Paper Republic newsletter 19

The newsletter

As some of you will know, the newsletter has been going for a couple of years now. Huge thanks to Jack Hargreaves for bringing it out fortnightly at the start. Recently there have been a few gaps, but now we’re back! From now on, we aim to publish our newsletter every two months. We hope you enjoy it. Please ask your friends to subscribe. As a special bonus, you can win a book, as a prize, if you get a number of friends to subscribe. Please tell us if you have news you’d like us to include in the newsletter, just drop us an email — click here. We’re also delighted to tell you that you can now read the archived copies of our newsletter on the Paper Republic webpage here.

Read Paper Republic

One of our Read Paper Republic pieces in the Home series now features on the Youtube video channel, Translators Aloud: Anne Henochowicz and poet Yu Xinqiao read from “At Night I Rise to Mop the Floor”.

Events – STOP PRESS

Meet the World: Ká-sióng: Imagining a Different World Through Taiwanese Literature

Thursday 7 November, Online, 12.00 – 13.15 GMT. FREE.

Join National Centre for Writing to celebrate Ká-sióng, a new series of chapbooks from Strangers Press, focusing on literature from Taiwan.

Reviews

• Read review of “The Feminine Critique: Women and the Absent Men in Chinese Family Life”, a review of award-winning writer Yao Emei’s new book The Unfilial: Four Tragic Tales from Modern China, tr. Will Spence, Olivia Milburn, and Honey Watson. And for another review in the Irish Times, click here.

• Check out the review of Fang Si-Chi’s First Love Paradise by Lin Yi-Han, tr. Jenna Tang. The book is a best seller and a #Metoo classic..

• Translator Jenna Tang reviews the translation and content of A Cha Chaan Teng That Does Not Exist by Derek Chung, tr. May Huang.

• Check out the review of Mingwei Song’s Fear of Seeing and Song Han’s Hospital, tr. Michael Berry

• Sleepwalking: A Father’s Dream of Protecting His Children (Untranslated Gems Friday)

• WorldKidLit Month had reviews of Taiwan author Julia Kuo, and Huang Beijia’s novel I Want to be Good here and here (in “Spunky Girls in Asian Kidlit”.)

• Review of One Man Talking: Selected Essays of Shao Xunmei 1929-39

Prizes

• The 2024 Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize has been awarded to Decapitated Poetry
  by Ko-hua Chen, translated from Chinese by Wen-chi Li and Colin Bramwell (Seagull Books). The judges said about the winner: ‘Decapitated Poetry is the glorious new collection of selected works by Ko-hua Chen, Taiwan’s first openly-gay poet. Chen’s poetry achieves transcendence through a daring combination of depth, revelation and lightheartedness. …’

• Cocoon by Zhang Yueran, translated by Jeremy Tiang has won the Singapore Literature Prize in the newly created Best Translation category

• Past ALTA mentee May Huang’s translation from Chinese of A Cha Chaan Teng That Does Not Exist by Derek Chung, published by Zephyr Press, won the Translation in Poetry category of the 43rd Annual Northern California Book Awards, and has been shortlisted for the 2024 Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize, run by ALTA.

• Taiwan Travelogue by Yáng Shuāng-zǐ, translated by Lin King (Graywolf Press, 2024) has been longlisted for the 2024 National Book Award in translation. Quote, this novel “unburies lost colonial histories and deftly reveals how power dynamics inflect our most intimate relationships.”

• “Stranger Comes to Visit in a Strange Way” (Translation of Yan An’s poem by Chen Du and Xisheng Chen) was nominated for the 2025 Best of the Net anthology by Hedge Apple (The literary magazine of Hagerstown Community College) on September 30, 2024 in the USA

• “Situations of a Bird and Two People” (Translation of Yan An’s poem by Chen Du and Xisheng Chen) was nominated for the 2025 Best of the Net anthology by Tab Journal (housed at Tabula Poetica: The Center for Poetry at Chapman University and supported by Chapman University) on September 5, 2024 in the USA.

Interviews

• Read the interview with Jingkang Wang, the 2024 Hugo finalist. His story “Seeds of Mercury” tr. Alex Woodend was published in Adventures in Space: New Short Stories by Chinese and English Science Fiction Writer.

• Check out the interview with Nick Admussen on contemporary Chinese poetry in English translation. The conversation focuses on intriguing topics as Lu Xun’s prose poem collection Yecao 野草 in English translation, the translating, publishing, and reception of Floral Mutter: Selected Poetry of Ya Shi.

• Read the interview with Dr. Ya-mei Chen, a translator and scholar in Taiwan to find out a global experience in a translation classroom

• And finally, the whole universe: Interview with Chinese celebrated experimental writer Can Xue and translator Annelise Finegan Wasmoen

Poetry

• “Green Line” by Chen Poyu, translated by Nicholas Wong, in The Cincinnati Review. This poem begins, “Leaning on the cold mirror in a hotel / I keep thinking about a cruel question / I’ve heard that if a flatworm is cut into halves…”

• October’s daily poem on poems.com was “Buddhist Pine”, by Chen Yuhong, translated by George O’Connell & Diana Shi

• The prestigious The Common’s China Portfolio titled “Burning Language: New And Queer Chinese Voices” features both original and translated literature by a new generation of Chinese writers, poets, and essayists, e.g., Yan An (tr. Chen Du and Xisheng Chen), Wu Wenying (tr. Shangyang Fang), and Su Shi (tr. Shangyang Fang), et al.

• “Hometown and Pearl” and “Mary Suite No. 1” (Translation of Yan An’s poems by Chen Du and Xisheng Chen) was published by Penn Journal of Arts and Sciences (based at University of Pennsylvania) online in September in the USA. Read poet Yan An, translator Chen Du, and translator Xisheng Chen’s interviews.

• “Calamity of Pearls” (Translation of Yan An’s poem by Chen Du and Xisheng Chen) was published by NonBinary Review (Zoetic Press) on September 1 in the USA. The link also has the poet and translators’ interviews.

• China Migrant Worker Poetry, three-part podcast series on the migrant worker poetry scene in China, the precarious social conditions in which these poets live and the poetry they produce. With a special add-on about translating the poems. A thought-provoking and moving podcast series.

Media

• • Translator and Ph.D. candidate at Yale University Xueni Jin shares her insight about cultural translation by analyzing Netflix’s use of Santi instead of Trisolaris coined by Ken Liu, the translator of Cixin Liu’s The Three Body Problem.

  • “10 of the best short story books and collections from the Booker Library” by Emily Facoory recommends Ninth Building by Zou Jingzhi, tr. Jeremy Tiang.

  • Damion Searls, the award-winning translator reveals the books that made an impact on him here, including Strange Beasts of China by Yan Ge, tr. Jeremy Tiang.

  • Hannah Lunds talks about The Localization Challenge of Black Myth: Wukong, China’s first AAA game which topped global charts on gaming platform Steam here.

• “Why Don’t We Listen to Others? A Case for Theatrical Translation” by Jeremy Tiang

• Read Author Anyan Hu’s self-reflection on his journey from odd jobs to literary success. Hu emphasizes the value of the everyday and banal in his new book Living in Low Places.

Free-to-Read Short Pieces

• From MCLC, The Typesetter 排字人, By Shen Yuzhong 沈禹鐘 (1889–1971), translated by Ping Zhu

• Stories from a Burning House: Song Dingbo Catches a Ghost by the onetime Paper Republic member Brendan O’Kane.

• “Piano Day” by Lü Lun, translated by Chris Song.

• Check out The Legend of a Funambulist, written by Lawrence Kwok-ling Pun 潘國靈 and tr. Andrea Lingenfelter.

This essay takes us on a journey with the tightrope-walker Mantra from his origins in the former Soviet Union, through Cold War Europe, and on to sojourns in New York, Las Vegas, and the Western United States.