Translation

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 →

Renditions valedictory issue 100

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It is with great pride that we write to announce the publication of Renditions no. 100, a landmark that follows fifty full years of publishing our journal. That we have continued to play an important role in literary communication between the Chinese-speaking realm and the world of letters in English is testified to by the extensive collection of pieces we have assembled for this 300-page valedictory issue, which includes masterly translations of a playful anthropomorphic biography by Su Shi, a celebrated classical poem by Lu Xun, and contemporary song lyrics about a post-industrialist China by the rock band Omnipotent Youth Society. A full table of content can be found here.

Orders of the issue can be placed at our e-bookstore, where readers can also purchase past editions or access out-of-print issues for free. We thank you humbly for your support over the years, and we hope that you will continue to support the Renditions Books and Renditions Paperbacks series, with Robert E. Hegel’s superb translation of the late-Ming epic novel Forgotten Tales of the Sui to appear soon.

Sincerely,

Renditions editorial team

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 →

The Little Angel

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The Chinese Film Classics Project is delighted to announce the publication of Kristen Tam’s translation of the film The Little Angel 小天使 (Wu Yonggang 吳永剛, dir., 1935).

CFC website: https://chinesefilmclassics.org/the-little-angel-1935/

My thanks to Kristen Tam for sharing her translation with the Chinese Film Classics Project and to Tamar Hanstke for creating the subtitles.
– Christopher Rea

About the Film

The Little Angel, the second directorial effort of Wu Yonggang, echoes many of the themes found in Wu’s silent classic Goddess 神女 (1934). A poor but loving family devotes all of its resources to the education of an intelligent and sensitive young boy, supporting him through various moral challenges he encounters in the neighborhood and at school. While father is fighting at the front and doing disaster relief work, three generations—mom, big sister, and grandpa—pitch in to help the boy succeed. The angelic Huang Min, inspired by “A Lesson in Love” he learned at school, reciprocates by secretly helping the family back…but takes doing good deeds too far. When, after saving another child’s life, Min’s own life is threatened, who will make the sacrifice to save him? Continue reading The Little Angel →

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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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 →

‘A Jocular Colleague’

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MCLC Resource Center s pleased to announce publication of Guo Wu’s translation of “A Jocular Colleague,” by Wu Yuanxin. A teaser appears below. For the full introduction and translation, go to: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/online-series/a-jocular-colleague/. My thanks to Guo Wu for sharing his work with our community.

Kirk Denton, MCLC

A Jocular Colleague 活宝

By Wu Yuanxin 伍元新

Translated by Guo Wu

MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright August 2024)

Wu Yuanxin

Introduction

Wu Yuanxin 伍元新 (1935-2012), my father, was a Guizhou-based writer and literary copyeditor, born in a Sichuan village in 1935. He lost his father, a small landholder, in the 1951 land reform when his father committed suicide under political pressure. Wu left the village, joined the workforce constructing the Chengdu-Baoji railway, and attended a machine-building school near Xi’an. He began publishing in 1956 in the Shaanxi Daily (陕西日报), focusing on village life. After graduating and securing a job in Guizhou, he published a play titled “Double Selection” (双选) in Beijing in 1963 that reflects socialist village life. After working in the editorial office of Flower Creek (花溪), a monthly magazine in Guiyang that enjoyed a national reputation, he was reassigned to the Guiyang Municipal Cultural Bureau when the Flower Creek editorial office was disbanded following the first anti-bourgeois liberalization (反对资产阶级自由化) campaign in 1981. The campaign criticized the magazine for publishing a sequence of short stories with liberal tendencies. While his writing was initially influenced by the genre of agricultural realism represented by Liu Qing 柳青 (1916–1978) and Wang Wenshi 王汶石(1921–1999), and he interacted in Guizhou with local writers of national influence such as Republican-era writer Jian Xian’ai 蹇先艾 (1906–1994) and sent-down youth writer Ye Xin 叶辛 (1949—), Wu Yuanxin’s short stories in the 1980s gradually shifted from rural themes to focus on young people who moved from the countryside to cities as migrant workers. He also paid attention to work units, or danwei 单位, in a purely urban setting.

“A Jocular Colleague” (活宝) is such a realistic urban story. I selected it from the author’s Selected Short Stories of Wu Yuanxin (伍元新小说选), published by Guizhou People’s Publishing House in 1996. The plot focuses on a cultural affairs unit in the mid-1980s where a group of local artists and intellectuals experienced the conundrum of the rapid transition from the “socialist cultural mechanism” (社会主义文化体制) to marketization, and the tension between the party-state’s control and individual confusion, resistance, and self-expression. The story revolves around the dynamics among three characters: Old Y, a bureaucratic party secretary whose authority is waning in the 1980s; and Little V, the bold, playful, and non-conformist main character who has his own ideas and plans, but who is also charitable and serious at heart; and the frustrated singer Little B as the narrator. Defying the early post-Mao stereotype of rigid and oppressive communist officials, the story portrays Old Y as kind-hearted, honest, and tolerant, though still entrenched in his communist mindset and jargon and in his role of presiding over routine “political study” (政治学习) sessions. The female narrator, Little B, seems to be a passive conformist who tries to understand her old schoolmate and current colleague, Little V, but generally disapproves of his character and bold rebellion. The author uses Old Y’s language in a humorous and out-of-place manner, highlighting the contrast between his old-fashioned ways and the era of marketization and modernization. The story is filled with dialogue that is often joking, sarcastic, and quick-witted, creating a sense of humor and cynicism rarely seen in contemporary Chinese fiction, in addition to providing a glimpse into the internal dynamics of a Chinese work unit.

I translate the narrative in the past tense because it is told by the first-person narrator, Little B, as a reminiscence. I have divided the original short story into three sections, each reflecting a distinct sub-theme. This structure guides the reader through the character development and thematic evolution of the story: the first section covers the meeting of the characters and the initial conflicts between Little Y and the establishment; the second focuses on Little Y running the dance hall; and the third on Little Y’s departure from the work unit.

A Jocular Colleague

1

If you want to know more about Little V’s background, ask Old He. He is the director of our unit’s Human Resources Department, and he manages Little V’s personal files.

It’s true that Little V and I were old schoolmates. But in a school with over a thousand students, we were in different classes, and he was a year ahead of me. We weren’t close. He didn’t stand out, especially not to a girl like me. The only memory I have of him from those days is from when we were sent down to the countryside as part of the youth program. The commune’s propaganda team came to perform a Model Opera, and he played Hu Chuankui, a comical nationalist officer during the Anti-Japanese War. I remember him protruding his belly and delivering his lines: “Thinking of the past, when my army just started, I had only a dozen soldiers and seven or eight guns . . .” [READ THE FULL TRANSLATION HERE]

‘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]

‘Home’ series from Paper Republic

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“Home”, new Paper Republic series of shorts in English translation

A refuge, a recollection, a promised land, a prison; the arms of family, or four concrete walls in the sky… Home means something different to each of us, but it means something to all of us.

Paper Republic’s newest Read Paper Republic series of online short story and poem translations, themed around HOME, will commence publication on June 6, 2024. Read the pieces, completely free, online at https://paper-republic.org/pubs/read/series/home/.

The tenth series since Read Paper Republic was first published in 2015, HOME includes four short stories and two poems, each adopting a different point of view on the all-important question of belonging. At a time when Chinese society is wrestling with generational gaps, real-estate crises, and the outfall of pandemic, these meditations on love and security (or lack thereof) deliver a powerful testament to the variety of human experience.

We’re giving away brand-new novels translated from Chinese completely free to people who help us grow our mailing lists with the most names. What you have to do to win a novel (or collection of short stories or poetry):

  • Send this email to any friends you think would be interested.
  • Ask if they will agree to have their names added to our mailing list. (They’ll get a couple of emails and a couple of free newsletters from Paper Republic per year, no more.)
  • Send us their names and emails by 31 July 2024.
  • Wait to hear from us! We’ll ask you for your mailing address if you’re one of the lucky winners

Continue reading ‘Home’ series from Paper Republic →

Affordances of the Sinophone Literary Translator in the Age of AI–cfp

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CfP: The affordances of the Sinophone literary translator in the age of AI
Time: 13-14 December 2024
Place: M+, Kowloon, Hong Kong

The Department of Translation at Lingnan University and the Hong Kong Translation Society will hold a symposium on the affordances of the Sinophone literary translator in the age of AI, at which the distinguished scholar-translators Michael Berry and Douglas Robinson (with Sun Xiaorui) will deliver keynote addresses.

First proposed by the psychologist J. J. Gibson in 1979 as a way of understanding the way an animal affords itself of opportunities for support and sustenance that it perceives in its environment, the concept of an affordance soon went viral, and has become a term of art in both the social sciences and the humanities if not the life sciences. Scholars have been applying it to literary translators in recent years. A substantial article on the topic was published last year by Douglas Robinson, who glosses affordances as resources (among other terms) and focuses on the uses to which a literary translator can put these resources. This symposium is an opportunity to focus more narrowly on the uses to which translators of literary works in Chinese languages have put the resources available to them, including the resources they have mined and refined. Anyone who is working on some kind of Sinophone literary translation should not find such a “narrow” focus confining; we invite scholars and translators alike to think along the following lines (without being limited by them):

  • The use of lexical or grammatical resources to create a distinctive literary idiom
  • The use of literary resources to reinvent a work in another genre
  • The use of intermedial resources, for instance taking inspiration from film or drama
  • The use of interpersonal resources, such as innovative ways of working with authors or editors
  • The use of institutional resources, including different sources of funding and channels for publication and canonization
  • The use of technological resources, from Double Dragon/Dictate to DeepL/ChatGPT

Continue reading Affordances of the Sinophone Literary Translator in the Age of AI–cfp →

The Translational Turn and the Dual Pressures on Chinese Literary Studies

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List members may be interested in my review essay, “The Translational Turn and the Dual Pressures on Chinese Literary Studies,” recently published by the Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry and available via open access.

Here’s the abstract:

Whereas sinology, or the study of Chinese literature in English, has often been identifiable by a Chinese culturism, or belief in Chinese civilization as a coherent whole united by its writing system, this review article looks at five books that could be described as participating in a “translational turn” in Chinese literary studies. Yet even as they make powerful arguments against the fundamental unity and cohesiveness of a diachronic Chinese cultural-political identity in their translingual and translational approaches to scholarship, the books—Carla Nappi’s Translating Early Modern China (2021), Haun Saussy’s The Making of Barbarians (2022), Tze-Yin Teo’s If Babel Had A Form (2022), Yunte Huang’s Chinese Whispers (2022), and Nan Z. Da’s Intransitive Encounter (2018)—risk taking for granted the longevity of China’s participation in globalization and its economic integration with the United States. In light of current changes to the relationship between China, the US, and the world order, this review article reads these books while attempting to think through the gains and pitfalls of the translational turn in Chinese literary studies.

And here’s the first paragraph: Continue reading The Translational Turn and the Dual Pressures on Chinese Literary Studies →

Angloscene review

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MCLC Resource Center is pleasesd to announce publication of Ruodi Duan’s review of Angloscene: Compromised Personhood in Afro-Chinese Translations, by Jay Ke-Schutte. The review appears below and at its online home: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/book-reviews/ruodi-duan/. My thanks to Michael Gibbs Hill, our translations/translation studies book review editor, for ushering the review to publication.

Kirk Denton, MCLC

Angloscene: Compromised Personhood
in Afro-Chinese Translations

By Jay Ke-Schutte

Reviewed by Ruodi Duan

MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright May, 2024)

Jay Ke-Schutte, Angloscene: Compromised Personhood in Afro-Chinese Translations Berkeley: University of California Press, 2023. 219 pp. ISBN: 9780520389816 (paperback); 9780520389823 (ebook).

New approaches to China-Africa studies that center the mediating role of race remain greatly needed. Jay Ke-Schutte’s Angloscene: Compromised Personhood in Afro-Chinese Translations, which is available for free in electronic format from Luminosa, takes on this call. Through an ethnography conducted in the 2010s of the relationships and micro-interactions between Chinese and African students in Beijing, Ke-Schutte argues that these encounters are continually articulated through the vectors of whiteness, cosmopolitanism, and use of the English language. This landscape, Ke-Schutte argues, comprises the “Angloscene,” which is constituted through acts of interpersonal and intercultural translation.

I appreciate many aspects of the book. The ethnographic descriptions are rich and well-composed. Ke-Schutte accords much-deserved attention to how the dynamic afterlives of Third World unity still manifest in current-day grassroots exchanges, such as when an African student implores a Chinese street vendor to “help out a Third World brother!” (5). Relatedly, I find very provocative the connections that Ke-Schutte highlights between labor migrancy in apartheid-era South Africa and the aspirations of female rural-to-urban migrant workers in contemporary Beijing (72-75). Ke-Schutte’s willingness to tackle some of the most impossible questions in the articulation and reception of Black identities in modern Chinese society (i.e., who can be a racist?) leads to unanticipated and deeply insightful observations. For one, I am intrigued by the global reach of “white political correctness” as a register of the civilizational expectations that govern subaltern subjects (89). The exchanges between Adam, a Zimbabwean student, and his Chinese ex-girlfriend Lili at a costume party capture this dynamic. Adam and Lili found themselves trapped in an impossible bind given their use of English language as the vehicle for communication, unable to escape the racialized positions and aspirations that elevate Tim, Lili’s new white boyfriend, to relative unassailability and authority. Continue reading Angloscene review →

Paper Republic 17

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And we’re back! I know you’re all thinking it, 浪子回头金不换, the prodigal newsletter has returned and there’s nothing sweeter. Well I hope that we can deliver with this, the first instalment in a year and a half.

But first, the annual, start-of-the-year reminder to any aspiring or experienced Chinese-English translators that registration for both Bristol Translates & BCLT Summer School is currently open. Both are online this time around, and while there is some time before the application window for Bristol closes, you only have until Sunday 14 April to apply for Multilingual Prose, Multilingual Poetry, Multilingual Theatre or Training the Trainer at BCLT, if Chinese is your language of choice. Please do spread the word. And if you yourself are interested, then I highly recommend signing up for either for how valuable an opportunity this is to start building your translation network and toolbox.

Now, onto the news:

Extracts, stories and poems:

  • Spittoon Magazine has a whole new selection of stories online, both in their original language and in English translation, for your enjoyment. I also believe the collective has some exciting news coming up in the next year or so, so if you’re not familiar with its work, now is the time to get familiar!
  • A new Shen Dacheng translation is available to read on the Clarkesworld website, in the form of her short story “The Rambler”, tr. Cara Healey. Dacheng’s body of work is a personal favourite of mine so it’s wonderful to see more of it out there in English for all to read
  • Poet Bei Dao’s first collection in over a decade is coming out next month in Jeffrey Yang’s translation and you can read poems from the collection here and here
  • Another book that’s out next month, and is well worth picking up, is Lin Yi-Han’s tragic semi-autobiographical Fang Si-Chi’s First Love Paradise, tr. Jenna Tang. So you know what you’re in for, the author-translator pair has two pieces online, here and here
  • This month’s author of the month at the Centre for New Chinese Writing is Lu Min. There’s an excerpt on the site from her latest novel Golden River available to read in both Chinese and English
  • And to round out this frankly star-studded line up, we have pieces from no other than Yu Hua, three of them tr. Michael Berry, an interview, a list of recommended readings for students of literature and the author on why young Chinese no longer want to work for private firms

Continue reading Paper Republic 17 →

Summer Translation Collaborative II

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Summer Translation Collaborative II with Julia Keblinska and Patricia Sieber
June 10-14, 2024
The Ohio State University (Columbus, OH, U.S.A., in person)
Module development for the Chinese Theater Collaborative (CTC)

Cover of the 1982 lianhunahua comic of The Injustice to Dou E, one of Guan Hanqing’s signature plays. Image credit: Screenshot from lhh1.com by Julia Keblinska.

In this week-long workshop on the OSU campus, CTC co-editors Julia Keblinska and Patricia Sieber will guide a small group of participants in authoring new modules for the Chinese Theater Collaborative (CTC) digital resource center. The program will feature presentations on how to handle different texts and diverse media, hands-on module development, and spirited peer review. This year’s workshop will focus on the modern afterlives of Guan Hanqing’s plays in any media (e.g., different traditional theatrical/operatic styles, spoken drama of any tradition, films, animation, TV drama, graphic renditions, prints, etc). The goal is to create draft modules that can eventually be published on CTC.

We would like to recruit a diverse cohort of advanced undergraduate and graduate students as well as recent MFAs and PhDs. Required qualifications: advanced command of modern Chinese, professional fluency in spoken and written English. Experience with translation, theater or other media is desirable, but not required. We welcome participants, who are interested in developing either individually authored or collaborative written modules. CTC modules are backed by scholarly research but presented in an accessible and visually appealing style to cater to diverse publics. We especially welcome applications by members of traditionally underrepresented groups. Continue reading Summer Translation Collaborative II →