Classic Epics of Chinese Literature: Search and Destroy

i had a professor that loved qian zhongshu and was unable to instill that passion in me
but he just published a translation of a collection of qian zhongshu's essays and stories: http://mclc.osu.edu/rc/pubs/reviews/shen.htm

grabbed an In Our Time on Romance of The Three Kingdoms last night, haven't listened yet but might be of interest here.

that was OK, they spent most of the time talking about the printing history of the book, which i'm not particularly interested in. hoped they focused more on the content/cultural aspect of it.

Outlaws of the Marsh probably entertained me more than anything else I've ever read.

NYRB w/a China-related series:
http://nyrevinc.cmail1.com/t/ViewEmail/y/C6E6492E21B3F512/204266847E9197FA6E6039C17E42EE19

New York Review Books is pleased to announce the debut of Calligrams, a new series of writings from and on China. Calligrams will encompass a wide array of poetic masterpieces, classic fiction, thrilling dramas, travel writing, criticism, and histories written by both Chinese and Western writers from antiquity to modern time. The series, made possible by a publishing partnership with the Chinese University of Hong Kong Press, is edited by Eliot Weinberger.

Two books into the Hawkes/Minford trans of Red Chamber. P.funny! Random 50s Britishisms for class/status-shorthand (or Latinate things for the monks/nuns) take a bit of getting used to.

wow, this looks like a great project. i'd love to read a good translation of the water margin stories.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2015/apr/23/wonderfully-elusive-chinese-novel/

Let me put it the other way around. Novels were not the primary language art in imperial China. Measured by volume, xi, translatable as “drama” or “opera,” would be in first place, and measured by beauty, calligraphy or poetry would be. Should we compare poetry across civilizations? If we do, classical Chinese poetry wins easily.

Love this - do we have any compilations of poetry knocking around anyone would care to recommend?

http://news.asiaone.com/news/lifestyle/unpublished-english-translation-chinese-classic-dream-red-chamber-found

http://www.nyrb.com/collections/calligrams/products/mirage

"First published anonymously in 1804—its author remains unknown—Mirage is set in Guangzhou (Canton), some decades before the city was overwhelmed by the opium trade and the Opium War. Su Jishi, the adolescent son of the head of the Chinese traders’ association, the men licensed to deal with foreign merchants in the port, is suddenly burdened with responsibility for his powerful family after his father’s unexpected death. More interested in sex than money, Su Jishi learns to navigate between pleasure and commerce as rebellions erupt just outside the city.

At the crossroads of two of the greatest Chinese books—the aristocratic coming-of-age novel The Story of the Stone (The Dream of the Red Chamber) and the military epic Outlaws of the Marsh—Mirage is panorama of libertines and concubines, lecherous monks and celibate soldiers, corrupt officials and drunken scholars. As entertaining as a bestseller, it is a hectic re-creation of vanished mores and customs, and the life of a Chinese city as it was beginning to discover—and deal with—the rest of the world."

Can't wait for the paperback of Mirage to come out; the hardback at Garden Books in Shanghai is 550RMB.

Mildly curious about the Love Stories and Tragedies from Chinese Classic Operas series, but maybe I'd be better with e.g. NYRB republishing the Chen/Acton/Birch xlation of The Peach-Blossom Fan and reading wiki-style summaries of the rest.

maybe it's my limited interest in pre-republican literature but i don't think i've ever heard of mirage. i went through a few pages of an online version.... i'd flip through a translation.

an interesting note from wikipedia: 清朝统治者为了稳定政权，控制文化，列出了各种各样的禁书，其中有六大禁书，《蜃楼志》为其中之一。六大禁书为：《载花船》、《蜃楼志》、《品花宝鉴》、《闹花丛》、《株林野史》、《绿野仙踪》。6 books that i've never read / aren't translated?

except 《绿野仙踪》 which is the wizard of oz, right?

in the interests of political and social stability, the rulers of the qing maintained control over the cultural sphere and banned various books. mirage was among the six major banned works, which included: "boat of passion" (? only visible translated title), "mirage," "treasured mirror for the connoiseur of flowers," "noise in the shrubs" (just a literal translation but 花丛 = world of brothels), "a rough history of zhulin" (or, dirty stories from zhulin?), "the wizard of oz" (??).

http://www.amazon.com/Ruined-City-Novel-Chinese-Literature/dp/0806151730/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1450285333&sr=1-1&refinements=p_27%3AJia+Pingwa

definitely the modern successor to say dream of red mansions. took almost 25 years but it seems howard goldblatt's translation has been cleared and is going to be published.

Holy shit. Just picked up the original a month back. Lol at fleshy orchid cover, zzz. More info at

http://www.oupress.com/ECommerce/Book/Detail/2080/ruined%20city

Had been thinking about picking up their Chutzpah! collection.

What translations are thought to be the best for Journey To The West and Warriors of The Marshes? I'm semi familiar with the 2 as tv shows I saw 30+ years ago so would like to read the text.

how many translations are there even? like, still available. i read the wjf jenner translation of journey to the west and i remember the abridged the monkey and the monk anthony c yu version from undergrad introduction to chinese lit class. and i read the sidney shapiro translation of outlaws of the marsh.

i have issues with goldblatt as a translator and the one and the only jia pingwa novel in translation was done by goldblatt and is a disappointment. these issues might be irrational and at the very least he's pushed lots of worthy chinese language books into english translation and won mo yan a nobel prize.

selling feidu as pornographic or something after so long, or... playing up that element of it.... if it helps sell books, but the sex stuff is pretty mild and usually played for laughs. the genius of the book is harder to convey and i'm curious to see how the translation will be received.

feidu chapter 1 part 1 http://jiapingwa.blogspot.jp/2015/01/abandoned-capital.html part 2 http://jiapingwa.blogspot.jp/2015/01/abandoned-capital_27.html

oh also. back in 2008 nicky harman translated an excerpt from gaoxing http://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/aug/08/jiapingwa and there were rumors that a translation would be released by penguin. it's a much more accessible book, based on a real acquaintance of jpw http://www.danwei.org/books/the_most_famous_junk_collector.php. a translation never arrived but a new translation is coming and it might beat howard goldblatt's feidu to publication.

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/dec/09/amazon-publishing-translated-fiction-amazoncrossing-sales

I've just seen that there appears to be a series of Chinese Classics whose covers appear to be marketed to Children that appeared in 2013 from a brand called Real reads.
http://www.bookdepository.com/Dream-Red-Chamber-Xueqin-Cao/9781906230364
http://d20eq91zdmkqd.cloudfront.net/assets/images/book/large/9781/9062/9781906230364.jpg

I just came across them when I was looking to see if there were cheap copies of things available on Book Depository.

now, you should check out the 1987 dream of the red chamber tv series.

i started reading 'dream of the red chamber' / 'story of the stone' years ago, and made it about 600 pages in, before my lack of reading time or intellectual focus got to me. it was pretty great -- in hindsight it vaguely reminds me of gene wolfe's 'book of the new sun,' only, like, good

I'm a fan of the Hawkes/Minford Red Chamber, but it's sort've in the ballpark of the Moncrieff/Kilmartin Proust, eh. I remember comparing some passages between it and some of the FLP or Victorian-era translations (maybe the "I'll fuck your dad" schoolroom quarrel?) and it was so much more alive. Enjoyed the Shapiro Water Margins, read a decent chunk of the Jenner Journey To The West (IIRC yr earlier Waley translations are in the vein of Burton's Arabian Nights).

Yeah, pushing the pornographic side of feidu seems really weird in terms of general literary trends? it's not like there's either a giant readership familiar with, IDK, jin ping mei; it's not exactly like Shanghai Baby/Beijing Doll are that current + obv authorial differences re: marketing; uh did the marketing/reception of stuff like Serve The People! focus on or elide the sex?

Don't really have a high opinion of Doldblatt via you & Y1yan W4ng. when i'm back in NZ, i'm half-interested in interloaning Rewriting in Literary Translation: The Case of Howard Goldblatt's Translations of Contemporary Chinese Fiction which I heard was p.takedown-y for a thesis.

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.

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

(jij zegt het figures I guess as it's about Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, though I wonder how this works w/ her publisher.

Thanks for the info though, appreciate it.

thank god we have a chinese literature thread. i wrote something about a jia pingwa novel: ‘Broken Wings’: Jia Pingwa’s Controversial Novel Explores Human Trafficking And Rural China

I'd like to read that, but there seems to be no link in that link?

oh, damn
https://supchina.com/2019/07/11/broken-wings-jia-pingwas-controversial-novel/

Nice! Thank you.

👍

hey thanks.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/06/24/liu-cixins-war-of-the-worlds i also want to recommend the jiayang fan liu cixin piece here if anyone missed it. i've mostly sat out liu cixin fever and this didn't encourage me to pick up the books.

Yeah that's excellent I've just got "Ruined City" what would you recommend next?

short answer: broken wings. happy dreams which you can get on amazon since they published it but nowhere else, more fun, trash pickers in xi'an. turbulence which grove put out in 2013, same translator, but hard to find. also earthen gate, part of a ruined city and white nights xi'an trilogy, great novel, translation lacking, but necessary if you want more ruined city vibes.

long answer: for 25 years while jia pingwa was at his most productive, nothing was translated. the author wasn't interested in moving the rights and there wasn't much interested in purchasing the rights. after ruined city came out, he was mostly cut off from the rest of the world and was basically blacklisted, and then after that, there was minimal interest from publishers in the west, so... you had turbulence in 1991, reissued by grove in 2003. it's an early novel, before ruined city, very different vibe. right after ruined city, five jia pingwa books suddenly make it into translation. jia was pushed by his people to make a go of it in english. most of the books are not very good. by next year, there will be eight jia pingwa novels in translation, since 2016, with seven different translators, through four different publishers, and there's been no real attempt at either quality control or promotion. jia is the most important chinese novelist of the last fifty years, read by hundreds of millions, but will probably never find much of a readership in english (french, swedish, spanish, much more hopeful).

so, after ruined city, there was carlos rojas' translation of the lantern bearer, which is a later novel, about a plucky female civil servant out in the countryside, but it's not very good, translated by an academic, riddled with strange errors (not like, quibbling about a translation errors, but errors in the english-language text), typos, and other problems. it was put out by a publisher called cn times, whose other books include mainly books about xi jinping, "china renaissance," "great power strategy," and also a book by a tampa cigar aficionado with recipes for cocktails that appear in pulp novels. then happy dreams released by amazoncrossing, which we discussed further up this thread. fun book! good translation! when the original came out in chinese in 2007, it was his most accessible and least dense book and reintroduced him to a new readership. it's about trash pickers in xi'an. definitely look this one up, if you can. after that, there was the broken wings translation, which i do think is very good. the cover design is shocking. (i hate the title, too. it was originally titled 极花 or "the pole flower" and translated as la flora extrema in spanish by its mexican publisher.)

there's also a translation of a much earlier book, put out this year, earthen gate, which is part of a trilogy of sorts with ruined city and white nights (untranslated). unfortunately, it came out on a small press who did no marketing. i tried to ask for a review copy, got turned down, offered to buy one, and they told me, "why bother reviewing it at all? we're not even selling it." it was done by two chinese translators, who did a surprisingly good job. although it's clearly the work of someone not a native speaker of english, it's idiosyncratic language is kind of a plus, if you can get into it. this follows ruined city pretty well, same setting, same concerns, about a village on the outskirts of xi'an (or xijing) which is being swallowed up by the city, local residents' attempts to have the village protected as "cultural heritage," basically turned into a museum, while other residents abandon ship and rush to make a living in urban xi'an. this is one of jia's best novels, not one of his best in translation, but i think it's worth checking out, if you want that ruined city vibe.

next year, there is a translation of jia's 2005 later period masterwork qinqiang coming, also through amazoncrossing, which should be okay! a thicc epic, clocking in at around half a million words, setting is a village in the late-1990s, slowly losing its vitality and identity, the city drawing away its young people... also master of songs another late rural novel is coming, too, often considered one of jia's most political novels, sweeping history of modern china-type novel. and possibly jia's cultural revolution novel ancient kiln.

I was wondering about the different translators, that explains a lot

This is a Chinese literature podcast. They have just wound it down at the 100th EP. The guy who ran it is doing a twitter thread on the EPs.

To mark the ending of the Translated Chinese Fiction Podcast, I thought I'd make a thread covering all 100 episodes. So here we go...https://t.co/aXNTl8CaC3

— Angus 「安安」 (@AngusLikesWords) February 10, 2024