Category Archives: Ruminations

Mo Yan and the World: Another Roundup

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Mo YanMo Yan 莫言, winner of the 2012 Nobel Prize for Literature, continues to be a topic of conversation. Following yesterday’s posting of “A Westerner’s Reflection on Mo Yan,” here are three other links to the relationship between Mo Yan–and by extension, Chinese literature, if not China–and the world.

First, Mo’s longtime translator into English Howard Goldblatt gives a brief take on the relationship between translator and writer, in “My Hero: Mo Yan.”

Then Julia Lovell, translator and author of The Politics of Cultural Capital: China’s Quest for a Nobel Prize in Literature, weighs in on the political responses in China and the “intellectually lazy … Western observers” in “Mo Yan’s Creative Space.”

Then, looking at Yang Mu 楊牧 winning the Newman Prize, Liao Yiwu 廖亦武 winning the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, and Mo Yan winning the Nobel–all in the space of a few days–Didi Kirsten Tatlow looks at “In 3 Awards, 3 Ways of Seeing China,” quoting observations from P K Leung and Michelle Yeh.

A Westerner’s Reflection on Mo Yan

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At the “International Conference on Chinese Literature in Global Contexts” at Beijing Normal University 北师大, World Literature Today editor Robert Con Davis-Undiano read his “Westerner’s Reflection on Mo Yan [莫言].” With Mo Yan winning the Nobel, WLT has posted it online. He writes,

Given Mo Yan’s stature and productivity, I propose that we view him as a possible test case to gauge the depth and quality of Western engagement with Chinese literature.  He is only one writer, but Western critics have responded strongly to his work, and how critics and readers react to a major writer is always revealing … I will argue that the Western active appreciation of Mo Yan signals a Western openness to Chinese literature and a deepening engagement with Chinese culture.

I will also argue that Mo Yan’s Red Sorghum (1986) is especially valuable for probing the Western response to his work and Chinese literature, owing to the significance of this novel in his production overall, the book’s grand scope, and the Western attention that the film Red Sorghum has already brought to the novel.

Read the whole piece here.

Found in Translation: Five Chinese Books You Should Read

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In yesterday’s post on the review of Bei Dao’s The Rose of Time: New and Selected Poems (New Directions, edited by Eliot Weinberger), I also mentioned the short collection of Bei Dao’s poetry Endure (Black Widow Press), which I translated with Clayton Eshleman. That collection earned a gracious mention–along with books by Yan Lianke 阎连科, Han Shaogong 韩少功, Yu Hua 余华, and Nobel Prize-winner Mo Yan 莫言–from the editors of Path Light on their Wall St. Journal blog post, “Found in Translation: Five Chinese Books You Should Read.”

Take a look at the full listing!

Review of Bei Dao’s The Rose of Time: New and Selected Poems

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Gryphon by Charles BaxterJonathan Hart reviews Bei Dao‘s 北島 The Rose of Time: New and Selected Poems (New Directions), edited by Eliot Weinberger, speaking “about these translations as if they were poems in English on which the reputation of the poet stands in the English-speaking world.”

He concludes that “Bei Dao’s poetry translates well in its bold imagery and implicit and oblique politics, using nature in a symbolism of indirection that is as subtle as it is apparent,” but he only mentions poems translated by Bonnie McDougall (Bei Dao’s early work) and by Weinberger (Bei Dao’s more recent work), not mentioning the poems translated by David Hinton.

For another recent collection of Bei Dao’s poetry in English, see also Endure (Black Widow Press), translated by Clayton Eshleman and me.

More Views on Mo Yan

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New Nobel Prize-winner for Literature Mo Yan 莫言 has, for obvious reasons, become a hot topic of discussion. I’ve assembled some of the analysis that’s recently appeared online in various forms.

First, my highschool classmate & translator from Swedish B J Epstein has written about the Nobel from an outsider’s perspective, bringing a discussion she and I had recently into her report.

Next, poet & translator Eleanor Goodman talks about the different reactions to the Nobel from within China and without.

Then, translator Bruce Humes covers the other side of the issue, demonstrating how “references deemed unbecoming to China’s image are often ‘airbrushed'” from a published Chinese translation of the NYTimes report of Mo Yan’s prize. And Brendan O’Kane asks “Is Mo Yan a Stooge for the Chinese Government?” (Brendan sez the short answer is ‘no’).

Next, Sabina Knight (Smith College) on Mo Yan’s Nobel (from NPR):

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Earlier, Granta‘s John Freeman interviewed Mo Yan (from Silliman’s blog):

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And PBS‘s Jeffrey Brown talks to Charles Laughlin (University of Virginia) and Xiao Qiang (University of California, Berkeley) about Mo Yan:

Mo Yan wins 2012 Nobel Prize

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Mo Yan 莫言 has won the 2012 Nobel Prize for Literature–a victory for those who support global pluralism in literature prizes, for those who believe in the legacy of Faulkner and García Márquez in contemporary international fiction, and for those who believe in giving a Nobel to a Chinese writer the Chinese government doesn’t oppose (belonging to one of these categories does not necessarily indicate belonging to either of the others). Congratulations also to Mo Yan’s translators in all languages, particularly Anna Gustafsson Chen in Swedish and Howard Goldblatt in English.

For readers looking for more, here is the press release for the Nobel Prize, the BBC’s beginner’s guide to Mo Yan, a good summary from 3% of Mo Yan’s writings available in English, and a section of an interview Howard Goldblatt did with himself for Chinese Literature Today. Still more? Here’s an article on the reaction in China, advanced ordering information for his forthcoming Pow!, an excerpt from another forthcoming work Change, and yet another excerpt from another forthcoming work, Sandalwood Death (pre-order Sandalwood Death here).

Yang Mu wins Newman Prize for Chinese Literature

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Taiwan-born and -raised poet Yang Mu 楊牧 has won the Newman Prize for Chinese Literature from the University of Oklahoma.

Yang was nominated by UC Davis professor Michelle Yeh, co-translator with Lawrence R. Smith of Yang’s collection No Trace of the Gardener (another volume, translated by Joseph Allen, was published as Forbidden Games & Video Poems: The Poetry of Lo Chʻing [羅青]). The other nominees were Hsia Yü 夏宇, Yang Lian 杨炼, Zhai Yongming 翟永明, and Ouyang Jianghe 欧阳江河, nominated by Jennifer Feeley (U. Iowa, USA), Michel Hockx (U. London SOAS, UK), Wolfgang Kubin (Bonn U., Germany), and Zhang Qinghua 张清华 (BNU, PRC), respectively.

Rare for contemporary Chinese poetry, all nominated poets have single-author collections available in English translation. Coincidentally, three of the nominees–Hsia, Zhai, and Ouyang–have had their only books in English published by Zephyr Press.

Poetry International Interview with Eleanor Goodman

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Poetry International has published its interview with poet & Chinese translator Eleanor Goldman, whose responses include a plug for Xi Chuan’s Notes on the Mosquito–she calls it “an example of the work of a mature poet working at the top of his craft”! Here’s how she explains how her interests in Chinese poetry began:

I’m embarrassed to say that when I first lived in China, it was as though Chinese literature didn’t exist. I remember being so starved for something to read that I asked my father to send a box of books, and he mailed by freight a box packed with Gogol, Faulkner, and Dickens. I have no idea how he came up with that list, but it was life-sustaining. At that point, my Chinese wasn’t good enough to read anything but the simplest of texts. But when I got back to the States and started to read as part of my efforts not to forget Chinese, I encountered some wonderful books of poetry. I had brought back a children’s addition of the famous compilation, Three Hundred Tang Poems 唐诗三百首, and I started to go through it systematically. I understood a tiny percentage of the allusions, but I basked in the richness of the imagery and related to the cleverness of language and emotional depth of these little lyrics. I memorized dozens of them and would recite them to myself while taking walks. Then in graduate school at Boston University, I took Rosanna Warren’s amazing translation workshop, and as my final project I translated a selection of Wang Wei poems into English. They were terrible translations, but I didn’t know that at the time. Rosanna encouraged me to send them to the Seneca Review, which published three of them. That was a much nicer welcome than any of my own poems had gotten at that point, so I thought, this is a great racket, I’m going to keep doing this. Several years later, the poet and translator Afaa Michael Weaver asked me to help him put together a contemporary Chinese poetry conference at Simmons College, where he teaches. That was my first introduction to contemporary Chinese poetry and it knocked my socks off.

Click here for the full interview.

Gamsa on Chinese Translations of Russian Writing Reviewed

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200The MCLC has just posted Roy Chan’s review of two scholarly books by Mark Gamsa, The Chinese Translation of Russian Literature: Three Studies and The Reading of Russian Literature in China: A Moral Example and Manual of Practice. Here’s the second paragraph of the review:

The development of good scholarship on Sino-Russian literary relations has been obstructed, perhaps foremost, by the linguistic difficulty of the endeavor. There are precious few scholars who are equally at home working in both Russian and Chinese sources, a task made more arduous when the scholar in question is neither Russian nor Chinese. Beyond issues of linguistic difficulty, however, is the problem of having a sufficient grasp of the national literatures of either Russia or China and the cultural, historical, and methodological problems that accompany the concept of the national. Linguistic expertise cannot gloss over a ham-fisted sense of literary terrain in either the Russian or Chinese context, especially considering how the latter are bound up with contentious ideological and political struggles. In the face of these daunting challenges, Mark Gamsa’s admirable control of the major issues that underlie both Russian and Chinese literatures, together with his encyclopedic ability to pull together numerous sources and facts, makes him the envy of anyone who attempts the treacherous study of 200transcultural literary and textual history. While I have some reservations about points of framing and interpretation (particularly with regard to the second book), these two books chart the course for future studies and different perspectives. For these reasons, Gamsa’s contributions deserve to be recognized as nothing short of trailblazing.