Eric Abrahamsen on Chinese Writers Remembering Yan’an

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Over at the NYTimes blog Eric Abrahamsen of Paper Republic has, with characteristic sarcasm, written about the recent edition of One Hundred Writers’ and Artists’ Hand-Copied Commemorative Edition of the “Yan’an Talks.” So what were the “Yan’an Talks” 在延安文艺座谈会上的讲话? Eric describes:

The Yan’an Talks on Literature and Art, delivered in 1942 by Mao Zedong, laid out his plan for the role of art in Chinese society. Seven years before the establishment of the People’s Republic, Mao was essentially telling artists that in a future Communist paradise they could expect to work solely in the service of the political aims of the party.

Well! And?

This year is the 70th anniversary of the talks, and there’s nothing unusual about state-owned publishers bringing out commemorative editions of political texts. This one would include facsimiles of several historical publications of the talks, as well as a new version pieced together from hand-copied passages by one hundred contemporary Chinese writers. And it was likely to go nowhere but warehouse shelves, next to thousands of commemorative books like it.

But the hand-copied feature caught the notice of online commentators. Among the hundred calligraphers were most of China’s best-known and respected authors, including Mo Yan, Su Tong, Jia Pingwa and Han Shaogong.

Interestingly, some of the writers who wanted to have nothing to do with this project–I’m thinking of Yan Lianke 阎连科–are the writers I consider most interested in “serving the people” 为人民服务, though perhaps not in the way everyone wants the people to be served. No word on whether Xi Chuan took part in this commemoration.

Read the whole piece here.

Mike Frick on Yan Lianke’s Dream of Ding Village

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Dream of Ding VillageOver at The China Beat (they have my favorite tagline on the web: Blogging How the East Is Read) is Mike Frick’s review of Dream of Ding Village 丁庄梦 by Yan Lianke 阎连科. The novel was translated by Cindy Carter, though you’d never know it from reading Frick’s review. Here’s an excerpt of Frick describing the writing:

Yan’s writing is at once richly metaphoric and attuned to the rhythms of Chinese farming life. He describes needle marks on the underarms of blood sellers as “angry red sesame seeds” and pinched veins as “fat-streaked pork.” Mostly this language is effective, though at its weaker moments the metaphors can feel overwrought, particularly in the dream sequences that mark major turning points in the plot. Dreams haunt the sleep of Qiang’s grandfather and serve as convenient devices for moving the narrative forward, although this sometimes occurs at the expense of good story-telling. Major revelations about Ding Hui’s greed and artifice are revealed through lushly animated dreams that allow Yan to transcend the narrative strictures of time and place. Through these dreams we see Ding Hui ingratiate himself with government officials until they appoint him chairman of the county taskforce on HIV/AIDS. In his first move as chairman, Ding Hui intercepts the free government-issued coffins intended for AIDS patients in Ding Village and sells them to other AIDS-affected villages for a profit. For his efforts, he labels himself a “philanthropist.” Left without coffins, those dying in Ding Village ransack the school for blackboards and desks to build their own. The transformation of the school into a funereal supply yard carries particular poignancy given China’s storied reverence for learning and scholarship.

Elsewhere on the web you can find The Transparent Translator: Cindy Carter on “Dream of Ding Village”, where Cindy is interviewed by Bruce Humes.

Douglas Robinson on Bonnie McDougall’s Translation Zones in Modern China

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200Douglas Robinson, Chair of English at Lingnan University, has reviewed Translation Zones in Modern China: Authoritarian Command versus Gift Exchange, by star Chinese literary translator Bonnie McDougall, for Modern Chinese Literature & Culture. Here’s an excerpt:

In one sense, the core of the book is McDougall’s recollections of living in Beijing from 1980 to 1983, working full-time as a Chinese-to-English translator for the Foreign Languages Press (FLP) and translating poetry by Bei Dao and other “unofficial writers” on the side. […] This is the strategy that makes for some awkwardness in the book: McDougall is constantly converting her personal experiences into an academic ethnography of an institution, while also frequently reminding us that most of what she is telling us she knows from personal experience. The book is neither frank memoir nor memoir disguised as something more impersonal and academic; it is both at once, and to achieve that effect it travels a shifting line of conjunction between the two.

There are also great advantages to this strategy. One is that, at least part of the time, we are situated in a temporal phenomenology that gives us a sense of the insecurity of real life lived in time–the fact that one never knows, experiencing a given state of affairs, how long that state is going to last, and whether it’s going to get better or worse. When McDougall arrived in Beijing in 1980, the Cultural Revolution had ended just scant years before; the forces that had organized and fueled that dark period were still around, and seemed occasionally to be gathering strength, as in the “anti-spiritual pollution” crusade of 1983 and 1984. At several points McDougall gives us a sense of the fear many felt at the time that the campaign was a resurgence of the Cultural Revolution. Deng Xiaoping was then just beginning to liberalize the Chinese economy, and the first signs of that opening, whose blossoming we see so clearly today, are visible in this period as well. What we see in the transitional period she describes is not a stark contrast between “China then” and “China now” but significant historical tensions and continuities that help us understand not just the PRC from 1980 to 1983, but something like the last half century of Chinese history.

BBC News – June 4, 1989

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In many ways, 1989, the year I turned eleven, represents my awakening to the fact of politics in other countries, both because of my age and because of what happened around the world that year. And the first step in that awakening was following the news about what was happening in China, at a time when news crews had gathered to cover Gorbachev‘s visit–the first from a Soviet leader since the ’60s. So I have always known something about what has been called the “June Fourth Incident,” but I had not seen this particular broadcast until today:

Traductions de Xi Chuan

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Some time ago this blog received a comment from Agnès Dupuis, a PhD candidate in Montréal writing her dissertation on Xi Chuan and translation into French. We started a brief but illuminating (for me, anyhow) correspondence, with her explaining the background of her argument to me via email.

Recently I came across some of her published translations of Xi Chuan’s early work, including three poems I’ve translated for Notes on the Mosquito–“Écho” 回声, my “Echo”; “Il a vieilli” 一个人老了, my “A Man Ages”; and “Mener un troupeau à la mer” 把羊群赶下大海, my “Send Your Flock to the Sea” (her first translation, “L’automne, en Quatorze Lignes,” is from Xi Chuan’s 秋天十四行, which we decided not to include). Here’s how she begins “Écho“:

Tout être est comme une ville

Il est un écho

 

Les briques et les pierres entassées repoussent l’océan vers le lointain

Le brouillard, aux petites heures du matin, se confine

 

Et toutes ces forteresses qui nous protègent de l’horizon

Mais qui donc autrefois allait faire paître le troupeau ?

NYRblog on Red Pine

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Ian Johnson at the New York Review of Books’ bloghas a nice piece on Chinese poetry translator Bill Porter (a/k/a Red Pine 赤松) and his second life as a writer for a Chinese audience, in Finding Zen and Book Contracts in Beijing. Here’s a key paragraph, which explains the importance of cross-cultural currents that have allowed non-Chinese scholars of pre-modern China to end up explaining Chinese culture to Chinese people:

In the travel writing that has made him so popular in China, Porter’s tone is not reverential but explanatory, and filled with humorous asides (such as the traveler’s need for a good laxative, or his twenty-year pursuit of a Guggenheim fellowship). His goal is to tell interested foreigners about revealing byways of Chinese culture. Unexpectedly, this approach also works for Chinese, many of whom are about as removed from their culture as Porter’s target audience is in the West. But this means that what is a niche market in western countries—the Chinese culture enthusiast—is a mass market in China. It also helps that Porter is a foreigner. Many wonder how foreigners see this complex culture, which during the 20th century Chinese writers, thinkers, and politicians blamed for their country’s demise.

The article also mentions the plight of the translator, economically speaking: “For most of the past decade, he says, his annual income has hovered around $15,000. Several of his books humorously thank the US Department of Agriculture—for providing food stamps that have kept him and his family going.” And as a Facebook friend of mine, a poet and former publisher who lives near Red Pine in WA, wrote: “Bill Porter spends 20 years in a Taiwanese Zendo studying Chinese classics while Stephen Mitchell spends 20 hours in a library studying what other translators have done with Tao Te Ching. Guess who gets rich in America and who gets by on food stamps.” I should add, though, that if it weren’t for Mitchell’s twenty-some hours, I may not have ended up studying Chinese in the first place.

For some of Red Pine’s thoughts on translating Chinese poetry, here’s a piece I published on CipherJournal, back in the day: Dancing with the Dead: Language, Poetry, and the Art of Translation.

Back Cover Blurbs

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Xi Chuan’s Notes on the Mosquito intercepts the traditional loveliness of the pastoral lyric with the close inspection of city eyes. This remarkable book traces the evolution of a poet who is simultaneously contemplative and social, a world-wanderer firmly rooted in his native Beijing. After the quashing of the student movement in 1989 and several years of self-imposed silence, Xi Chuan resumed writing at a point between two ends—between poetry and history, between poetry and philosophy, poetry and religion. He writes with a calm, ever-curious, and questioning intellect—a poet supremely interested in “now” and firmly resistant to either nostalgia for, or amnesia of, “then.” This welcome, bilingual selection by one of China’s preeminent contemporary poets opens more long-sealed doors to the complexity of his homeland.

—C. D. Wright

Michelle Yeh on Dan Murphy’s translation of Over Autumn Rooftops: Poems by Hai Zi

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200At Modern Chinese Literature & Culture, esteemed scholar Michelle Yeh 溪密 has a review of Dan Murphy‘s translations of Hai Zi 海子 (an early friend of Xi Chuan’s) in the collection Over Autumn Rooftops. A fan of the translations overall, Yeh’s enthusiasm emerges most when she discusses the poetry, as follows:

What readers will find–and enjoy–in Over Autumn Rooftops is a poetry of considerable complexity. Hai Zi draws on a wide range of literary sources: from the Book of Odes and Qu Yuan to Homer and Greek mythology, from canonical works to folk literature. His early poetry suggests influences by his older contemporaries, such as Shu Ting and Duo Duo. His images exhibit a tendency toward the primal (water, fire, sky, earth, fish, bird, seasons) and the sublime (“the king,” God), and he often identifies with village, sun, prairie, and wheat (“beautiful, wounded wheat” [237], “wheat in despair”). His language is simple yet tinged with mysticism, effortlessly crossing the boundary between the inner and the external world.

Click here or the image above for the review.

New Directions New Homepage

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New Directions has updated their website’s homepage, with my translation of Xi Chuan’s Notes on the Mosquito making the display, right between a new collection of Kenneth Rexroth’s writings, Thomas Merton On Eastern Meditation, and Natasha Wimmer’s translation of Roberto Bolaño‘s first novel.

Duo Duo at the Prague Writers’ Festival

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Duo Duo by Petr MachanThe Chinese poet Duo Duo 多多 attended the Prague Writers’ Festival last month, and they have put up a page of his interviews, readings, prose as translated by John Crespi, and poetry translated by Mai Mang 麦芒. Also included is Duo Duo’s acceptance speech for 2010’s Neustadt Prize, also translated by Mai Mang as “This Is the Reason We Persevere,” which seems to voice the starting point of China’s Obscure Poetry 朦胧诗 poetics:

Even as I speak, remnants of the 1970s still resound, and contain every echo of the reshaping of one’s character. One country, one voice–the poet expels himself from all that. Thus begins writing, thus begins exile. A position approaches me on its own. I am only one man; I establish myself on that. I am only a man.