We are proud to report that Eleanor Goodman has been awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to spend this coming year in Beijing as a Visiting Scholar at Beijing University. The grant will support her newest book-length translation of Chinese poetry.
Her book of translations, The Selected Poems of Wang Xiaoni 王小妮, is forthcoming from Zephyr Press.
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Liao Yiwu, Meng Huang, Maria Rosen: Performance in Stockholm
Liao Yiwu 廖亦武 reading his poem “The Massacre”, Meng Huang 孟煌 reading his “Letter to Liu Xiaobo in Prison” and Maria Rosén singing the Swedish folksong “Ballad from Roknäs”, 19th March 2013, 9 pm, Sergels Torg, Stockholm, Sweden
No End of Mo Yan
But he spent half his spoils on “a 200 sq metre (2,152 sq foot) property outside Beijing’s fifth ring road.“
In a piece called “Mo Money–Nobel prize winner’s novel attacks China’s food safety,” Week in China argues that because of the “10,000 dead pigs [that] turned up in the Huangpu River,” Mo Yan’s “most recently translated book – titled POW! – … seems almost eerily timely, even though the original Chinese version came out more than 10 years ago.”
Salman Rushdie on Chinese Censorship: “the reason that so many are upset with Mo Yan isn’t that he didn’t oppose censorship, but that he went out of his way to defend it.”
And in a piece I must have missed when it came out months ago, “Mo Yan: Frenemy of the State,” Nick Frisch argues that “In the Chinese tradition, literature does not exist as a sphere outside the state: literature is the state. Or rather, the state is literature itself.”
And in an interview, Mo Yan’s translator Howard Goldblatt says, “I take pride in the fact that the head of the Nobel Literature Committee told me in Stockholm how critical my English translations were in selecting Mo Yan as the 2012 laureate; I assume he said something similar to the French or Italian or Swedish translators, since the committee members read several languages, but, with one exception, not Chinese.” But: “On behalf of literary translators everywhere, let me declare that we have nothing to apologize for”
And pictures of the town Mo Yan grew up in.
Chinese professor fined in poetry row
File under: politics / poetry / criticism
BEIJING: A Chinese court ordered a controversial professor who claims descent from the ancient sage Confucius to apologize and pay a fine after a heated online row over poetry, local media reported yesterday. Kong Qingdong, a professor at the elite Peking University who sparked an outcry in 2012 by calling Hong Kong people “dogs,” said online that a student was a “dog-like traitor” for criticizing a poem he wrote, the Beijing News reported.
The poem was in the style of China’s Tang dynasty (618-906 AD) but the student said it rhymed incorrectly, a local newspaper said. “Your talk is not pertinent, you dog-like traitor,” Kong wrote on China’s twitter-like Sina Weibo service, sources said. A court in Beijing ordered him to pay the student 200 yuan ($ 33) in damages and make a public apology.
Foreign Echoes & Discerning the Soil at Hong Kong Baptist University
Lucas Klein: Foreign Echoes & Discerning the Soil: Dual Translation, Chineseness, & World Literature in Chinese Poetry
2013/5/30, 7:00 – 9:00 p.m. at Centre for Translation, DLB 601, David C. Lam Building, Shaw Campus, Hong Kong Baptist University, Renfrew Road, Kowloon Tong
Abstract:
What constitutes the relationship between world literature and Chineseness? How has translation shaped Chinese poetry, and can translation be understood as at the foundation not only of world literature, but of Chineseness, as well? This talk will begin to answer these questions by demonstrating how Chineseness as an aspect of the Chinese poetic tradition is itself a result of translation. Looking at Chinese poetry’s negotiation with concepts central to translation – nativization and foreignization, or the work’s engagement with the Chinese historical heritage or foreign literary texts and contexts, respectively – I argue not only that Chinese poetry can be understood as translation, but for an understanding of the role of such translation in the constitution of both Chineseness and world literature. After contextualizing recent debates in the field of Sinology and translation studies, I will examine the work of Bian Zhilin 卞之琳 (1910-2000) and his implicit vision for a world literature able to merge the Chinese literary heritage with Western influence. Since debates around world literature, especially in Chinese literary studies, focus on the modern era, however, I shift focus with a discussion of the Tang dynasty (618-907), when China had earlier become highly international, even cosmopolitan, in a detailed look at the history of Regulated Verse (lüshi 律詩), describing not only its origins in Sanskrit but how it maintained associations with Buddhism. Following this, I consider the work of Du Fu 杜甫 (712-770) to understand how the canonization of his work nativized Regulated Verse through its historiography. I conclude with a reconsideration of the ethics of world literature and translation in determining our understanding of the local.
Translation & Modernization Conference at Chinese University of Hong Kong
A Normal Interview with Xi Chuan & Lucas Klein
Editorial Intern Michael Gray asks Chinese poet Xi Chuan and his translator Lucas Klein tough questions concerning process, navigating translation, and the relationship between literature and reality. Lucas Klein performed the English translation of Xi Chuan’s book Notes on the Mosquito: Selected Poems (2012).
For Xi Chuan: What elements of your original text do you find are most altered in the process of translation?
XC: In my own writing, especially recently, I’m often very blunt, but bluntness can be very hard to translate. I’ve done a lot of translations myself, and in my experience imagery is relatively easy to translate; with musicality, or particularly rhythm, though it’s hard to match the translation perfectly with the original, it’s still possible to find comparable solutions. But with ideas expressed bluntly it’s easy to lose the poetry. Bluntness is a quality of late Borges, because in his early years he was playing with the Baroque. It’s also a notion of expression Milosz was fond of, coming from Eastern Europe. These two stepped outside the bounds of lyrical poetry.
See the full interview here.
“Close Approximations”: Asymptote Translation Contest
Chinese Literature Dissertation Reviews: The Hong Kong Crime Film
Dissertation Reviews has posted Yang Wei‘s review of Kristof van den Troost‘s dissertation, The Hong Kong Crime Film: Genre and Film Noir from the 1940s to the Present. Here’s how it begins:
Although an impressive amount of scholarship on Hong Kong cinema has been published in the last two decades, crime film as a genre has mostly evaded critical attention. Narrated in a keen, persuasive scholarly voice, Kristof Van den Troost’s Hong Kong Crime Film fills this gap by establishing the general lines of this important Hong Kong genre since its early inception in the 1940s. At the heart of this genre-oriented approach lies the author’s fundamental mistrust of the predominant academic practice in Hong Kong cultural studies, one that privileges the importance of 1997 and its impact on local identities. The single-mindedness of this approach often prompts scholars to find political corollaries in given film productions. Granted that no film can be truly independent of ideology and the dominant mechanism of socio-economic productions, the challenge here is to avoid overreaching, a mission the author suggests many have failed in various degrees. Common problems include “treating a film (or a select group of films) as a direct representation of society” and “singling out one film for a political analysis.” As a result, studies on Hong Kong cinema have become “more [focused] on ‘Hong Kong’ than on its cinema,” with many significant aspects of Hong Kong cinema, including the historical study of genres, remaining virtually unexplored.