Translations from Asia

This month's feature on Words Without Borders: China:

"As the world looks to Beijing and the 2008 Olympics, we present a national women’s team of writers to guide us through the richly sedimented and often contradictory layers of the current Chinese psyche. Against the background of contemporary China—where modern business harks back to historical trade, economic growth introduces the painful reality of layoffs, the Cantonese dialect asserts itself against Mandarin, and an argument for the one-child policy takes a peculiarly feminist twist—characters run from social and cultural pressure, fight to support extended families, and dive into unrequited love. Huang Yongmei, Liu Sola, Sheng Keyi, Wang Anyi, Wang Ping, Ye Mi, and Zhao Ying introduce us to the humor, pathos, and great complexity that is China today. Our great thanks to guest editor Hu Ying for allowing us this glimpse below the new China’s gleaming surfaces."

On the Words Without Borders blog, Anne Ishii also briefly notes the curious absence of Asia in a report of recent translations read at the Columbia Grad Student Translation Conference, and published at Context. Ishii writes that, "the real kicker of the survey was the curious absence of statistics on Chinese, Japanese, Korean, South Asian, Thai and Vietnamese translations." As a side note, I would like to announce that Boston's Pen & Anvil Press intends to publish an anthology of Japanese poems in translation in the next year or so.