Posts featuring Xiao Hong

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

Literary festivals and publications from Bulgaria and Hong Kong!

This week, our editors from around the world report on literary celebrations in Bulgaria and historical archives of Chinese literature in Hong Kong. Read on to find out more!

Andriana Hamas, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Bulgaria

Plovdiv, one of Bulgaria’s oldest cities and the European Capital of Culture for 2019, recently hosted the twentieth anniversary edition of its renowned literary festival: Пловдив чете (“Plovdiv Reads”). For twenty years, the month of June has seen both established and up-and-coming authors sit side by side, trying to unravel the mysteries of the written word. Among the most notable participants this year were Zdravka Evtimova, winner of the Chudomir National Award; the writer and translator Chavdar Tsvenov; the literary historian Cleo Protohristova; the critic Boris Minkov, known for his masterful editorial skills; the publisher Svetlozar Zhelev, who takes pleasure in mediating literary friendships; and the experimental writer Rene Karabash.

Over the course of approximately two weeks, the various hosts and their audiences reviewed some of the best that contemporary Bulgarian fiction has to offer. However, the festivities weren’t restricted to the local literary stars, but also included prominent international guests such as the Ukrainian novelist Haska Shyyan—who commented on her new book in light of the dreadful developments in Ukraine that have shaken the world over the past few months. Another event of note was the special talk devoted to the twentieth-century Bulgarian poet and translator Atanas Dalchev, and the relatively unfamiliar circumstances surrounding his life in Thessaloniki and Istanbul.

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What’s New in Translation: July 2018

Looking for your next read? You're in the right place.

For many, summertime offers that rare window of endless, hot days that seem to rule out any sort of physical activity but encourage hours of reading. While these might not be easy beach reads in the traditional sense of online listicles, we are here with a few recommendations of our favorite translations coming out this month! These particular books, from China, France, and Argentina, each explore questions of masculinity, death, and creativity in unexpected ways while also challenging conventional narrative structures. As always, check out the Asymptote Book Club for a specially curated new title each month. 

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Ma Bo’le’s Second Life by Xiao Hong, translated from the Chinese by Howard Goldblatt, Open Letter (2018)

Reviewed by Sam Carter, Assistant Managing Editor

The “second life” in the title of this scintillatingly satirical novel alludes to how we live on in fictions as well as to how fictions sometimes take on a life of their own. Partially published in 1941 simply as Ma Bo’le, Xiao Hong’s late work was in the process of being expanded, but the throat infection and botched operation that cut her life short at age thirty left further planned additions unfinished. Fortunately for English-language readers, though, it’s now been capably, inventively, and gracefully completed by Howard Goldblatt in an exemplary instance of a translation demanding—as do all renderings into another language—that we attend to its twinned dimensions of creativity and craft. Previously the translator of two Xiao Hong novels as well as a quasi-autobiographical work, Goldblatt was undoubtedly the perfect person to carry out what he fittingly calls “our collaboration,” which is the result of “four decades in the wonderful company—figuratively, intellectually, literarily, and emotionally—of Xiao Hong.”

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My 2015

Let her short but full life be an example to us readers: make hay (and read books) while the sun shines!

When I think about the best books I read this year, I inevitably think about when and where I read them. Starting in late December of last year, I spent many nights hunched over my desk, reading The Plum in the Golden Vase, the late 16th century Chinese masterpiece about the lecherous, murderous, thoroughly corrupt local magnate Ximen Qing and his six equally infamous wives, alongside David Tod Roy’s now complete five-volume translation (Princeton University Press, 1993-2013). When I finished reading both, it had become a warm Boston spring. The giant Chinese novels of the late Ming and early Qing periods (from the 16th to the late 18th century) are long for a reason: when you spend months in the world of the novel, that world becomes a significant part of your own life, heightening the sensation of microcosm. In the case of The Plum in the Golden Vase, this immersion imperils the soul. The novel reads like a thousands-page long sneer—it depicts a world in which everyone and everything, great and small, is morally compromised, and it seems to delight in its own bleak view of the world. Consequently, it’s a novel that is easy to admire and hard to love. The translation, too, wears on the reader by the end. It is complete and readable, but the occasional awkward, overly literal interpretations that are tolerable in the first volume become irritating by the fifth. “Short-life,” for example, Roy’s literal translation of the late Ming curse duanming, loses its amusing novelty by the thousandth repetition. Yet Roy’s translation is a masterwork for other reasons. Each volume comes with about a hundred-odd pages of footnotes tracing the origin of each and every oblique reference and piece of quoted poetry and prose in the novel. Roy’s scholarly tenacity borders on obsession: in order to get the jargon of Ming-era dominoes just right, Roy consults no less than four extant domino manuals from the Ming and Qing. Working through a massive scholarly apparatus that took over twenty years to construct puts the scant four or five months it takes to read the translation in perspective. There’s careful reading, and then there’s careful reading. READ MORE…