Literature

posts related to modern and contemporary Chinese Literature

Affordances of the Sinophone Literary Translator

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Symposium on the Affordances of the Sinophone Literary Translator

With a keynote address by Michael Berry and masterclasses by Nicky Harman, Jennifer Feeley, Christopher Rea, Anna Gustafsson Chen, and Gigi Chang, a hybrid-mode symposium will be held on the affordances of Sinophone literary translation at M+ in Hong Kong on 13-14 December.

Webpage: https://shorturl.at/6cWCr
Registration: https://shorturl.at/lSt0Q

All are welcome, but please register whether you’re attending in person or online.

Posted by: Darryl Sterk <shidailun@gmail.com>

Queer Literature in the Sinosphere

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Dear all,

I am pleased to announce Queer Literature in the Sinosphere is published today. I hope you find the book useful in your teaching and research. Book information below.

Thank you and all the best,

Hongwei Bao <renebao@gmail.com>

Queer Literature in the Sinosphere
(edited by Hongwei Bao and Yahia Ma, Bloomsbury Academic, 2024. 296pp. ISBN: 9781350415331)

Description

Queer Literature in the Sinosphere is the most up-to-date English-language study of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ+) themed literature and culture in the Chinese-speaking world. From classical homoerotic texts to contemporary boys’ love fan fiction, this book showcases the richness and diversity of queer Chinese literature across the full spectrum of genres, styles, topics and cultural politics. The book features authors and literary works from mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore and the global Chinese diaspora. Featuring chapters by leading scholars from around the world, this book This book charts a new queer literary history in non-Western, non-Anglophone and Global South contexts. Continue reading Queer Literature in the Sinosphere →

The Boom & the Boom

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Dear MCLC colleagues,

I am delighted to share to share my recently published monograph: The Boom & The Boom: Historical Rupture and Political Economy in Contemporary British and Chinese Science Fiction (Peter Lang, 2024).

Description:

The Boom & The Boom compares the recent science fiction renaissances in the UK and China, known as the British and Chinese SF Booms, both having emerged in the late 1980s. The author contextualizes the two booms within the transformative political and cultural histories of both countries, characterized by the politico-economic shifts initiated by Margaret Thatcher and Deng Xiaoping. In an era marked by the state’s retreat from society and the redefinition of social subjects through market competition, science fiction assumes a crucial counter position for cultural critique, envisioning alternatives and possibilities embodied in utopian hopes.

Emphasizing the “local” rather than the “global” nature of science fiction, The Boom & The Boom interrogates how Boom writers in the UK and China respond to specific sociopolitical conditions in their respective regions. It contends that the British SF Boom serves as a political platform for left-wing writers against Thatcherite politics, seeking alternatives to capitalist realism. In contrast, the Chinese Boom, influenced by the rise of a mass public, grapples with a sense of doubleness, blending futuristic visions of non-capitalist alternatives with collective trauma from the past shaped by Dengist reforms. Only through this comparative lens can we come closer to understanding the “hyperobject” that has given rise to both Thatcherism and post-socialism. Continue reading The Boom & the Boom →

One Man Talking review

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MCLC Resource Center is pleased to announce publication of Charles Laughlin’s review of One Man Talking: Selected Essays of Shao Xunmei, 1929-1939, edited and translated by Paul Bevan and Susan Daruvala. The review appears below and at its online home: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/book-reviews/laughlin/. My thanks to Michael Hill, our translation/translation studies book review editor, for ushering the review to publication.

Kirk Denton, MCLC

One Man Talking: Selected Essays
of Shao Xunmei, 1929-1939

By Shao Xunmei
Edited and Translated Paul Bevan and Susan Daruvala

Reviewed by Charles Laughlin
MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright October, 2024)

Shao Xunmei, One Man Talking: Selected Essays of Shao Xunmei, 1929-1939 Edited and translated by Paul Bevan and Susan Daruvala. Hong Kong: City University of Hong Kong Press, 2023. 454 pp. ISBN: 978-9629376604 (paper).

Over the past quarter century, there has been growing scholarly attention to Shao Xunmei 邵洵美 (1906-1968), initially as a poet, but increasingly as a publisher and cultural figure. One chapter of Leo Ou-fan Lee’s 1999 book Shanghai Modern: The Flowering of a New Urban Culture in China, 1930-1945, introduces Shao as a decadent poet alongside the “dandy” Ye Lingfeng 葉靈鳳, but also devotes space to his important role in the publishing industry.[1] In 2001, Jonathan Hutt published an article entitled “La Maison d’Or: The Sumptuous World of Shao Xunmei.” In 2016, Jicheng Sun and Harold Swindall published a collection of Shao’s poetry in English translation, The Verse of Shao Xunmei. More recently, in 2020, is Tian Jin’s critical study of Shao’s poetry, The Condition of Music: Anglophone Influences in the Poetry of Shao Xunmei.

Parallel to this increased attention to Shao’s poetry, Paul Bevan has published extensively on Western impacts on Republican era print culture with a particular emphasis on illustrated magazines, and these works have fleshed out Shao Xunmei’s broader profile as a cultural figure. In 2018, Bevan published a monograph on Shao Xunmei’s Modern Miscellany (時代畫報), and in 2020 he brought out “Intoxicating Shanghai”—An Urban Montage: Art and Literature in Pictorial Magazines in Shanghai’s Jazz Age, a broader study on pictorial magazines based in Shanghai and their contributing artists. Bevan has also published a journal article on Mexican illustrator Miguel Covarrubias’ momentous encounter with 1930s Shanghai and his impact on its visual print culture (2021), and more recently a book chapter on Shao’s bookshop The Golden House and his relationship with translation (2024), both of which overlap with the content of One Man Talking. One Man Talking can thus be seen as a collection of source materials on Shao Xunmei that supplements Bevan’s research on Shao and his milieu, that establishes Shao as a cultural figure using his own (prose) voice. This effort is aided by the editors’ collaboration with Shao’s daughter Shao Xiaohong, who provided valuable materials, including an essay on Shao’s wartime publication efforts, and to whose memory the book is dedicated. The book also features a foreword by Leo Ou-fan Lee, translations and commentary by co-editor Susan Daruvala, Michel Hockx, Helen Wang, and Sun Xinqi. Continue reading One Man Talking review →

The Typesetter

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MCLC Resource Center is pleased to announce publication of Ping Zhu’s translation “The Typesetter,” by Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies writer Shen Yuzhong. The translation appears below and at its online home (which also includes the Chinese original): https://u.osu.edu/mclc/online-series/the-typesetter/. My thanks to Ping Zhu for sharing her work with the MCLC community.

Kirk Denton, MCLC

The Typesetter 排字人

By Shen Yuzhong 沈禹鐘 (1889–1971)[1]

Translated by Ping Zhu

MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright September 2024)

The first page of the Chinese original in Red Magazine.

This story is a satire of the concept of “literature of blood and tears” (血和泪的文学) proposed by Zheng Zhenduo 郑振铎 in 1921. Instead of representing the blood and tears of the proletariat, Shen Yuzhong, a Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies author, wrote the story from the perspective of a worker who observes the literal “literature of blood and tears” produced by a writer. The Chinese original follows the translation.–Ping Zhu

The clanging of the bell in the printing factory wakes Wang Qin from his morning slumber. Rubbing his tired eyes, he knows it’s time to go to work at the factory again. He gets up grudgingly, puts on his clothes, grabs a basin, goes downstairs to fetch some water, and returns to his room to wash his face and neck. He lives in a small back room on the second floor, rented from a sub-landlord for five silver dollars a month. If you compare them to those of others in society, his living expenses are at the lowest level. However, Wang Qin’s earning capacity is quite weak; he only earns fifteen silver dollars a month at the factory. One-third of that goes to rent, the rest goes to food and clothing, leaving him perpetually worried about his hard life. Sometimes he thinks about changing his life, but that seems impossible. People’s lives are all assigned by capital, deeply oppressed by its forces. No matter what abilities you have, it’s difficult to struggle against capital.

The factory work starts every morning at seven, not long after the bell rings to wake the workers living nearby. Hearing the bell, everyone hurriedly bids farewell to their morning dreams and goes to obey its call. After washing up, Wang Qin also quickly goes out. He takes two copper coins from his pocket and buys some street food to eat along the way. This is his daily routine, not a one-off. When he arrives at the factory gate, he sees many of his coworkers streaming in. They’ve known each other for so long that they no longer bother with greetings or small talk. Once inside the factory, the workers take off their coats and start working amid the clatter of the machines. Continue reading The Typesetter →

Mother Tongues and Other Tongues

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With great pleasure and excitement, Simona Gallo and Martina Codeluppi announce the publication of their edited volume Mother Tongues and Other Tongues. Creating and Translating Sinophone Poetry https://brill.com/display/title/69613

How do self-translation and other translingual practices mold the Sinophone poetic field? How and why do contemporary Sinophone writers produce (new) lyrical identities in and through translation? How do we translate contemporary Sinophone poetry? By addressing such questions, and by bringing together scholars, writers, and translators of poetry, this volume offers unique insights into Sinophone Studies, while sparking a transdisciplinary dialogue with Poetry Studies, Translation Studies and Cultural Studies.

Contents
Acknowledgments
Conventions
List of Figures
About the Contributors

Introduction: Sinophone Poetry as an Interlingual Space
Simona Gallo and Martina Codeluppi Continue reading Mother Tongues and Other Tongues →

Poem on the death of a delivery driver

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Source: China Digital Times (9/12/24)
Poem on the Death of a Delivery Driver: “A Man Is Not a Steed nor a Machine”
By

The plight of China’s delivery drivers is front-of-mind for the Chinese public. In August, CDT translated an account of one courier’s death in the summer heat, while a viral photograph of a Meituan driver kneeling before a security guard drew attention to the indignities many delivery drivers are forced to suffer. This week, a 55-year-old driver famous locally for his work ethic died while making deliveries. Video of the deceased driver, who had appeared to be sleeping on the back of his bike, went viral—spurring an outpouring of tributes to the deceased, and to the profession in general.

One such tribute, a poem titled “Algorithm” posted to the Bilibili account Koko the Earthling (地球人口口, dìqiúrén kǒukǒu), is translated in part below. The final lines of the second stanza, “A man/ Is not a steed/ Nor a machine” capture the long-unrealized desires of China’s working class. They closely mirror the Communist revolutionary Li Lisan’s stirring call for a worker’s strike at Anyuan in 1922: “Once beasts of burden, now we will be men!” A century later, the words still ring true.

Algorithm—dedicated to the departed delivery man

Your pose, lying flat
Never again to be seen as laziness.
Stretched all the way out,
Death allows you an ease that was long taboo.

Parsing your life is of no interest to me.
In this age of sound and fury
I’ll call you the simplest of names:
A man
Is not a steed
Nor a machine.

[…]

In the evening of this Republic,
Can the brand new algorithm
Tally the life of a slave—
His ancient fate
And fleeting existence?

Koko
September 10, 2024 [Chinese]

Lyricism in Alai’s work

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List members may be interested in the following new publication:

Li, Dian. “Between History and Phantasmagoria: Critical Nostalgic Lyricism in Alai’s Poetry and Short Fiction.” positions: asia critique 32, 2 (2024): 601–621.

Abstract: In his poetry and fiction, Alai creates a historiography of Eastern Tibet replete with the grandeur and magnificence of the past occasionally interposed with some oppressive cultural practices. It is a historiography motivated and energized by nostalgic lyricism, which helps locate and construct a symbolic Tibetan ethnicity. This article proposes that Alai’s nostalgic lyricism critically reflects on the inversion of loss and the compensation of lack, thus articulating alternatives against the discontent of the present. In so doing, Alai formulates a minority position against the forces of deterministic historicism and discourse of linear modernity that have constantly placed the minority subject in modern China under threat of erasure.

Best,

Dian Li

An Afternoon with Howard Goldblatt

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The Chinese Program at San Francisco State University invites you to

Farewells and Homecomings: An Afternoon with Celebrated Translator Howard Goldblatt 迎朋送友：與著名翻譯家葛浩文相聚

Howard Goldblatt is the preeminent translator of Chinese Literature of our time. Among the more than 50 Chinese-language authors he has translated are Mo Yan 莫言, the 2012 winner of the Nobel Prize in literature, Huang Chunming 黃春明, one of Taiwan’s most acclaimed nativist writers, and Pai Hsien-yung 白先勇, author of one of the first gay novels in Chinese. He is also a 2009 Guggenheim Fellow and Professor Emeritus of the University of Notre Dame.

Goldblatt’s journey into the realm of Chinese literature began at SF State where he obtained an MA in Chinese in 1971 and where he taught from 1974 until 1988. During this homecoming, Goldblatt will talk about his career as a translator, his friendships with Chinese writers, his time at SF State, and a farewell poem that has seen him through life’s most poignant moments.

DATE/TIME: Saturday, Sept. 28, 2 – 4 p.m.

LOCATION: SF State Campus, Humanities 133 (a campus map and driving instructions will be sent upon registration)

Admission is free but registration is required by Sept. 14. Seating is limited.

Click here to register:

https://renxt.sfsu.edu/site/Calendar?id=101321&view=Detail

If you have any questions please contact the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at MLL@sfsu.edu.

SF State welcomes persons with disabilities and will provide reasonable accommodations upon request. If you would like reasonable accommodations for this event, please contact the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at MLL@sfsu.edu so your request may be reviewed.

San Francisco State University
1600 Holloway Avenue, ADM 153
San Francisco, CA 94132
(415) 338-2217

Paper Republic no. 18

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Image description

August is Women in Translation Month! #WITMonth, an initiative started by Meytal Radzinski in 2014, which aims to focus the minds of readers (and publishers) on translated books by women authors, and give them the prominence they deserve. Put simply, women writers are less often translated into English than men writers, and win fewer prizes. Chinese is no exception, as we have recorded in all the years that Paper Republic has been compiling its annual Roll Call of Chinese writers published in translation. Last year, Eric Abrahamsen wrote for the 2023 Roll Call: ‘There is an interesting and varied collection of titles, including classics, left-fielders, big names, and small(er) names. The non-fiction in particular is a wonderful spread of current events, political topics, and essays. [But…] There also continues to be a marked gender imbalance: only two female poets in the poetry section; in fiction only 6 women to 16 men. To find out who those women are, follow the link above!

But rather than bandy depressing numbers around here, we thought we’d start with a reminder of interviews of Chinese women writers, put together by Nicky Harman and Natascha Bruce, in which we explore how Chinese women authors from mainland China see themselves and their status. Our aim in translating and publishing these interviews was to bring the opinions of Chinese women writers on this topic, in all their rich variety and complexity, to English-language readers. Our survey was conducted in 2019-2020, but is still well worth looking at again.

Here is a quick round-up of blogs and lists we have found online for the 2024 Women in Translation Month: Continue reading Paper Republic no. 18 →

Suipian no. 2

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碎篇 // Suipian // Fragments
By TABITHA SPEELMAN

Welcome to the 2nd edition of Suipian, my new personal newsletter in which I share thoughts and resources that help me make sense of Chinese society and its relationship to the rest of the world. You’re receiving this because you were previously subscribed to Changpian, my earlier newsletter sharing Chinese nonfiction writing – or if you recently subscribed of course! See here for more introduction to Suipian.

I hope you have been having a good summer. I have been moving between riversides in China (Liangmahe) and Rotterdam (Nieuwe Maas) – and feel lucky to be able to do that. Heading back to Beijing this weekend.

This is a pretty long one. It looks like this newsletter will come out once every 1-2 months (aiming for shorter monthly ones), and you might find I get to things a bit slow – certainly not at news cycle pace. But I hope you enjoy this edition and find something in it to add to your late summer reading.

随笔 // Suibi // Notes
Sharing thoughts or resources related to my work as a correspondent

1.Generations. I recently wrote a brief review of Peter Hessler’s new book Other Rivers: A Chinese Education for our paper. Although the Dutch translation was not great (and somehow came out before the original), I thoroughly enjoyed the tour de force of this book on how members of two generations (or even three, per Yangyang Cheng’s much better review) experience China’s development. As a long-time fan, I was struck this time by Hessler’s ability to articulate concrete cultural characteristics of Chinese society today without essentializing them. I am someone who is wired towards identifying commonalities rather than differences, but for weeks after reading Other Rivers, I’d walk around Beijing with new language and awareness of what I encountered (in the public safety culture, say, or in terms of people’s high – but shifting – tolerance for environmental noise). Continue reading Suipian no. 2 →

Shangyuan Art Museum: A Demolition

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Last week the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung published my text about the demolition of Beijing Shangyuan Art Museum in June. It is available online, maybe for free by the time you read this. I have assembled screenshots with some commentary in English on my blog (https://banianerguotoukeyihe.com/2024/08/20/shangyuan-art-museum-in-the-faz/). What follows is the English version. Please email me if you have any questions. Thank you!

Best,

Martin Winter 维马丁 <dujuan99@gmail.com>

Shangyuan Art Museum. A Demolition.
Martin Winter

How can I write about it? Write down what I know. In detail. How did it start. On June 3rd suddenly there were people measuring buildings. Three or four people. Then one of us artists asked them what they were doing. These houses will be demolished. What? Yes, all of these. Our studios. Why? It’s all illegal. We are just measuring, they sent us. Who? The village committee. And those above. On June 4th too, other people. Where is Cheng Xiaobei? Does she know? She is coming to Beijing. Next week. She is the boss. One of the founders of Shangyuan Art Museum and the only person around willing to take charge, able to negotiate and decide.

I am one of the artists. Every year they invite artists to live and work there. Over thirty, sometimes 40 people. From early April to late October, sometimes late March till early November. Trees bloom in March, some bloom in February. But there’s no heating. Each year water is freezing somewhere in the walls. Doors and windows are not made for winter. The one really solid building, the big exhibition hall, is now gone. Continue reading Shangyuan Art Museum: A Demolition →

Beyond Citizenship review

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MCLC Resource Center is pleased to announce publication of Frederik H. Green’s review of Beyond Citizenship: Literacy and Personhood in Everyday China, 1900-1945, by Di Luo. The review appears below and at its online home: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/book-reviews/green3/. My thanks to Nicholas Kaldis, our literary studies book review editor, for ushering the review to publication.

Kirk Denton, MCLC

Beyond Citizenship: Literacy and
Personhood in Everyday China, 1900-1945

By Di Luo

Reviewed by Frederik H. Green

MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright August, 2024)

Di Luo, Beyond Citizenship: Literacy and Personhood in Everyday China, 1900-1945 Leiden: Brill, 2022. Xviii + 282 pp. ISBN 9789004524736 (Hardback) | ISBN 9789004524743 (eBook).

Di Luo’s highly engaging monograph Beyond Citizenship: Literacy and Personhood in Everyday China, 1900-1945, explores the intricate relationship between literacy and the rise of the nation state in Republican-period China. Luo does not focus on the means through which gains in literacy were achieved or the tangible and intangible benefits improved literacy rates presented to the newly educated citizens or the nation state. Rather, Luo’s interest lies in the question of how the practice of literacy training in itself shaped the relationship between the state and the various actors involved in literacy training, including administrators, policy makers, local cadres, teachers, and students. Literacy training remained high on the agenda of both the GMD (KMT) and the CCP throughout the first part of the twentieth century, yet there existed distinct differences in each party’s respective discourse regarding the form and purpose of literacy training as well as in the ways each party named and presented illiteracy. Luo’s intention is not to demonstrate whether the GMD’s or the CCP’s strategies for literacy training were more successful. Instead, she illustrates through a number of fascinating case studies how the various actors involved perceived the role and value of those efforts and what differences existed in the way success was recorded, measured, and presented differently by the GMD and CCP. By putting the training process at the center of her analysis, as the reader is informed in the introduction, Luo highlights the “agentive role of historical actors and their participatory experience in meaning-making, rather than literacy per se” (18). To Luo, literacy training is a social process the importance of which to the making of modern China does not rest on the practice of learning alone, but equally “on the practices of sponsoring, managing, teaching, and representing” (20). In order to document this social process and the multi-dimensional practices the GMD and CCP engaged in, Luo carefully studied government and other official records in over a dozen major libraries and archives in China and the US. The result is an eye-opening study that captivates its reader through both its depths and breath and that spans from the late Qing until the first years of the People’s Republic. Continue reading Beyond Citizenship review →

‘Writing a Letter’ by Ling Shuhua

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Source: The Shanghai Literary Review (July 30, 2024)
“Writing a Letter”
By Ling Shuhua, introduced and translated by Nicky Harman

Introduction and translation by Nicky Harman

Ling Shuhua (1900-1990) was a talented Chinese woman modernist writer, much admired by Chinese luminaries such as the poet Xu Zhimo and the writer and activist Lu Xun. She was also a well-regarded painter. Most of her writing was produced during the 1920s and 1930s, with almost nothing being published thereafter, with the exception of her (English-language) autobiography Ancient Melodies (Hogarth Press, 1953). After the war, she left China and lived in Singapore and the UK and, possibly for that reason, her reputation faded in her home country. Recently, however, her work has been republished there.

Ling Shuhua’s Importance as a Writer

Ling Shuhua grew up in two very different worlds: she was the daughter of the third concubine of a high-ranking Qing (Manchu) official and was taught by one of the imperial court painters; in many ways, the kind of life she lived as a child had not changed for centuries. But Ling had a modern as well as a classical education, studying in Japan and in Yenching University in Beijing. As a writer in the 1920s and 1930s, she was active in contemporary literary and artistic circles. As was the case with others of her contemporaries, she had a cosmopolitan outlook and was influenced by Western writers, in her case Katherine Mansfield and Anton Chekhov. She understood and wrote about the old society, while at the same time she had modern sensibilities. Among Chinese women writers of her time, she was unique in having close connections with the Bloomsbury Group; she was a friend of Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell and Vita Sackville-West. Continue reading ‘Writing a Letter’ by Ling Shuhua →

“The Second Mother”

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MCLC Resource Center is pleased to announce publication of Brian Yuhan Wang’s translation of “The Second Mother,” by Ba Jin. A teaser appears below. For the full translation, go to: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/online-series/the-second-mother/.

Kirk Denton, MCLC

The Second Mother 第二的母親
(La dua patrino)

By Ba Jin 巴金 [1]

Translated by Brian Yuhan Wang

MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright August 2024)

Ba Jin (1904-2005).

Everyone called me an orphan.

My parents died young; I don’t even remember clearly what they looked like. I was brought up by my uncle. He had no children of his own, so he treated me like a son.

My aunt had passed away, and I led a lonely life. My uncle was often away from home, leaving only a houseboy and an old nanny to look after me. There was also a middle-aged servant, who often accompanied my uncle on his errands. My home was spacious, and there was a small garden where I could play, but I didn’t have any playmates. The world of the houseboy and nanny was quite different from mine. Though only a child, I often felt lonely.

Back then, I had started studying. My uncle hired an old, stern-looking tutor to keep me disciplined. I had to spend four to five hours in the study every day. While the tutor silently pored over his books, I read out the strange words and verses in books like the Thousand Character Classic over and over in a weary voice, with my mind wandering off into unattainable fantasies. The moment the tutor abruptly announced, “All right, class is over!” in his serious tone, I couldn’t resist laughing as I rushed out of that prison-like study.

I often had dreams at night, and they always featured the tutor’s face, which would transform wildly into various guises. I occasionally had more pleasant dreams, but they were always ruined by thoughts of studying—I even found myself studying in my dreams sometimes. Anyway, the only person I feared was that tutor, who always looked so serious; the only thing I dreaded was studying. [click here for the full translation]