book. But it's hard to interest the general reader in a (virtually) unknown author and book, so I decided to pick up on the piece Xu Xiaobin wrote recently for PEN Atlas, "A sea of red flags" and write about women. Xinran (薛欣然) has written a lot about Chinese women too, and was happy to be included...and so I ended up with two nice interviews. I have no idea if it will shift more books by both these authors off the shelves, but it felt like a worthwhile thing to do......

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10 CHINESE WOMEN WHOSE WRITING SHOULD BE TRANSLATED

By Nicky Harman, May 25, '16

Paper Republic collective and friends put together this list for LitHub.com:

"Most readers nowadays, asked to name a contemporary Chinese writer, could manage at least one. But the odds are that it will be a man. Yet the near-invisibility of Chinese women writers internationally is entirely undeserved. They flourish on the literary scene at home and have done so since the beginning of the New Culture Movement in the early twentieth century. We are quite proud that this list (drawn up by the Paper-Republic.org collective and friends) ranges so widely. There’s something here for everyone, from travel literature to novels and short story collections, from fantasy and sci-fi to meditations on love and loneliness, with plenty of dark humor along the way. We have included works from all over the Chinese-writing world–mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan (and one from USA too)."

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MAO BADGES — RED, BRIGHT AND SHINY (AND OPEN TO EVERY FORM OF CAPITALIST SPECULATION)

By Nicky Harman, May 25, '16

Terrific article by Helen Wang and Paul Crook:

"The British Museum collection of Mao badges currently stands at about 350 pieces. It’s part of the UK’s national collection of badges from all over the world. Since the catalogue of Mao badges was published, every so often I receive emails from people who have their own Mao badge collections, often numbering in the hundreds or thousands. One such person is Clint Twist, who, with only a little encouragement a couple of years ago, set up what is probably the first English language website devoted to Mao badges — and tweets a Mao badge almost every day @clinttwist.

More recently, I discovered that one of the British Museum volunteers, Paul Crook, had been a teenage Mao badge dealer in Beijing in the 1960s! Paul — who was recently interviewed by the BBC for a segment on posters from the Mao era — kindly agreed to talk about that time, vividly confirming Dikötter’s statement that “badges were the most hotly traded pieces of private property during the first years of the Cultural Revolution, open to every form of capitalist speculation.”

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Jade laptops and a library of books...

By Nicky Harman, April 21, '16

Natascha Bruce talks about starting out as a Chinese-to-English translator: "....it actually never occurred to me to make the link between literature existing in translation, and there being real people out there creating those translations. I don’t know what I would have said I thought happened, if pushed? That once you have studied Chinese for one hundred years and can prove, for certain, that you know everything – will catch every single hidden reference to a Tang poem without missing a beat – there’s a special ceremony and you are given a laptop made of jade and a library of books, and told to go forth and be the person to make them accessible to the English-reading world, something mystical like that."

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The Literary Translation Centre at the London Book Fair April 2016

By Nicky Harman, April 19, '16

Every year, the LTC hosts wall-to-wall panels and discussions about the highlights and lowlights of being a translator, and the business of translation in general, for the whole three days. We didn’t keep any notes but, thankfully, others did. Here’s a selection of blogs and articles.

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"Masked Dolls", London book launch

By Nicky Harman, April 15, '16

For London folk: Centre of Taiwan Studies "Masked Dolls" - An evening with the Taiwanese Author Shih Chiung-Yu.
28 April 2016, 7:00 PM, at Brunei Gallery, Room: B102, School of Oriental and African Studies, Malet Street, London WC1

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