Source: Ethnic ChinaLit (5/25/25)
Synopsis: “The Audible Annals of Abudan” (梗概：《凿空)
By Bruce Humes

A colleague and I have just completed translation of a novel set in turn-of-the-century Xinjiang. Given that precious little writing is coming out of the region these days — and that this is a moving novel that captures the poverty and impact of state-driven modernization on a village there populated by Turkic Muslims and their uppity donkeys — readers might enjoy our synopsis of the novel below.–Bruce Humes

Synopsis: The Audible Annals of Abudan
(Based on the Chinese novel by Liu Liangcheng)

Within your lifetime,
many things will disappear before your eyes.
Only those you yearn for won’t arrive. — Imam Ghupur

At high noon, a harsh burning sun hangs above Qiuci’s Old Town Bazaar in southern Xinjiang. On the congested bridge, a driver honks his horn furiously at an oncoming donkey cart. As if on cue, what seems like ten thousand donkeys commence braying in unison. The riverbed is instantly engulfed by deafening hee-haws.

Sirens blaring, the People’s Armed Police swoop down and order the cart owners to silence their beasts, or else. But as the chorus of furry vocalists converges in the sky and then plummets back to earth, no owner dares rein in his donkey.

What led to this ear-shattering mob action? Has the foreigner’s Mad Donkey Disease gone viral on Chinese soil? Could the donkeys have learned of their doomsday? Was it a toxic combination of the scorching sun, overcrowding and the piercing sirens? Or was it instigated by Elqem, the Donkey Master of Abudan?

The Party Secretary wants to get to the bottom of this “mass incident” — any leading cadre’s nightmare — and quick.

The investigators zero in on Abudan, where the Turkic villagers are accustomed to their hardscrabble lifestyle on the fringes of the vast Taklamakan Desert, once the ancient Buddhist kingdom of Qiuci before Islam arrived one thousand years ago. Continue reading ‘The Audible Annals of Abudan’ →

Source: World Literature Today (May 15, 2025)
Answering New Questions: Translating Yu Hua’s City of Fiction
By Todd Foley

Here form is content, content is form.
—Samuel Beckett on Finnegan’s Wake

On April 8, 2025, Europa Editions published City of Fiction, the English translation of Yu Hua’s complex novel containing elements of epic adventure, romance, and family saga, set against the backdrop of the intense social and cultural development of China’s early twentieth-century history. In this essay, translator Todd Foley discusses his choices, some of which resist conforming to more standard editorial expectations.

The vast distance between English and Chinese makes the question of translating voice and style especially fraught. When a Chinese text is dismantled and rebuilt in English, how should it sound? What are the rules for its reconstruction? For all that has been written on the theory of translation, there is no clear answer, as the gold standard of “faithfulness” proves to always be relative: “faithful” to what? Every translation, as it takes shape from the idiosyncratic relationship between the original text and the translator’s feeling of it (which is, of course, always socially and historically contingent), poses these questions anew.

City of Fiction presented me with some new questions of style and voice I did not expect from Yu Hua. Following his impeccably executed avant-garde modernism of the 1980s, Yu Hua’s novels of the past three decades have all been characterized by brisk, rollicking narratives that critically examine recent Chinese history up through his contemporary moment. His energetic style is typically full of fecal matter, blood, guts, and misogynistic sexuality, which all paradoxically coheres around an incisive and tear-jerking social allegory—which itself is merely the first step toward the more serious philosophical tensions his works explore. Continue reading Translating Yu Hua’s ‘City of Fiction’ →

2024 Roll-Call of Chinese Literature in English Translation
By Jack Hargreaves, published December 24, 2024

‘Tis the end of 2024 (Where it’s gone? Don’t ask me.) and that means it’s time for the annual roll-call of Chinese-language literature published in English translation.

It has been a mixed year, with, on the plus side, there being more women authors published than in 2023, and just more works of fiction in general — more prizewinning works of fiction, too.

But there does seem to be less poetry. And when I say there are more works by women than there has been, the increase isn’t dramatic. In fact, you might say that this year is, on the whole, a return to business as usual after the post-Covid years — those weren’t fallow years, but they were lower yield.

Still, it’s a really exciting list of titles which includes some of my favourite reads from 2024, full-stop. I’m also confident that we’ve missed some works out, especially when it comes to poetry, so please do drop any absent titles in the comments below and we’ll make sure to add them. The same goes for any particularly glowing reviews you’ve come across, or prize announcements (we’ve mostly included winners, but please also share any shortlisted or longlisted works).

Special mentions go to translators Jennifer Feeley and Lin King for bringing us five showstoppers between them, with Mourning a Breast and Tongueless, and Taiwan Travelogue, Cloud Labour and book two of The Boy From Clearwater, respectively. Continue reading Paper Republic 2024 Roll Call →