Classic Epics of Chinese Literature: Search and Destroy

just from memory, without actually checking, lots of the reviews of serve the people mentioned sex + emphasized the political heresy involved with the sex. feidu's sex scenes are weird and maybe more exciting for the suggestion that jpw deleted sections but it's mild compared to the online genre fiction that is 95% of the chinese literary market. when it was officially re-released in 2009, most chinese language reviewers made mention of the sex, which is integral to the novel, but the reputation was no longer a dirty book that people hid behind more respectable volumes on their bookshelf.

i would encourage anyone reviewing the book or seeking a deeper understanding of it to read y1y4n w4ng's narrating china: jia pingwa and his fictional world which has the only serious writing about feidu in english and not buried in academic journals.

it's a good guide too if you want to read it in the original.

Yeah, reading it once I'm back in Wgtn - y1y4n's head of department & super lovely; going to try to get as much read as possible while we're still both in the same city.
Good point re: online genre fiction ... things are so schizophrenic between what's sanctioned/soft-powered and what sells, though obv I have no idea what current phds are writing about.

While I remember - have you read 李佩甫《羊的门》 / if so, would you recommend? V.v. shallow, but there's a lovely looking new edition of it in bookstores atm + obligatory NZ sheep jokes &c ... since I'm leaving so soon and I still can't believe how insanely cheap books are, I'm trying to fill up my suitcase with untranslated things to work up to reading.

yes, and, as you said shallow, a very simple national metaphor-type book written under the influence of both pre-liberation satirists like lu xun and peasants as backdrop socialist realist novels--not in its aims or mode of depicting the people but clearly influenced by it, a mirror version of a zhou libo novel. i was going to try to draw a circle around the banned (was it?) early 90s big novels but i see it actually came out in 1999. i think he's kind of a big deal, actually, but with zero interest from overseas readers, even with a novel in translation. i think dengdeng linghun was well reviewed?? but basically the same book as he's always written.

i guess the rerelease is timed to coincide with his maodun win for shengming ce.

Note from Goldblatt on the various floating-around translations of 《废都》:

http://u.osu.edu/mclc/2015/12/27/golblatt-translation-of-abandoned-capital-2/

right. the two guys jpw mentions are hu zongfeŋ6 and robiŋ gilb4ŋk. i found it hard to believe that they would have said "yeah, we're just interested in translating your bricklike masterpiece as a fun exercise." i got in touch with hu zongfeŋ6. he didn't do it as an exercise and he's still waiting for someone to publish it.

he seemed unaware of the goldblatt translation coming out and ignored me when i asked about it.

i also got a chance to look at the zongfeŋ6/gilb4ŋk translation and... it wasn't as bad as i expected. 1) they stood by jpw's request not to change a single sentence. extremely literal translation. it's a good reference, if you want to read it in the original. i wish they'd just be dicks and throw it online. 2) it reads a lot like yang xianyi or another prc translator, very foreign literature press.

http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2016/04/translating-nine-pounds-of-poetry/

Complete Du Fu in English, facing-page texts, online for free. Hmmmn. + NYRB's republishing David Hawkes' A Little Primer Of Tu Fu in June.

Finally dug a bunch of stuff out of storage; was leafing through some 80s Edinburgh Reviews (from an Alasdair Gray phase) and was startled to see excerpts from a translation of 《水浒传》 into Scots as Men o the Mossflow by Brian Holton. Huh.

Also, on recent-ish-ly discovered/restored pre-Qin texts: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/04/21/revolutionary-discovery-in-china/

i'd heard mention of the pre qin texts but never paid attention, thought that they were more fragments. the story is fascinating. i'd like to know more about how/where they were found. interesting stuff.

http://www.nickstember.com/jia-pingwa-project-sample-translations-four-novels/

!!

dude!

i better get started on it, huh

exciting news despite my minor role in it. stember has put in countless hours of work on this.

Xue Yiwei's Shenzheners, translated by Darryl Sterk:

http://www.lindaleith.com/publishings/view/47

's nice that Hao Jingfang won a Hugo, and AFAIK Chen Qiufan's The Waste Tide is getting translated?

the xue yiwei story is interesting because i've honestly never heard of him? and he lives in montreal. i will be picking up the translation.

have a random Chinese writer-y friend living on Waiheke Island (which y'know) that I've been sporadically WeChatting w/; they were a fan of some of the stories from online mags but were surprised I'd heard of him.

hope the Stember project is ticking over. lmk if there's a Kickstarter or something, heh.

yes something should be appearing soon! the funding is from 贾平凹文化艺术研究院--a nonprofit but must be some chinese government funding, right? i'm excited to see what everyone else comes up with because these are astonishingly dense and complex novels.

i'm working on a book for clt/uoklahoma press-- different author-- at the same time and flying thru it compared to the sentence by sentence battle that translating jia has become.

any recommendations on legit online magazines for contemporary fiction?

is the consensus that the goldblatt translation of abandoned capital/ruined city isn't all that good? it's kind of affectless and lightly twee but idk how much that reflects the original

https://twitter.com/GraniteStudio/status/773517865852936192

he had the hardest job in modern translation (all previous attempts that floated around were unimaginably bad) + supposedly wasn't that into it/wasn't impressed with his own work.

as someone about to hopefully publish a jia pingwa translation + knowing the challenges and how much he was paid/work involved, i'm not going to last into it but it wasn't very good, no.

lay into it

what makes jia so difficult to translate? i am hopelessly monolingual so all of this is alien to me

combination of low language-- dialect/levity/local references -- + high -- classical references, admissions to poetry/opera etc. hard to get the tone right. sexuality/earthiness feels hard to bring into english.

long books.
really require extensive footnotes top really get a lot of the layers/references. narrative mode (?) more similar to i dunno a 19th century epic or work of late ming/qing vernacular-- dissimilar from modern western novel in many ways.

thanks, that's very interesting. i would welcome extensive footnotes but i suspect these are not exactly big-budget blockbuster productions.

i typed "profanity" not "levity."

footnotes nearly always discouraged by editors.

http://www.ugly-stone.com/shaanxi-opera/

sweet! had blanked on this revive but y1y4n just fwded me nick's email about the website + talking about an mla conference in ny early 2018 - you going?

cashed in a bunch of book vouchers to order in the gei fei & mirage on nyrb + shenzheners; friend home for xmas from chengdu gave some 90s diary-ish pop lit to read in the original but been a bit lazy w/it.

maybe. any thoughts on the sample? it's tough to grind jpw into english.

i'm reading/translating dong xi right now, another bestseller unknown outside china-- decent writer, often hacky sometimes brilliant.

Half-way through this profile on chinese novelist Yan Lianke. What I love is the way the writer relates most episodes in this encounter to some aspect of Yan's satires of modern day China.

it's a hell of a piece. i love scene with the former party secretary in the old town.
i think we discussed it on the rolling china thread. yan lianke occupies a weird position in the literary bureaucracy inside china but most view his overseas acclaim with jealousy.

I really want to read some of his books next year.

has to be among the least read threads on old ilx, but i always see it at the top with its bookmark.

my translation of jia pingwa's shaanxi opera is coming out probably late this year... the fifth jpw book in like three years, all different translators, crappy publishers printing a hundred copies to get the chinese government subsidy, no reviews or readers, a real mess, but that's how things go sometimes, and this'll be on amazon's translation imprint and flogged hard.

i'll be back in beijing and xi'an from the end of march to mid-april, if anybody's around, too.

in AmazonCrossing? Cool! I will be getting that.

you got it.

amazon is a wicked force but they pay
translators well and promote books.

global capital, it's a mixed blessing

They publish so much translated literature. More than anyone else, i think?

at least in english. in other languages they're mostly cranking out genre fiction and it makes sense i guess. in chinese it's been a book of short stories from shaanxi, lu nei's young babylon, jia pingwa, maybe I GUESS because some prc bureaucrats help choose what amazon gets the rights to. apparently the rates are bad for translators from french or german but global capital, it's a mixed blessing.

What does the translator application entail? Can anyone sign up?

i think it's invitation only but you can submit a title https://translation.amazon.com/submissions. i'm not sure to what extent this supposed marketplace/bid process actually exists because the only title i see up for "bid" is a dutch title (jij zegt het) listed at an opening price of 13k flat fee and 2% royalties. (that rate is much lower than what they're paying for translations from chinese and, based on what the association of literary translators in france's <a href="https://www.ceatl.eu/open-letter-from-association-of-literary-translators-in-france-to-amazoncrossing";>open letter</a> says, not very good at all.)

for me, i queried them with something through that submission thing that they were vaguely interested in but were put off by the rights situation (never clear in china), then, introduced by a a translator that previously worked with them, they made me an offer for something they'd gotten the rights to and negotiated a contract in the usual way.

constantly forget to convert html to bbcode.

it would appear that for languages other than german, french, dutch that the rates they pay are good enough.

maybe originally or eventually, it was or will be part of a scheme to get all those self-published kindle books translated? like, you self-publish a kindle and some guy bids 100 bucks and 50% of royalties to translate your novel into dutch? i really don't know what they're up to.

Chuck Tjingle

Pounded in Das Boot