The new issue of Cha: An Asian Literary Journal is now live. Guest edited by Divya Rajan (poetry) and Bob Bradshaw (prose), it features work by Sarah Stanton, Eddie Tay, Kim Liao, and others.
I’ll be guest-editing Cha‘s “Ancient Asia Issue,” scheduled to launch August 2013. See also their earlier publication of my translation of five sections from Xi Chuan’s “Thirty Historical Reflections” 鉴史三十章 from their China Issue.
In yesterday’s post, “On the Tyranny of Big Languages,” I wrote that “so-called ‘smaller languages’ are actually languages of fewer speakers.” I put it this way to get away from the notion of stature-as-importance, and trying, in the case of Europe, to give a neutral presentation of why English, French, German, and Spanish might be considered “big languages” in comparison to the languages of the authors featured in the linked-to article, viz. Bulgarian, Romanian, and Czech. And in the case of Europe, not only is that true, but English, French, and Spanish are languages spoken in countries around the world, making them even bigger both in population and power.
Originally thinking about languages big and small in the context of Europe meant I could bypass the question of whether Chinese–one of the world’s most widely spoken languages, but still a “less commonly taught language” (LCTL) in the west–was a big or small language. I meant to give examples about the translation of Chinese into European languages was dependent on first being translated into English or French (here’s another one: the Greek version of Soul Mountain 靈山 by Gao Xingjian 高行健 was translated from the French version by Noël Dutrait; and another: in Norway, editors “follow the line-by-line edits made by US and UK publishers” of Chinese translations), but then I mentioned that the first Chinese edition of what we know in English as One Hundred Years of Solitude was translated from Russian and English editions… Is this to suggest that Chinese is a small language, then?
Well, in terms of international power, yes (although it is one of the official languages of the UN), though in terms of population clearly not. More specifically, in terms of translation into other languages, I don’t think publishers around the world are looking at what’s successful in the Chinese market to base their decision on what to do next, and the translation market in China clearly looks to other countries’ successes. Big and small are relative and vague terms, but when it comes to translation, it’s pretty plain that China is a follower rather than a leader. If we apply this retroactively to understanding the world system, we might say that while it’s clear that the current world system is not a representational democracy, it’s also clear that China could do more–or act differently–to set an international cultural agenda.
Publishing Perspectives has published a perspective on a panel in which three European writers–Bulgaria’s Kalin Terziiski, Romania’s Răzvan Rădulescu, and the Czech Republic’s Tomáš Zmeškal–discussed the state of literature and literary publishing around the world. The whole piece is worth a read, but to me, the most interesting question is whether, for writers in lesser-spoken languages, translators are more important than literary agents. The point is put this way:
Zmeškal went on to say that unless a writer is translated into one of the big languages – English, French, German, Spanish – then it becomes very hard to get translated into the smaller languages because those publishers are waiting for the kind of validation that comes with being published in a big market.
It’s not hard to see why. Since so-called “smaller languages” are actually languages of fewer speakers, there’s both a higher pressure on speakers of those languages to master the “big languages,” especially English, as well as a lower likelihood that enough speakers of those languages will master other languages–such as Chinese, say–at the level required to produce good translations. This has resulted in some interesting outcomes: in Romanian, one translator has been responsible for both contemporary fiction and medieval literary theory; the first translation of Cien años de soledad into Chinese was done from Russian and English, not Spanish; and then of course there’s Croatian poet Miroslav Kirin‘s translations of my translations of Xi Chuan… But fundamentally this is a big problem: we know that translations only account for a measly 3% of books published in the US each year–and according to Chad Post, “in terms of literary fiction and poetry, the number is actually closer to 0.7%.” This means that not only are Americans exposed to appallingly little from the rest of the world, but American ignorance ends up enforcing itself upon the rest of the world’s literary cultures, as well. Of course, this is a phenomenon not limited to the world of literary publishing.
If literature from smaller languages needs the help of translation into English before it can be translated into other smaller languages, then I’m afraid that literature from smaller languages isn’t getting much help.
The new issue of Plume is here, with new work by, among others, Arthur Sze and Tomaž Šalamun, translated by Michael Thomas Taren.
Click here for my translation of Xi Chuan’s “The Ant’s Plunder” 蚂蚁劫, published in Plume last November. And follow this link for information about Chinese Writers on Writing, edited by Arthur Sze, which includes my translation or essays by Xi Chuan and Bian Zhilin 卞之琳.
Kurt Devrese‘s Alligatorzine is here with new updates, work by Jen Hofer, Anthony Seidman, and Jerome Rothenberg in Dutch (translated by Devrese himself).
For Alligator‘s earlier publication of my Xi Chuan translations, check out these: “A Personal Paradise” 个人的天堂, “Friends” 熟人, “Companion” 伴侣, “Drizzle” 连阴雨, and selections from “Answering Venus (45 Fragments)” 回答启明星(45断章).
Congrats to Andrea Lingenfelter for winning the Northern California Book Awards for her translation of The Changing Room (Zephyr Press), a collection of poems by Zhai Yongming 翟永明. Click here for my my review of The Changing Room, and here for the full list of NCBA nominees and winners (Michael Palmer won in the category of poetry for his New Directions book Thread).
The translation-centered webside 3% (run by Chad Post of Open Letter Books) has published my review of Jonathan Stalling‘s Yingelishi: Sinophonic English Poetry and Poetics. Here’s how it begins:
If poets are, as P. B. Shelley wrote, “the unacknowledged legislators of the world,” then translation must be one of the unacknowledged legislators of poetry. Certainly translation of Chinese poetry has been essential to modern American writing: Ezra Pound’s Cathay didn’t just invent, as T. S. Eliot put it, “Chinese poetry for our time,” it invented the possibility within English for modes of writing recognizable as somehow Chinese. Poets as dissimilar as Charles Reznikoff and Stanley Kunitz, or Charles Wright and J. H. Prynne, have built careers inhabiting these modes; from Gary Snyder’s Mountains and Rivers Without End to John Ashbery’s Mountains and Rivers, we know Chinese whispers when we hear them in American poetry because we have read Chinese poetry in an English first invented by Pound.
Never mind the inaccuracies that have often come with translating poetry from Chinese to English; inaccuracies have been one of poetic translation’s more fruitful possibilities: Aramaic gamla may mean both “camel” and “rope,” but would we cite the Bible’s suspicion of the rich entering heaven if not for the striking surrealism of camels passing through needle-eyes? Or, in that case, mind the inaccuracies, because through them a kind of poetry is born. And this is the kind of poetry that Jonathan Stalling brings us with Yingelishi: Sinophonic English Poetry and Poetics.
The 43rd Poetry International Festival Rotterdam has begun. I wonder why there are no Chinese poets participating this year.
Over at The Iowa Review editor & translator Russell Scott Valentino has a quick post about the Banff International Literary Translation Centre titled Making World Literature. Here’s a paragraph:
Yesterday we talked at some length about methods of reading, preparing a text, working with authors, and revising. It is sometimes said that translators can’t do anything about the plot of the works they translate, but this seems to me an oversimplification and not really correct, because the effectiveness of the plot is always dependent on pace, and pace is a function of language at the level of phrase, sentence, and paragraph, which is what translators have control over. They can easily make a plot ineffective, so the obverse must also be true. Our conversation reminded of Amy Leach’s discussion of “exhilirated intermediaries,” which at times seems apt here.
Valentino also mentions the the sessions where writers are visited by their translators, among them translator into German Beatrice Fassbinder visiting Jeffrey Yang, whom she’s translating. In addition to being a poet and translator (most recently of June Fourth Elegies 念念六四 by Liu Xiaobo 刘晓波), Yang is my New Directions editor for my translations of Xi Chuan in Notes on the Mosquito.
Julia Lovell’s review of No Enemies, No Hatred: Selected Essays and Poems of Liu Xiaobo 刘晓波, edited by Perry Link, Tienchi Martin-Liao, and Liu Xia, is now up on Modern Chinese Literature & Culture. Here’s an excerpt:
Reflecting Liu’s own political turn after 1989, the editors of No Enemies, No Hatred have focused on his more engaged writings–those that led to his most recent prison sentence and that played a significant part in his winning the Nobel Prize–rather than on his literary criticism. Unsurprisingly, the events of spring 1989 loom large throughout the collection, for these protests and their aftermath would prove to be a turning point in Liu’s career and personal life. In the years preceding 1989, he had won notoriety in China primarily for his contrarian literary and cultural views: for excoriating Chinese creative writing of both the Maoist and post-Mao eras. “Shit, the Chinese are just hopeless,” he impishly declared, condemning the new avant-garde writing of the 1980s as stagnant, repetitive, and imitative. In America when the Tiananmen protests broke out, he vowed to “do” rather than “just talk,” and flew back to Beijing to become one of the movement’s leaders. His involvement in the demonstrations led to the loss of his Beijing teaching post, two jail sentences before his 2009 trial, and a publication ban in mainland China.
Despite being a translator herself, Lovell does not mention translation in her review. Nor does she discuss the poetry included in the volume, though she does mention, parenthetically, that “(Those interested primarily in Liu’s poetry can refer to a new parallel-text edition translated by Jeffrey Yang, entitled June Fourth Elegies.)” I would have been interested in seeing a review that could look at both books together, or at least describe the role of the poetry in assessing Liu’s writing–why, for instance, is it included in No Enemies, No Hatred at all?