I am writing a piece covering the upcoming Howard Goldblatt translation of Abandoned Capital and issues surrounding its road to translation/publication. The CLT book series, published by University of Oklahoma Press has announced the softcover translation of Jia Pingwa’s Abandoned Capital will arrive sometime in early 2016.
As late as earlier this year, the Hu Zongfeng/Robin Gilbank translation– a completed translation with JPW’s blessing (they agreed with his rules, which included not changing a single sentence, nothing deleted or glossed)– had received offers from Chinese publishers but was still being shopped to foreign publishers. There appears to have been no interest. The translation quality was, from the excerpt I saw, rather stiff.
Goldblatt previously stated that he had looked over a translation by a colleague of JPW (although Hu Zongfeng has said the colleague was not him) and was asked to edit it into something that the University of Hawaii Press could publish. This proved to be impossible and the project was abandoned.
Does anyone know how this publication came to be? There seems to have been no rumors of its announcement. Is the full Hu Zongfeng version floating around out there? Did anyone read the full thing? Has anyone read the Goldblatt translation?
I’d love to chat further, possibly off-list, if anyone has any info.
Dylan Levi King / dylan_levi_king@hotmail.com