Translation

Into the Desert review

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Source: World Literature 世界文学 (forthcoming in the bilingual journal World Literature accessible online at http://xuemo.cn/en/en_search.asp?q=World+Literature&t=1)
“Journey to Spiritualism in the Novel Into the Desert by Xuemo”
By Dian Li (University of Arizona)

Cover of Into the Desert

Xuemo’s novel Into the Desert begins with this sentence: “Mountains of sand reached into the sky, dropping the sun closer to the grounds than when they’d set out.” Here “they,” as we quickly learn, are a father-daughter pair embarking on a nighttime trip into the desert. As we appreciate the beauty of the desert led on by this sentence, we are also besieged by the ominous feeling of a coming disaster: the reference to a fox (never a lucky animal in Chinese folklore), the howling wind and the bitter cold (often signs of the destructive forces of nature). Two pages later, the daughter, who was just nine years old, was left alone by her father: “She sat down to wait for Papa. Drowsiness slowly descended and enshrouded her like an enormous net.”

The abandonment of a child is a cruelty that no one can bear, worse yet, imagining how this child would have fared by herself in the unforgiving desert disturbs us endlessly, giving us a lingering anticipation that will foreshadow our transition from the Prologue to the main story of the novel, which turns out to be an extensive journey into the same desert, a place of both fear and spirituality.

“Early in the morning, before the sun made an appearance, Ying’er and Lanlan left their village for the salt lakes in the heart of the Gobi.” So begins the long journey into the desert in Chapter 1, which is cast in a detached but suggestive third-person narration rich in verbs but stingy in adjectives. We will find this style to be characteristic of Xuemo, a contemporary Chinese writer who has already enthralled many English readers with several translated works of fiction. Undoubtedly, many more will embrace him with this novel that was masterfully translated by Howard Goldblatt and Sylvia Li-chun Lin. Continue reading →

Babel of Chinese SF: A Reading Group

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Chinese SF in translation-May Session-“Starship: Library” by Jiang Bo and translated by Xuetitng Ni
Babel of Chinese SF: A Reading Group

We are a monthly online meet-up that reads, shares and discusses Chinese language sci-fi and speculative fiction in translation
Website: https://babelofchinesesf.wordpress.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/BabelChineseSF
Email: babelofchinesesf@gmail.com
Wechat: 科幻巴别塔
Newsletter: https://gmail.us20.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=72d01cf57bd5a94340f964cde&id=490929f73a

Upcoming: May Session

“Starship: Library” / 《宇宙尽头的书店》
by Jiang Bo 江波
Translated by Xueting Christine Ni 倪雪亭
Included in Sinopticon: A Celebration of Chinese Science Fiction
Video call with the author Jiang Bo and the translator Xueting Christine Ni

Beijing Time: 20:00, May 28th, 2023.
British Summer Time: 13:00, May 28th, 2023. Continue reading →

Secondhand China review

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MCLC Resource Center is pleased to announce publication of Miaowei Weng’s review of Secondhand China: Spain, the East, and the Politics of Translation, by Carles Prado-Fonts. The review appears below and at its online home: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/book-reviews/miaowei-weng/. My thanks to Michael Gibbs Hill, our translations/translation studies book review editor, for ushering the review to publication.

Kirk Denton, MCLC

Secondhand China:
Spain, the East, and the Politics of Translation

By Carles Prado-Fonts

Reviewed by Miaowei Weng

MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright May, 2023)

Carles Prado-Fonts. Secondhand China: Spain, the East, and the Politics of Translation Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2022. 272 pp. ISBN: 9780810144767 (paperback); 9780810144774 (cloth).

Secondhand China offers an in-depth examination of the complex relationships between East and West, Spain and Europe, and Catalonia and other parts of Spain between the late nineteenth century and the 1930s. Carles Prado-Fonts analyzes Spanish and Catalan cultural texts about China produced during this period, providing a unique perspective on the cultural and political dynamics at play in these relationships as well as on the politics of translation.

Secondhand China should be read in the context of the distinction between the study of China (Sinology, or, more politically correct, China Studies) and the study of written China(s) (Sinography). While China studies scholars focus on China as a geopolitical location, exploring its culture, society, history, politics, and various other aspects, Sinographers like Eric Hayot, Haun Saussy, and Steven G. Yao take a different approach. In Sinographies: Writing China (2008), they propose in a provocative way that “China” is not simply something to be studied, but rather, something to be thought through, or a lens through which to examine or even redefine the crucial problems of contemporary thought. “China” is viewed as central to many of these problems, such as the problems of translation, subalternity, the value of texts, and so on. Obviously, Secondhand China participates in this ongoing project of Sinography that “thinks through ‘China.’”[1] Continue reading →

Translation and Power–cfp

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Translation and Power:
The Fourth International Conference on Chinese Translation History
December 16-18, 2023
Organizer: Research Centre for Translation (RCT), The Chinese University of Hong Kong
Co-organizer: Department of Translation, The Chinese University of Hong Kong
Venue: The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong.

The “International Conference on Chinese Translation History” series organized by the Research Centre for Translation, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, explores Chinese translation history within the bigger framework of world civilization and human thought. It aims to lay groundwork for new models, methods, and perspectives in this innovative interdisciplinary branch of learning through detailed case studies. Since 2015, the conference series have been held every two years, with a different central theme for every conference. The fourth conference focuses on the broad spectrum of issues pertaining to the concept of translation and power in Chinese translation history. Continue reading →

New RCT website

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Dear readers and colleagues,

We are delighted to announce that a new Research Center for Translation (RCT) website has been launched. You may now visit our new digital home at https://rct.cuhk.edu.hk/.

We have simplified our navigation and created a more responsive interface. You can conveniently access different sections on our homepage, where information of upcoming translation studies—related events and the latest publications of RCT can be found. With all these modern features, useful resources for translation studies and Renditions publications are just a click away.

We have also launched our new e-bookstore: https://cuhkrctbookstore.com. With better navigation and detailed product information, it’s now even easier to find past issues of the leading international journal Renditions, your favourite paperbacks and hardcovers of Chinese literature in English translation, as well as the outstanding scholarly works in translation studies.

While we have tried our best to improve the browsing experience of our website, we would love to hear your feedback; please feel free to contact us if you have any comment. We are grateful for your continued support to our Centre, and we hope the new website will become a platform where users find inspirations and new ideas.

Best regards,

Lawrence Wang-chi Wong
Director, Research Centre for Translation, CUHK

PEN 2023 Manifesto on Literary Translation

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PEN recently published a manifesto on translation that should be of use and interest to MCLC members:

https://pen.org/report/translation-manifesto/

Here’s an excerpt from the call to action:

“Translation plays a role in the globalization of everything from forms of artistic expression to laws, scientific knowledge, and politics, and it frames how readers in the U.S., including those who are multilingual, engage with other languages and cultures. As U.S.-based translators, we must recognize that we are positioned to resist or to perpetuate neoliberal globalization and its attendant forms of cultural imperialism, which have intensified asymmetrical relations among nations, peoples, cultures, and languages. Contending with the ethics of our translation work by acknowledging it as geopolitically charged presents an opportunity to intervene in U.S. cultural imperialism in particular. In the political and economic moment when this is being written—one in which the COVID-19 pandemic has further foregrounded our planetary interconnectedness as it has escalated the social inequities already deeply entrenched and heavily policed through hierarchies of race, gender, class, nation, citizenship, language, and culture—we are compelled to reassert a long-standing demand for a paradigm shift. Continue reading →

Japanese writer stokes China’s feminist underground

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Source: The Guardian (4/25/23)
Chizuko Ueno: the Japanese writer stoking China’s feminist underground
Ueno’s books are hugely popular in China, where a crackdown on large-scale organising has stifled a nascent feminist movement
By ; @helenrsullivan

Prof Chizuko Ueno, the Japanese feminist and author. Talk to young Chinese academics, writers and podcasters about what women are reading and Ueno’s name comes up. Photograph: The Asahi Shimbun/Getty Images

To find evidence that China’s feminist movement is gaining momentum – despite strict government censorship and repression – check bookshelves, nightstands and digital libraries. There, you might find a copy of one of Chizuko Ueno’s books. The 74-year-old Japanese feminist and author of Feminism from Scratch and Patriarchy and Capitalism has sold more than a million books in China, according to Beijing Open Book, which tracks sales. Of these, 200,000 were sold in January and February alone.

Ueno, a professor of sociology at the University of Tokyo, was little known outside in China outside academia until she delivered a 2019 matriculation speech at the university in which she railed against its sexist admissions policies, sexual “abuse” by male students against their female peers, and the pressure women felt to downplay their academic achievements.

The speech went viral in Japan, then China.

“Feminist thought does not insist that women should behave like men or the weak should become the powerful,” she said. “Rather, feminism asks that the weak be treated with dignity as they are.”

In the past two years, 11 of her books have been translated into simplified Chinese and four more will be published this year. In December, two of her books were among the top 20 foreign nonfiction bestsellers in China. While activism and protests have been stifled by the government, the rapid rise in Ueno’s popularity shows that women are still looking for ways to learn more about feminist thought, albeit at a private, individual level. Continue reading →

M. Winter interview and new anthology

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List members may be interested in reading Anthony Tao’s interview of me for The China Project on the occasion of World Poetry Day a few days ago.​

Also, the second book of our NPC (Neue Poesie aus China) anthology series ​has come out. This volume has 94 poets. For more info, please see the publisher’s page and my blog.

See also here for the first volume, with an introduction in English.

Martin Winter <dujuan99@gmail.com>

Don’t Change Your Husband

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The Chinese Film Classics Project is delighted to announce the publication of Lorraine Shen’s translation of the film “Don’t Change Your Husband” 情海重吻 (Xie Yunqing 謝雲卿, dir., 1929):

https://chinesefilmclassics.org/dont-change-your-husband-1929/

ABOUT THE FILM

Qinghai chongwen 情海重吻
Alternative English title: Kissed Again in a Sea of Love
Directed by Y.C. Zai (Xie Yunqing 謝雲卿)
Cinematography: S.M. Chow (Zhou Shimu 周詩穆) and P.H. Yuen (Yan Bingheng 嚴秉衡)
Set design: S.K. Fu (Hu Xuguang 胡旭光)
Starring: Lyton Wang (Wang Naidong 王乃東), T.S. Tong (Tang Tianxiu 湯天繡)
Studio: Great China Lilium (Da Zhonghua baihe yingpian gongsi 大中華百合影片公司)
Date of release: January 20, 1929
Running time: 61 minutes
Silent, with bilingual Chinese-English title cards
English subtitles translated by Lorraine Shen
Subtitles created by Liu Yuqing

This conservative tale, in which a patriarch and his son-in-law forgive errant and meddling women, wins the Oscar for most male onscreen weeping. Female infidelity, male suffering, and marital reconciliation are dominant themes (with a little light farce thrown in), as in other moral dramas such as Love and Duty 戀愛與義務 (1931) and A Dream in Pink 粉紅色的夢 (1932). Lyton Wang 王乃東, who plays the victimized husband, went on to fame as the rake “Dr. Wang,” the nemesis of Ruan Lingyu’s character in New Women 新女性 (1935). Kissed Again in a Sea of Love, as its Chinese title might be translated, borrows its English title from Cecil B. DeMille’s Don’t Change Your Husband (1919), starring Gloria Swanson. Like many Chinese silent films, it features bilingual Chinese-English title cards. Continue reading →

Summer Translation Collaborative with Amy Ng

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Summer Translation Collaborative with Playwright Amy Ng
May 15-19, 2023
The Ohio State University (Columbus, OH, U.S.A., in person)
Traditional Chinese play translation for the contemporary stage
Pending grant funding

Staged reading of “Rescuing One’s Sister in the Wind and the Dust”; adapted by Amy Ng; based on “Zhao Pan’er Rescues a Sister Through Seduction” by Guan Hanqing; image credit ©Alameida Theatre

In this week-long workshop on the OSU campus, Amy Ng (a London-based Hong Kong playwright) will lead a collaborative effort to translate a classical Chinese play into stageable English. The workshop will feature guest presentations by experienced translators (mornings), hands-on group translation work & individual reflections (afternoons), and a staged reading (Friday afternoon). The goal is to create and document a new process for drama translation, while crafting an engaging, fun, and thought-provoking playtext.

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 English. Interest in and/or experience with theater (any tradition) is desirable, but not required. We welcome novice translators as well as those with prior experience. We especially welcome applications by members of traditionally underrepresented groups. Continue reading →

Michael Berry on Hospital

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Source: The Big Idea (3/1/23)
The Big Idea: Michael Berry
By Michael Berry
What is described by translator Michael Berry as a sci-fi dystopian novel may actually be somewhat of a familiar tale to you. Come along in his Big Idea to see how Hospital, by Han Song, ended up being a perfect representation of his own life.

MICHAEL BERRY:

During a recent podcast interview about Hospital, the host asked “Let’s find out if it’s even possible to summarize the plot?” It isn’t an easy question to answer, even for me, the translator of the novel. Even after spending more than a year living and breathing every word of the book, I feel like I am still figuring it out.

Hospital starts off with a fairly straightforward, plot-driven narrative: Yang Wei goes on a business trip to C City, drinks a bottle of complementary mineral water in his hotel room, is almost immediately struck down with unbearable stomach pain, and after passing out for three days, is taken to a local hospital by several members of the hotel staff. And then things gradually start to get strange…flourishes of the uncanny begin to appear and the reader is quickly transported further and further away from the book’s early realist setting into a strange, dark, and increasingly unsettling universe.

As Yang Wei descends deeper into the hospital, undergoing a seemingly never-ending series of tests, examinations, and procedures to treat a mysterious unspoken ailment, the narrative itself also gradually begins to go off the tracks, taking us down a fictional rabbit hole that is uncompromisingly experimental. Gradually, we also realize that the hospital is not what we originally thought, but rather a massive all-encompassing structure that has taken over all of C City, the nation, and the world. Continue reading →

Old Lady Wang and Her Piglet

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Here’s my third–and, for now, final–translation of a Lu Ling short story, this one titled “Old Lady Wang and Her Piglet” (1944). It appears below and at its online home: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/online-series/old-lady-wang/.

Enjoy,

Kirk Denton, MCLC

Old Lady Wang and Her Piglet
王家老太婆和她的小豬

By Lu Ling 路翎

Translated by Kirk A. Denton [*]

MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright March 2023)

Cover of In Search of Love and Other Stories.

A winter’s night, and although it had only just turned nine o’clock, the village on the bank of the river was dead silent. Not a single light could be seen in the village, or along the riverbank, or in the surrounding fields. Under thick, formless gray clouds, the dark shadows of houses clustered on the slope and those of the wooden boats clustered by the shore lay heavy, forlorn, desolate. In the gray dark, giving off a faint light, the river sounded a wild cry and flowed on. A cold wind began to blow in the rain.

The streets had long been deserted. The sound of the wind and rain made the small village appear yet darker and more desolate. Off the main street, from a small lane cluttered with run-down shacks, came a clear, sharp, and emotion-filled voice, now angry, now anxious, now admonishing, now consoling; accompanying the voice was the crisp cracking sound of a bamboo stick and the coarse high-pitched squeal of a pig. In the deep still night and cold rain these sounds were so clear and anxious they could be heard far into the distance. Continue reading →

How We Kill a Glove

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I am delighted to announce the publication of Ma Lan’s poetry collection, How We Kill a Glove, in a Chinese/English bilingual edition from Argos Books, with translations by Martine Bellen and me. The official release date is April 15, but it is already available for purchase at https://argosbooks.org/?cat=3.

Charles A. Laughlin
University of Virginia

Abstract: Ma Lan writes poems that carry us suddenly into the vast, strange worlds of myth and dream. Blurring the lines between subject and object, Ma’s poetry reveals the character, the liveliness inherent in objects, which seems hidden but never really was (“I wrap a floral tablecloth around my body/making the napkins line up naked”); her poems operate their own internal logic that aligns and then departs from the logic of shared reality (“Death never rejects a reason for ceasing to breathe”). Charles Laughlin’s sensitive, acute translation of Ma Lan’s poems bring readers into a world where “Poets are flirtatious horses”, moving with all of the might and symbolism of ancient folklore. Ma, a member of the Muslim Hui ethnic nationality in China, builds surreal spaces in these poems, embedding them with mysterious and at times menacing political undertones. “Where does it come from, this ponderous density?” she asks, using language to search the physical and metaphysical. “Like dreaming a dream beyond the universe.” Continue reading →

Xi Xi Memorial Roundtable

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Made In Hong Kong: Xi Xi Memorial Roundtable Discussion
Date: Friday, March 3 2023
Time: 11:30 am-1:00 pm (EST)  (March 4 12:30 am-2:00 am HKT)

Zoom link: https://psu.zoom.us/j/91047224971?pwd=WUVrWDVENlRKaVZMYnZTM252UVpGZz09

Dear Colleagues,

You are cordially invited to participate via Zoom in our roundtable discussion to commemorate the Hong Kong writer 西西 Xi Xi who passed away in December 2022. Besides celebrating her enormous legacy in Hong Kong literature and culture and connecting the local literary community with the Anglophone academic community across the globe, the event brings together speakers from Hong Kong and the United States who will discuss topics such as pedagogy in the Anglophone classroom, researches in Hong Kong literary studies, Xi Xi’s translations and literary language, and local efforts to preserve and propagate Xi Xi’s influence via archive and community engagement.

(The roundtable is sponsored by the Department of Asian Studies of Pennsylvania State University.)

Speakers:

Shuang Shen (associate professor of comparative literature and Asian studies, Penn State)
Bangce Cheng (PhD student of comparative literature and Asian studies, Penn State)
Jennifer Feeley (translator, Yale PhD)
Louise Law Lok-man (project director of 字花 Fleurs des Lettres, Hong Kong’s acclaimed literary magazine, poet)
Maoshan Connie (illustrator, community map artist, Xi Xi’s visual arts collaborator)

Contact & Organizer: Wayne CF Yeung (Penn State) (cuy79@psu.edu)

Soong Translation Studies Awards 2022-23

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Stephen C. Soong Translation Studies Memorial Awards (2022–2023)
Call for Entries

Introduction

Stephen C. Soong (1919–1996) was a prolific writer and translator as well as an active figure in the promotion of translation education and research. To commemorate his contributions in this field, the Stephen C. Soong Translation Studies Memorial Awards were set up in 1997 by the Research Centre for Translation, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, with a donation from the Soong family. They give recognition to academics who have made contributions to original research in Chinese Translation Studies, particularly in the use of first-hand materials for historical and cultural investigations.

Entry and Nomination

RCT invites Chinese scholars or research students in mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Macau or overseas regions to participate in the 25th Stephen C. Soong Translation Studies Memorial Awards (2022–2023). General regulations are as follows:

  • All Chinese scholars or research students affiliated to higher education/research institutes in mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Macau or overseas regions are eligible to apply.
  • Submitted articles must be written in either Chinese or English and published in a refereed journal within the calendar year 2022. Each candidate can enter up to two articles for the Awards. The publication date, title and volume/number of the journal in which the article(s) appeared must be provided.
  • Up to three articles are selected as winners each year. A certificate and a cheque of HK$3,000 will be awarded to each winning entry.
  • The adjudication committee, which consists of renowned scholars in Translation Studies from Greater China, will meet in June 2023. The results will be announced in July 2023 and winners will be notified individually.
  • Articles submitted will not be returned to the candidates.

Continue reading →