Duck! Here comes your erratic, out of the blue newsletter on all things Chinese lit in translation.
Now, I know what you’re thinking, it hasn’t been a month since the last one. But bear with us, we’re still finetuning how long we have between each edition before they become unwieldy. So here is a petite, slimline edition.
Happily, it’s still as nutritious as ever, chocker with links to good news, good writing* and good times.
*poetry in particular this time around!
A quick reminder first that Bristol Translates and BCLT Summer School are still open for applications. The former will have Nicky Harman and me (Jack Hargreaves) teaching the Chinese strand, swapping and changing between the classes from the mornings to the afternoons; the latter has Jeremy Tiang running the Literature from Taiwan workshop alongside Writer-in-Residence Kan Yao-Ming.
Now for the news:
Extracts, stories and poems:
- Read two students’ translations of the anti-war poem “祷告辞” by Yu Xiuhua
- Five poems by Li Xiaoyang (pen name Cong An), tr. Stella Jiayue Zhu
- An essay by Dorothy Tse 謝曉虹 on “Writing Between Languages” from 2011
- New archive of translations of socialist-era Chinese comic books available online! Here is Lu Xun’s “The New Year’s Sacrifice” 祝福
- Hanuman the Monkey King by Pan Haitian, tr. Emily Jin
- Listen to Jenna Tang read from her translation of Lin Yi-Han’s Fang Si-Chi’s First Love Paradise《房思琪的初戀樂園》 for new series “Emerging Together”
- A Xiao Xi poem, “the car is backing up, please pay attention”, tr. Yilin Wang, and a second, “the wind would not stop”, here
News:
- Translator Na Zhong has co-founded Accent Society, an organisation dedicated to nurturing and supporting Chinese writers who write across languages and disciplines through teaching, consulting and publishing
- The Society of Authors and Translators Association have raised their observed STARTING rate to £100 per 1000 words (it was £95)
- Poet Wong May, born in China, raised in Singapore, educated in the US, and now lives in Ireland, is one of the winners of the 2022 Windham-Campbell Prizes
- Student Eric Yip wins first-prize in the 2021 National Poetry Competition. You can read two translations of the poem into Chinese here, with a brilliant Twitter thread about the translators’ decisions here
- The Spittoon Collective launches its first podcast. Spittoon’s founder Matthew Byrne interviews Spittoon Literary Magazine Co-Founder Simon Shieh and English language Editor-In-Chief, Xiao Yue Shan
- The Stephen Spender Prize for poetry in translation opens for submissions on 4 May
Events
- Translator Helen Wang will take part in an online talk w/Daniel Hahn, Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp and Lawrence Schimel on translating picture books
- Yan Ge is running a creative writing workshop on 27 May on Adventures in Fiction
Reviews and releases:
- Peek this cover reveal for the upcoming translation by Josh Dyer of Andrew Yeh’s Green Monkey Syndrome
- Leilong’s Too Long! by Julia Liu, illustrated by Bei Lynn, tr. Helen Wang is out now! Take at look inside here!
- Review of White Fox in the Forest by Chen Jiatong, tr. Jennifer Feeley
- An interview with Yen Ooi about their book Rén – The Ancient Chinese Art of Finding Peace and Fulfilment
- Yan Ge Reflects on “Othering” in Strange Beasts of China
- World of Chinese reviews The Way Spring Arrives and Other Stories
Media:
- A panel: Generations of Voices in Chinese Literature with a prize draw! You can alternatively listen to Yan Ge, Daniel Li and Emily Xueni Jin chat here
- A podcast with Jing Tsu, author of Kingdom of Characters: The Language Revolution That Made China Modern
- Singaporean writer and translator Wei Ting on Unlearning the Colonial Gaze in Southeast Asian Art
- Learn about early efforts to digitize Chinese characters and turn blocky pixels into smooth strokes, in “Chopsticks, Pixels, and the Pioneers Who Redesigned Modern Chinese”
- An Introduction to Southeast Asian Speculative Fiction
- A new Sinophone Realities episode with Hua Li talking about offline fan culture, environmental SF and the key role played by lianhuanhua 连环画 in popularizing the genre in post-Mao China
- Where is China’s “Brothers Grimm”? an article