Literature

posts related to modern and contemporary Chinese Literature

Prism 21.1

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Prism (Volume 21, Number 1, 2024)
Guest edited by Ban Wang and Haomin Gong

Culture, Nature, and Environmental Humanities: An Introduction
By Ban Wang

TRADITIONAL ECOLOGICAL WISDOM

Dog Has No Buddha Nature: The Compulsion for Meaning, Nihilphobia, and Chan Therapy in the Anthropocene End-Time
By Chia-Ju Chang

The Life of Urban(e) Waters: Kyoto, circa 1830
By Stephen Roddy

ETHNICITY, PLACE, AND BORDER

“Natural” Disasters and Disaster Relief: Ecoethnic Politics in Alai’s Epic of Ji Village
By Huaji Xu; Haomin Gong

Mu Dan’s Encounter with Nature: The Phantasmic, the Metaphysical, and the Lyrical
By Qiongqiong Ye; Haomin Gong

Greenwashing, Simulated Green, and Beyond: Yi-fu Tuan and His Embodied Simulation of Habitats
By Xinmin Liu

Flood Dashing against the Temple of the Dragon King: The Allegorical Nature in Wind from the East (1959)
By Zhen Zhang

The Logic of the Void: Translation, Indigeneity, and Islands in Taiwanese Ecological Fiction
By Robin Visser

SCIENCE FICTION AND ECOCRITICISM

Inventing Climate Change: Nature and Nation in Late Qing Chinese Science Fiction
By Cheng Li

Ecology, (Post)Humanism, and Liu Cixin’s Three-Body Problem
By Melissa A. Hosek

Future Emotions and Senses: Chen Qiufan’s Science Fiction of the Anthropocene
By Kiu-Wai Chu

Indifference as Alienation in Chen Qiufan’s Science Fiction Waste Tide
By Yuanyuan Hua; Yunfan Zhang

Ecological Utopia and Dystopia in Chinese Science Fiction
By Ban Wang

Mu Cao wins Prince Claus Impact Award (2)

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The Prince Claus Fund web page on Mu Cao includes a beautiful short video on Mu Cao, made by the Fund in September 2024 and first shown during the award ceremony for this year’s Prince Claus Impact Awards: https://edu.nl/wj6y4. (The video is right below the photo at the top; the play button is not clearly visible, but it sits in the middle of the burgundy rectangle.) In the video, Mu Cao explains what writing means to him. Below the video, there’s a brief profile of the poet in English.

Crossing, a book produced by the Prince Claus Fund on the occasion of the 2024 Impact Awards, includes laudations for each of the six laureates. After Mu Cao was nominated (in 2023), the Fund approached me for information on his life and work, to support the jury as it made its way from close to two hundred nominees to six awardees. In this capacity I had the privilege of writing the laudation for Mu Cao, for which I drew on an essay I co-authored with Hongwei Bao that is forthcoming in 2025. The text of the laudation is below.

Maghiel van Crevel

MU CAO: AN INIMITABLE VOICE
In Crossing (Amsterdam: Prince Claus Fund, 2024): 96-98.

Mu Cao is a poet and fiction writer whose life and work defy social convention in every respect. He is the author of a literary oeuvre that has emerged against the odds, carried by an inimitable voice that blends indignation and imagination to address a fiercely personal experience as well as overarching issues of social justice.

Born and raised in a village in rural China, Mu Cao was expelled from school at age fifteen and has since sustained himself with precarious labor, mostly in Zhengzhou and Beijing. One of three hundred million labor migrants who have flocked from the Chinese countryside to the cities since the 1980s, he has held dozens of jobs, from assembly line worker to web salesperson and from noodle-maker to barbershop attendant. Living on a shoestring, he works in order to save money so he can quit and write. When the money runs out, he looks for work again. Continue reading Mu Cao wins Prince Claus Impact Award (2) →

Qiong Yao dies in apparent suicide

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Source: BBC News (12/4/24)
Top Chinese language novelist dies in apparent suicide
By Fan Wang, BBC News

Getty Images Chiung Yao attends a press conference on July 10, 2007 in Taipei.

Getty Images

Chiung Yao [瓊瑤], arguably the world’s most popular Chinese language romance novelist, has died in an apparent suicide.

The 86-year-old’s body was found in her home in New Taipei City on Wednesday, local media report. Emergency services said she took her own life, according to Taiwan’s Central News Agency.

Chiung Yao started writing at 18 and published more than 60 novels, many of which were adapted into movies and TV series and remained popular for decades.

She was also a successful screenwriter and producer. One of her most famous works was the TV drama My Fair Princess, which launched the careers of big name stars.

She was born Chen Che in Sichuan, China in 1938. Chiung Yao is her pen name.

A post on her Facebook account on Wednesday read: “Goodbye, my loved ones. I feel lucky that I have met and known you in this life”. It was not immediately clear if the post was published before or after her body was found. Continue reading Qiong Yao dies in apparent suicide →

Mu Cao wins Prince Claus Impact Award

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Chinese poet and fiction writer Mu Cao 墓草 (1974) has received one of the 2024 Prince Claus Impact Awards, as one of six biennial laureates in art and cultural practice worldwide (https://edu.nl/x8bjf). The Prince Claus Fund is an independent foundation dedicated to culture and development. The Impact Awards honor groundbreaking artists and cultural practitioners whose work inspires positive social change. The 2024 laureates received their awards on 3 December in the Royal Palace in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

Mu Cao is known as China’s first openly gay poet. He is also one of China’s earliest migrant worker poets (aka battler poets 打工诗人) and writes with uncompromising candor on life on the underside, in his poetry and his fiction alike. Both queerness and socioeconomic inequality count as sensitive topics in China and Mu Cao has only published through unofficial channels there. An official, two-volume survey anthology of his poetry and short fiction came out in Taiwan in 2023 (https://edu.nl/fdg79). Five books of his poetry and two multiple-author anthologies produced under his editorship can be freely accessed at the Leiden University Library digital collection of unofficial poetry from China (https://edu.nl/k4d4d).

For scholarship, media, and translations on/of Mu Cao’s work, see the MCLC Resource Center bibliographies on literary studies: Author studies > M (https://u.osu.edu/mclc/h-q/#M) and Translations (author) > M (https://edu.nl/q6qc6).

Posted by: Maghiel van Crevel

Taiwan novel makes history winning National Book Award

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Source: Radio Taiwan International (11/21/24)
Taiwan novel makes history winning US National Book Award
By Amanda Ruth Stephens

Taiwan novel makes history winning US National Book Award

Taiwanese author Yang Shuang-zi’s “Taiwan Travelogue ” won the U.S. National Book Award Wednesday. In her acceptance speech reflecting on the theme of Taiwanese identity, she said, “[I] wrote about the past to move on to the future.” (Photo via YT/@NationalBook)

The English translation of the novel Taiwan Travelogue (臺灣漫遊錄) made history Wednesday as the first Taiwanese novel to win the U.S. National Book Award for Translated Literature since the award was founded in 1967. The award is among one of the most prestigious literature awards in the world, mentioned alongside the Man Booker Prize and Nobel Prize for Literature.

Written by author Yang Shuang-zi (楊双子), the book tells the story of a Japanese travel writer Chizuko, and her Taiwanese translator Chizuru traveling along Taiwan’s railway system on a “culinary journey” during the period of Japanese occupation. During the journey, Chizuko is faced with confronting the layered power dynamics in an intimate story that the New York Times praises as “a nesting-doll narrative about colonial power in its many forms[…] of translations, [and] of empires”.

The author, Yang Shuang-zi, is actually a pen name for twin sisters Yang Jo-tzu (楊若慈) and Yang Jo-hui (楊若暉) who worked as collaborators focusing on narrative creation, and historical research and translation. While Yang Jo-hui passed away in 2015, her sister has continued to use the pen name in her honor. Continue reading Taiwan novel makes history winning National Book Award →

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