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Wang Zengqi

Revenge

October 4, 2018

Translation from NER 39.3

An avenger should not break his sword.
A jealous man should not complain of a tile falling off the roof.
—Zhaungzi (369–280 bc)

Translated from the Chinese by Xujun Eberlein

“Flowers” by Ramsay Wise

A white candle; a half jar of honey. The honey is not in his view right now. The honey is in the jar; he is sitting on the low bed. But his senses are filled with honey, dense, thick. The bile does not rise into his throat. He has a good appetite. He hasn’t vomited many times in his whole life. A whole life. How long is a whole life? Have I had a whole life now? Doesn’t matter. This is a very common pet phrase. Everybody says, “In my whole life . . .” Like this monk—monks must often eat this kind of wild honey. His eyes narrow a bit, because the candlelight jumps, and a heap of shadows jumps, too. He smiles once: in his mind he has come up with a name for the monk, “the honey monk.” This is no wonder, because the words “a whole life” hide behind honey and monk. Tomorrow when I say goodbye, what would he do if I really call him that? Well, now the monk has a name, what about me? What would he call me? It wouldn’t be “the sword guest” (he noticed that the monk saw his sword at once), would it?

[Read more]

 

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Wang Zengqi (1920–1997) is well known in China for his short stories and essays, though his work has been little translated. His writing had two peak periods: the 1940s (before the Communist era) and 1980s (after the Cultural Revolution). During the last two decades of his life he was pivotal in reestablishing the value of culturally rich language after years of politically conformant literature in China. “Revenge” is Wang’s earliest known story and one of the first in Chinese to use the stream-of-consciousness style.

Xujun Eberlein has lived half a life each in China and the United States. Author of the story collection Apologies Forthcoming (Livingston Press, 2008), winner of the Tartts First Fiction Award, she writes and translates from Boston. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Agni, Asia Literary Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Night Train, Post Road, Prism International, StoryQuarterly, and elsewhere. She received a Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist Fellowship, and her personal essays have been recognized in The Best American Essays and The Pushcart Prize. She is currently finishing a memoir set in China. 

 

Filed Under: News & Notes, Translations Tagged With: Wang Zengqi, Xujun Eberlein

Maciej Miłkowski

The Week of German Cinema

January 10, 2017

1.

"Sunset" by Ramsay WiseAt this sort of event the audience is, on the one hand, rather specialized—we are talking about culture after all—and on the other hand quite predictable, drawn from among a small, easily quantifiable group of regulars—we are talking about culture after all. A few are recognizable public figures, almost famous, though the fame of literary critics, translators, even poets is a bit different from that of actors, athletes, or singers. Even the most celebrated poet can visit a crowded marketplace without worrying that he will be obsessively accosted, while picking out a handsome ear of corn, by a group of local youths professing their admiration and undying devotion.

Cultural gatherings are also sure to draw a number of academics—steadfastly observing the principle never to veer from their narrow area of specialization. A meeting with a French writer is attended by Romanists, a meeting with a Hungarian writer by Hungarianists. If the relevant languages are not taught at the university in a given city, then discussions with their leading artists often sit empty, if they happen at all. At a recent meeting with a Croatian writer, one such specialist, a lady in the front row—in answer to the translator about whether she needed to translate the Croatian author’s replies—glibly proclaimed, “Of course not! What for?” At the next week’s meeting with a leading Lithuanian writer, somehow I didn’t see this woman.

[read more]

—translated from the Polish by Justin Wilmes

Maciej Miłkowski, born in Łódź, Poland, is a writer, translator, and book critic. He has translated over fifteen books from English, in both fiction and nonfiction. His first collection of short stories, Wist, was published in 2014 by Zeszyty Literackie. He hosts a program on literature for the internet radio station Studnia. His stories have been translated into Dutch, English, German, Hungarian, Lithuanian, Ukrainian, and Russian. He resides in Kraków.

Justin Wilmes is Assistant Professor of Russian Studies at East Carolina University. His work focuses on post-Soviet cinema and culture, Polish literature, and translation.

Filed Under: Fiction, Translations Tagged With: Justin Wilmes, Maciej Miłkowski

Ning Ken

Writing in the Age of the Ultra-Unreal

November 21, 2016

Translation from NER 37.2.

On October 26, 2015, Ning Ken gave a talk at Middlebury College titled “Writing in the Age of the Ultra-Unreal.” He spoke in Chinese, and the audience was provided with an English translation to read, which the translator has revised for New England Review.

"Red Fountain" by Roger Camp rogercampphoto.comThe first thing I should do, of course, is explain what I mean by “chaohuan,” which we are rendering in English as “ultra-unreal.” The literal meaning of “chaohuan” is “surpassing the unreal” or “surpassing the imaginary.” It is a word that a friend and I made up about a year ago during a conversation about contemporary Chinese reality. Not long after, I used the word in remarks I made at a conference in Hainan province. The conference was organized by the Institute of Literature at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, and recently the institute’s journal, the influential Literary Review, published an article that uses our coinage in its title. The word “ultra-unreal” is young; it’s a newborn baby. I confidently submit, however, that it is going to live a long, healthy life. China’s been pregnant with the word for at least thirty years. Maybe fifty years. Maybe even a hundred years.

So, what has happened in China over the last one hundred years? Well, let’s leave aside the more distant past and limit ourselves to just the last decade, during which much of Chinese reality has seemed like a hallucination. Some of the things that have actually happened have surpassed novels and movies in their inventiveness. Let me give a few minor examples that reveal something of the current Chinese reality.

There is a major anti-corruption campaign underway in China as I speak, and all the examples I am about to give were made public by the official Chinese media. In China, corrupt officials like to keep huge amounts of cash in their homes. In the past, investigators might find a stash of one million or ten million, but these days such an amount would be nothing. Early in 2015, a department head at the National Development and Reform Commission was investigated for corruption. In his apartment they found more cash than they could count by hand. They got currency-counting machines so they could zip right through the counting, but they burned out four of the machines before they got a final tally, which was more than two hundred million Renminbi, which is about thirty-one million US dollars.

—translated from the Chinese by Thomas Moran

[Read more]

Ning Ken grew up in one of Beijing’s old hutong (alley) neighborhoods and, after graduating from college, spent several years in Tibet, where he wrote poetry and taught at a local school. His books include two nonfiction collections and five novels, most recently Sange sanchongzou (Three Trios, 2015) and Tian•Zang (Heaven •Tibet, 2010), for which he was awarded his second Lao She Literary Award and the Shi Nai’an Literary Award. He currently lives in Beijing.

Thomas Moran is John D. Berninghausen Professor of Chinese at Middlebury College. He lives in Ripton, Vermont, with his wife, the painter Rebecca Purdum.

Filed Under: Translations Tagged With: Nonfiction

Durs Grünbein

Russians at the Gates

November 2, 2016

Nonfiction from NER 37.3.

"Silver Reflection" by Roger Camp rogercampphoto.com For the most part they were unobtrusive, almost invisible—our occupying power. Their day-to-day life carried on behind closed doors, as if someone were trying to shield them from us, or maybe us from them. They lived a hidden life in the barracks, behind the crooked fences and walls that were made impenetrable by skeins of barbed wire, like a hedge of rose thorns. But anyway, who would have dared try to climb over, who would have had the courage to infiltrate the forbidden zone on the other side? Not even we children were brave enough to give each other a leg up over the wall, though our knees were sometimes itching to.

It wasn’t hard to imagine what it was like behind the walls—over there with the Ivans—as people called them ironically behind their backs. Or the Russians, as was said, though still sotto voce, since the word was strange and chauvinistic too—and we all knew it. But talking about Soviets wasn’t the answer either. Those who used the phrase on official occasions or at school felt immediately that there was something embarrassing, something not quite right about the hypocritical turn of phrase. The problem was that there was no suitable designation for these strangers in our country. Everyone knew that they were one of the victorious occupying powers at the end of the Second World War; their dominance in our country was such a dirty open secret that no one dared say it out loud. Our own country: nothing but a Soviet satrapy? An idea scarcely to be admitted, even in a dream. Instead, one put on a diplomatic face, mumbled some desultory words about friendship between peoples, and every so often, on high feasts and holidays, spoke with due pathos about our Soviet brothers.

This kind of comradeship—the sort acted out at parades rather than genuinely felt—was in the spirit of Lenin. Right at the start of the revolution Lenin had made internationalism the duty of every enlightened communist. It was his successor who was forced to change direction and restrict it to the Motherland—because the rest of the world was lagging hopelessly behind. There was a second chance after victory over Germany, the “deadly foe” or, for the time being at least, “necessary ally.” But this was also a chance to pick up again where they had been forced to give up the previous time, owing to lack of enthusiasm on the part of the German working class. This time they wanted to export the Bolshevist order, completely and without illusion, and build on the collapse that made the idealism of its participants superfluous. A few marks scribbled on a map of Europe at the Yalta conference decided in which zone of influence the people of the defeated nation would live from now on and who were the new masters in this fragmented land.

And so one day, shortly after the end of the War, the Russians entered Dresden. They took over the old complex of barracks to the north of the city, set up an exercise area on the Heller heath, distributed themselves among various quarters and official buildings throughout the various districts of the city, and were there to stay. Soon it was as if they had always been there. They belonged to the city like the women trailing home with their shopping bags at teatime, the red coaches of the Tatra trams, and the trash bins made of gunned concrete. Only later, long after the troops had been withdrawn from the eastern part of Germany, did it become apparent how rarely one of their soldiers was to be seen on the postcards of the period. Their day-to-day activities never even got a mention in the local section of the newspaper. They remained a foreign tribe among the Germans. It was, with them, the same as with certain neighbors who never become more than strangers even though we see them every day. They always presented an exotic sight, mostly turning up in small groups, uniformed recruits marching in line, or a gaggle of them in civvies wandering through the city and in the museums. People got used to seeing them around and soon learned to see through them. They seemed to have come from another planet, a star that appeared on their caps and the gates of their inaccessible quarters: they were the people from the Soviet star.

­—translated from the German by Karen Leeder

[Read more]

Durs Grünbein, born in Dresden, has published more than thirty books of poetry and prose, most recently the poetry collection Cyrano oder Die Rückkehr vom Mond (Suhrkamp, 2014) and the volume of memoirs Die Jahre im Zoo: Ein Kaleidoskop (Suhrkamp, 2015). His many awards include the Georg Büchner Prize (1994), Premio Internazionale di Poesia Pier Paolo Pasolini (2006), the Great Cross of Merit with Star (2009), and the Tomas Tranströmer Prize (2012). He lives in Berlin and Rome.

Karen Leeder is a writer, critic, and translator, and is Professor of Modern German Literature at New College, Oxford. Recent publications include Volker Braun, Rubble Flora: Selected Poems (Seagull Books, 2014), with David Constantine, which was commended for the Popescu Poetry Prize in 2015, and the edited collection Rereading East Germany: The Literature and Film of the GDR (Cambridge University Press, 2016). Her translations of Durs Grünbein have appeared in a number of magazines including Poetry Review and Poetry. She was awarded the Stephen Spender Prize in 2013, an English PEN award, and an American PEN/Heim award in 2016.

Filed Under: Translations Tagged With: Durs Grünbein, Nonfiction

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