Chinese Literature reviewed in the New York Times Sunday Book Review

My last blog post concerned the cult figure Li Yang, advocate of "Crazy English". To rectify somewhat that focus on the idiosyncratic and bizarre, I'd like to mention a few new works by Chinese authors mentioned in this week's New York Times Sunday Book Review.

Jonathan Spence reviews Mo Yan's Life and Death are Wearing Me Out, published by Arcade and translated by Howard Goldblatt. Spence writes:

"At one level [...] “Life and Death” is a kind of documentary,
carrying the reader across time from the land reform at the end of the Chinese Civil War, through the establishment of mutual-aid teams and lower-level cooperatives in the early and mid-1950s, into the extreme years of the Great Leap Forward and the famine of the late ’50s and early ’60s, and on to the steady erosion of the collective economy in the new era of largely unregulated “capitalism with socialist characteristics.” At the novel’s close, some of the characters are driving BMWs, while others are dyeing their hair blond and wearing gold rings in their noses.

Yet although one can say that the political dramas narrated by Mo Yan are historically faithful to the currently known record, “Life and Death” remains a wildly visionary and creative novel, constantly mocking and rearranging itself and jolting the reader with its own internal commentary. This is politics as pathology. From the start, the reader must be willing to share with Mo Yan the novel’s central conceit: that the five main narrators are not
humans but animals, albeit ones who speak with sharply modulated human voices. Each of the successive narrators — a donkey, an ox, a pig, a dog, a monkey — are the sequential reincarnations of a man named Ximen Nao, as determined by Yama, lord of the underworld."

Meanwhile, Aventurina King writes on loved / reviled Chinese pop novelist Guo Jingming. King writes:

Thousands of teenagers — his readers are rarely over 20 — flock to Guo’s signing sessions. Some post frenzied declarations of love on his blog: “Little Four, I will always be with you!” (Guo’s nickname comes from “fourth dimension war,” a random quotation he found in a magazine.) Alongside adoring letters
addressed to “Big Brother Guo,” the author posts pictures of himself half-naked in the shower, in his underwear or swathed in Dolce & Gabbana accessories and Louis XIV-style shirts.

Guo is hardly universally beloved. Last fall, he was voted China’s most hated male celebrity for the third year in a row on Tianya, one of the country’s biggest online forums. Yet three of his four novels have sold over a million copies each, and last year he had the highest income of any Chinese author: $1.4
million.

The most critically acclaimed Chinese novels of recent years — “Wolf Totem” (a parable about the death of Mongolian culture and a veiled critique of the Cultural Revolution), Yu Hua’s “To Live,” Mo Yan’s “Republic of Wine” — generally use their characters as vessels for broad social and political commentary. But Guo’s novels focus on the tortured psyches of his adolescent characters, who either nurse their melancholy by sitting alone for long hours under trees and on rooftops, or try to blunt it with drinking, fighting and karaoke.

In addition, Liesl Schillinger writes on Yan Lianke's Serve the People! translated by Julia Lovel, which she describes as a "bluntly drawn, mildly erotic fable" banned in China. Francine Prose reviews Wang Anyi's The Song of Everlasting Sorrow, and Pankaj Mishra discusses Jiang Rong's Wolf Totem.

China's Elvis of English

In a recent article, the New Yorker reports on cult figure Li Yang whose "Crazy English" -- a bizarre blend of ideology and slick marketing scheme -- has set itself loose upon China in preparation for the 2008 Olympics.

Evan Osnos writes: "China intends to teach itself as much English as possible by the time the guests arrive, and Li has been brought in by the Beijing Organizing Committee to make that happen. He is China’s Elvis of English, perhaps the world’s only language teacher known to bring students to tears of excitement. He has built an empire out of his country’s deepening devotion to a language it once derided as the tongue of barbarians and capitalists. His philosophy, captured by one of his many slogans, is flamboyantly patriotic: “Conquer English to Make China Stronger!”"

Li's idea of English is a strange one, to say the least, inextricably linked to ideology; the implication is that with the power of English you can gain prowess in the workplace, attract a trophy mate, and excel in all kinds of ways. These tantalizing promises have their appeal, of course. Osnos writes that "Li’s cosmology ties the ability to speak English to personal strength, and personal strength to national power. It’s a combination that produces intense, sometimes desperate adoration." Thousands flock to his sessions and, according to publisher's statistics, millions of his books and audio products have sold.

Unsurprisingly, Li's pedagogical methods are unconventional at best and bolster this myth of English as a uniquely powerful tool. His 'Crazy English' involved yelling. (Osnos provides the example of doctors brushing up on their English for the Olympic Games shouting after Li: "I! Would! Like! To! Take! Your! Tem! Per! Ture!" to what Osnos images would be the consternation of their patients.)

The fees Li charges for arena-filled sessions and private group meetings are extortionate and all his commercial efforts reveal the work of a savvy marketeer and demagogue. As Osnos writes, "Li’s name adorns more than a hundred books, videos, audio boxed sets, and software packages, such as the “Li Yang Crazy English Blurt Out MP3 Collection,” which sells for sixty-six yuan—a little more than nine dollars—and his motivational memoir, which costs twenty yuan." Osnos playfully adds that the original title of Li's memoir, I Am Crazy, I Succeed "used a word that implied “I Am Psychotic, I Succeed,” but the publishing house rejected it."

Polish author Magdalena Tulli reading at BU

The Polish novelist and translator Magdalena Tulli will be reading at Boston University's School of Management on May 1st at 7 PM. Her novels include Dreams and Stones and Moving Parts. The American novelist Lawrence Weschler will also read, and the two writers will discuss their work. Following the reading and discussion, there will be a release party for the new issue of Agni literary magazine.

Eshleman wins Academy of American Poets award

From the AAP website, "CLAYTON ESHLEMAN RECEIVES THE 2008 HAROLD MORTON LANDON TRANSLATION AWARD": The Academy of American Poets is pleased to announce that Clayton Eshleman has been chosen by the poet and translator Jerome Rothenberg as the recipient of the 2008 Harold Morton Landon Translation Award. Mr. Eshleman is being recognized for his translation of The Complete Poetry of César Vallejo (University of California Press, 2007). This is the second time Mr. Eshleman, who as been translating Vallejo's work for over 45 years, has won the award; the first time was in 2001 for Vallejo's Trilce. The Harold Morton Landon Translation Award is given to the best book of poetry translated from any language into English published in the previous year, and carries a prize of $1,000.

Fast, good, or cheap: pick any two.

Writing for The Smart Set, Jessa Crispin uncovers the shocking rationale for the relative dearth of literature in translation (emphasis mine):

I decide to skip the translation panel I had planned to attend after lunch. The London Book Fair had declared this year’s market focus the Arab World. This meant two things that I could tell. One, instead of just hideously overpriced stale pizzas and soggy sandwiches, you could also now find hideously overpriced Middle Eastern food. Two, at every panel, some publisher had to himself on the back about the increased sales of works in translation. In reality, however, translated works now make up approximately four percent of books published in the English-speaking world, instead of the previous three percent. Whenever a representative from an Arabic publisher stood up during the Q&A section to ask why, if there’s so much interest in translated literature, more literature is not translated, he is answered with awkward silence. “Translation is expensive,” is a general answer given, once someone on a panel realizes no one is going to volunteer to speak first.

Gander's translations in NYC

On Saturday, May 3rd, PEN America is sponsoring a panel titled "The Art of ranslation" at the NYU Lillian Vernon Creative Writers House, 58 West 10th St., at 4 p.m., a reading and discussion with Forrest Gander on the Mexican poet Coral Bracho, Fanny Howe on the Polish poets Henia and Ilona Karmel, and Stephanie Sandler and Genya Turovskaya on the Russian poet Elena Fanailova. Eliot Weinberger will introduce the event. Tickets are free to PEN and PSA members and NYU students or $5 at the door. This event is being cosponsored by Poetry Society of America, Zoland Poetry, and the Creative Writing Program at NYU.

From the PEN America site: "[Gander’s] translations include No Shelter: Selected Poems of Pura Lopez Colome (Graywolf), and (with Kent Johnson) two books by Jaime Saenz, The Night and Immanent Visitor, which was a finalist for the 2003 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. Gander’s translations of Coral Bracho’s poems, Firefly Under the Tongue, will be published in spring 2008."

Poetry's Translation Issue Podcast

Hear some of the poems from Poetry's April translation issue at the Poetry Foundations podcast. First, reads "Our sweet companions -- sharing your bunk and your bed" by Marina Tsvetaeva, translated by Sasha Dugdale, who notes that, perhaps Tsvetaeva had been reading Pushkin's narrative poem "The Gypsies" or had otherwise been momentarily yearning for a nomadic life.

Hear a poem by Swedish "retrogardist" (akin to Neo-Formalist) poet, Håkan Sandell. The Translator, Bill Coyle, claims that Sandell does not enslave himself to the past, but gives himself the resources to plunder from tradition at will. Sandell's "Poetry rejoices..." reflects on the universality of poetry that transmits itself across geographic space--"on the Faroe Islands, over rendezvous on the Champs-Elysée [...] over Japan, over Korea"--and also across time, "over arts refined over a thousand years." Poetry, here, even transcends form, and is found in the arts of swordmanship and drinking tea.

Borges on writing (Norton Lectures from 1967 and 1967)

Excerpts from the 1967 and 1968 Norton Lectures given by Jorge Luis Borges can be heard here.

Amongst other things, Borges discusses how French literature, although great, is too self-conscious. Preconceiving one's characters, Borges argues can lead one to "labor under illusory problems."

Borges' advice to writers: tamper as little with your own work as possible.

Amsterdam World Book Capital 2008

Oh how I'd love to be in Amsterdam at the end of May when the city holds the UNESCO World Book Market. There will be over 1000 book stalls set up and a program of events, including publishing and author sessions. In connection with the event, the Amsterdam Public Library will hold an exhibition called Amsterdam in Words, which will feature authors who have written about Amsterdam. In June, Amsterdam will hold the Congress of European Booksellers, organized by the European Booksellers Federation and the International Booksellers Federation.

In Memoriam: Robert Fagles

The great translator, poet, and teacher Robert Fagles died at age 74 on March 26, 2008. His translations of The Iliad and The Odyssey were published in the '90s, and his Aeneid followed in 2006.

In an interesting video interview 2003, Fagles discusses how he originally "fell into" the classics and translation while he was an undergraduate at Amherst. He recalls his early love for Lattimore's translations and how learning Russian head him towards translation. Fagles affectionately quotes Auden's description of translation as "Braille for the blind".

Each new translation of a classic work, he claims, is a different performance, with its own nuances and foregrounded elements. In his own translation of The Odyssey, he attempts to bring across Homer's "single ruling imagination". Homer, he claims, is "the great conceiver."

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.

Translation Panel at Boston University

Come meet professionals from fields including textual translation and legal, educational, and social services interpreting, at a panel discussion entitled FOUND IN TRANSLATION: INSIGHTS ON TRANSLATION AND INTERPRETING FOR A GLOBAL AUDIENCE on APRIL 14, 2008 at 7 PM in Kenmore Classroom Building (KCB) 101.

Representing a variety of languages, signed and spoken, panelists will present students with a taste of the work they do and the important role it plays in a diverse society.Sign language interpreters will be present, and refreshments will be served. More information, including list of participants, is available at the website of the sponsoring organization, the BU undergraduate Linguistics Association.

Three Percent's 2008 Translation Database

Chad Post at Three Percent has been doing an excellent job putting together a database of books of fiction and poetry translated in 2008. He updates the list regularly and writes capsule reviews for many of the titles. I strongly recommend taking a look if you are interested in picking up some new translations. Chad also has an interesting analysis of 2008 translations so far in terms of language and publishing house. The list of titles is by no means complete, so the data will not be 100% accurate, but here are Chad's findings for 2008 so far:

French: 26 titles (14.7% of total)
Spanish: 19 (10.7%)
Arabic: 17 (9.6%)
German: 16 (9.0%)
Russian: 12 (6.8%)
Italian: 8 (4.5%)
Hebrew: 7 (4.0%)
Chinese: 6 (3.4%)
Japanese: 6 (3.4%)
Portuguese: 6 (3.4%)
Swedish: 6 (3.4%)

Unsurprisingly, Europa Editions and Dalkey Archive have been responsible for the greatest number of publications in translation this year, followed by Melville House, FSG, Harcourt, Penguin, and Archipelago.

These results will undoubtedly change a lot as the year progresses.

Announcement: Translation conference at Rutgers University

Conference on Translation at Rutgers University

April 3-4, 2008, Teleconference Room, 4th floor, Alexander Library, 169 College Avenue.

With a lean and varied format—1-1/2 days, all sessions plenary—the conference will explore translation as a real-world activity in political, legal and commercial arenas, as well as a vital discipline in the academy.

Translators from New Jersey State law courts and the field of dubbing, and renowned theorists and scholars will come together in public dialogues, roundtables and panels to consider translation in the dimension of culture, institution, and theory. This conference is FREE and OPEN TO THE PUBLIC!

Fore more information, see:
Translation3%20Flyer%5B1%5D.pdf

Announcement: PAUL CELAN FELLOWSHIPS for TRANSLATORS 2008/2009 at the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM) in Vienna

CALL for APPLICATIONS - DEADLINE: April 11, 2008

OBJECTIVE
The program supports East-West, West-East and East-East translations of classical texts and contemporary key works in the HUMANITIES and SOCIAL SCIENCES as well as in the field of CULTURAL STUDIES.

CONDITIONS
Paul Celan Visiting Fellows will be invited to spend 3 to 6 months at the IWM in 2008/2009 to pursue their translation project while working in residence at the Institute.

The fellows will receive a stipend to cover living expenses, travel, health insurance and incidentals.

They will be provided with a guest apartment, an office with access to e-mail and internet, in-house research facilities and other relevant sources in Vienna.

DEADLINE for applications is April 11, 2008 Please refer to the website www.iwm.at, "Fellowships", to learn the details of the application procedure and materials/documents required.

Sixty-Six: The Journal of Sonnet Studies is now available

I am very excited to announce that the inaugural issue of Sixty-Six: the Journal of Sonnet Studies is now available for purchase.

Of particular interest to Pusteblume readers are the sonnets in translation and accompanying essays on translating. Stephen Tapscott, a fine scholar, poet, and teacher at MIT, has submitted original translations of Frederico Garcia Lorca's sonetos del amor oscuro and a short, intriguing essay on these darkly delicious Spanish sonnets. There are also several sonnets by Francesco Petrarca, translated skilfully from the Italian, with an accompanying essay, by Christina Mengert. The Spring 2008 issue of Sixty-Six also features translations of poems by the German poet, Herbert Eulenburg, and--delightfully--a translation in English of a Polish translation of a poem originally in Hungarian. I would recommend you get your hands on a copy!

Stephen Marche on Alain Robbe-Grillet's death and the repercussions for Eng Lit

On February 18th, 2008, the French writer Alain Robbe-Grillet died. Grillet spearheaded the "nouveau roman" movement in France in the 1950s with his essays on reinventing the novel. Robbe Grillet saw conventional novelistic techniques (read: plot, character, narrative, ideas) as horribly out-dated and focused, instead, on the individuality of objects. The resulting work was highly stylized, "art" literature. The novels rarely interest contemporary readers; Robbe-Grillet is primarily read for his ideas on novel-writing. And his ideas, as such, have become rather unpalatable as writing moves back (if it had ever truly moved away) towards the structural architecture of the 19th Century novel.

Stephen Marche at Salon sees the backlash from Robbe-Grillet-style avant-garde writing towards realism and traditional novelistic structure as a source of stagnation in English writing (why he doesn't consider consider French writing more thoroughly, though, is puzzling). While Marche admits that Robbe-Grillet was "a great champion for the innovative novel," he believes the inaccessibility of Robbe-Grillet's work led to a literary backlash. "After him," Marche write, "literary innovation, experiment with form or anything mildly unconventional came to be seen as pretentious and dry, the proper domain of the cheese-eating surrender monkeys and nobody else."

Marche continues:

English fiction in the wake of Robbe-Grillet has become a deliberately
old-fashioned activity, like archery or churning your own butter. He
represented, through his status as cultural icon of the avant-garde, an entire
generation that turned literary experimentation into self-involved blandness. In
the '50s, writers like Nabokov could produce "Pale Fire" or "Lolita" and feel
themselves part of the mainstream of literary culture. After the '60s, after
Robbe-Grillet, anyone who experimented in fiction was being consciously
marginal, or at least countercultural. Thomas Pynchon(Nabokov's student) removed
himself in the most dramatic way; Nicholson Baker is another, quieter example.

Robbe-Grillet not only convinced a generation of talented novelists
that there was something vulgar about attracting a popular readership but also
lost the war he undertook to fight; the reaction against him was so much
stronger than the revolution. It is entirely appropriate that six months before
Robbe-Grillet died, James Wood became the principal literary critic at the New
Yorker. He is the master and commander of the forces of archaism. Whenever I
read a James Wood essay, I feel like I'm entering an oak-paneled club where I'm
forced to put on a tie and turn off my cellphone.

At the core of Wood's appeal as a critic is not an idea or a program
but a prejudice, a leaning, that the novel is essentially a nineteenth century
form. This prejudice came out most clearly in his review of Monica Ali's "Brick
Lane," where he argued -- and I don't think he's wrong -- that the book's
strength and appeal derive from inhabiting a pre-modern perspective. We live in
a world where divorce does not necessarily result in ultimate personal disaster.
Ali's characters do live in such a world and therefore they, and not we, make
better characters: "Adultery has withered as a fictional theme because it drags
such little consequence behind it nowadays." "Nowadays" is the quintessential
Wood word. There is more than a faint tinge of moralism in his nostalgia: You
should not want to recognize yourself in novels because characters like you are
not fit for them. Wood has made himself the opposite of Robbe-Grillet. He
instructs us in the maxim "make it old."

Now it seems that Marche's argument has slid, quietly, from Robbe-Grillet to Wood. Marche is as discontent with what he terms the "ultraradical" (embodied in Robbe-Grillet) as he is with the "willfully archaic." What he wants, of course, is good writing that is not trend-driven. Good writing, ideally, is driven by both stylistic beauty and the quality of ideas. If one of the two is lacking, the work is rarely memorable.

Reviews and news

Just a quick round-up of news and reviews of translations that have appeared this month:

-- Thomas Mallon at the New York Times Sunday Book Review reviews a new collection of three short works of fiction by Irène Némirovsky.

-- Benjamin Lytal at The Sun discusses new translations of Kafka, focusing on Metamorphosis and Other Stories translated by Michael Hofmann. Lytal remarks on how Hofman brings out the humor in Kafka's writing. As Lytal observes, the "new Kafka is funny — as David Foster Wallace pointed out in his essay "Laughing with Kafka" (1998), he is often much funnier than American students give him credit for."

-- Words Without Borders is examining contemporary Lebanese writing this month.

Nooteboom's Lost Paradise

I'm all set to read Cees Nooteboom's Lost Paradise, which has just come out in English translation. Nooteboom shares with Harry Mulisch the somewhat back-handed accolade of being one of the few heavy-weight Dutch writers known outside of the Netherlands. One reason his prose works well in translation is that it is a prose of ideas, rather than style alone. The esteemed J.M. Coetzee reviews Susan Massotty's translation of Lost Paradise in a recent New York Review of Books and places Nooteboom in the international realm of letters:

Nooteboom has a reputation as a postmodernist, not only in respect of his
fictional procedures, where he has plainly been to school with Vladimir Nabokov,
Jorge Luis Borges, and Italo Calvino, but in his sensibility too, cool,
intellectually sophisticated, ironic. He may come from the dark, heavy north and
speak a northern tongue but his heart, he implies, lies in a brighter, lighter
south (he is a devoted Hispanophile). He is a son not of Germany, whose high
peaks and dark forests breed in the soul dangerous metaphysical yearnings, but
of the commonsensical Low Countries. Even from the Dutch he keeps a critical
distance: for example, his 1984 novel translated under the paradoxical title In
the Dutch Mountains criticizes the complacency, greed, and hypocrisy of his
countrymen.

Perhaps that is what most appeals in Nooteboom--his resistance to provincialism; he is concerned more with manipulating ideas than with the dreary, fixed details of time and place.

The novel's story is (perhaps undesirably) fanciful, influenced by Rainier Maria Rilke's poetry as Coetzee sees it and, more directly, as I see it, by Wim Wender's film Wings of Desire. I won't go into plot summary here since Coetzee does a thorough job.

Coetzee also has this to say about Massotty's translation:

Massotty's translation of Lost Paradise reads fluently. Some of that fluency comes, however, at the cost of precision. Nooteboom is a careful
prose stylist of a notably philosophical bent. In a book concerned so centrally
with questions of dying and living beyond death, it is remiss to write of
someone who is burning with curiosity that he is "dying of curiosity," of
someone who is crying out to be seen that she is "dying to be seen," and of
someone who has one question above all to ask that he is "dying to ask"
it.

I would imagine his judgment is likely to be valid since Coetzee is, himself, a fine translator from Dutch and appears to know a thing or two about Noteboom. His slim translation of the work of Dutch poets, Landscape with Rowers, includes a poem by Nooteboom. In his collection of criticism, Stranger Shores, Coetzee has also written on Nooteboom.

Sabotage et Clavicule, a new bilingual journal

Claire Trevien, the editor of the journal Sabotage et Clavicule, is working to launch une nouvelle revue poetique. She seeks submissions from French to English or from Anglais to Francais, as well as essays and reviews concerning literature and translation. Work from visual artists will also be considered for this online magazine. Fully half of the publication will be dedicated to new poems by French poets under the age of 30. Submissions may be sent to her attention at SabotageEtClavicule[at]gmail.com.