Four Events on Yu Hua's 《活着》from NYC

[Luxi]

59 minutes ago, amytheorangutan said:

I got the time wrong yesterday

 

Same here! I'd forgotten the US moves the clock before we do. I was thoroughly confused when I logged in and saw the same woman as in the translators' discussion, and the chat on Yu Hua so advanced that it was almost finished.   

The video will go online later, they posted a link but it disappeared before I had time to copy. It will be on the Museum's You Tube channel, same as the previous video.  

 

Don't forget they'll send the streaming link for the film today and you'll have 24hrs to watch it before the talk on 18 March...Have a box of tissues ready.

[amytheorangutan]

Oh gosh yes the film! I only read the book up to page 51 and cried yesterday when reading about 長根 I suspect that was only a taste of what’s to come ?

[Lu]

On 3/12/2021 at 1:33 PM, realmayo said:

... then what are we left with? Quite good novels. But given the fact that there are plenty of quite good novels in English, and those don't pay great, perhaps it's unrealistic to expect sales of a translated quite-good-novel to generate enough money to pay both translator and author.

This is of course very true, but it would be good if people all over the world read more quite-good-novels from different cultures, because it broadens the mind and makes the world bigger. Even if a novel doesn't set out to Explain China (or Germany, or Ukraine), the people in it will still approach the world slightly differently than the reader and that will make the reader wiser. Or they approach the world exactly like the reader and that will make the reader realise that people all over the world are real people with their own hopes and dreams, not boogeymen or faceless crowds.

 

Also, your quite-good-novel might be my favourite, eye-opening classic and vice versa. The more quite-good-novels there are, the better for both of us. And for the writers, who can feed off a larger pool of different approaches and styles.

[realmayo]

1 hour ago, amytheorangutan said:

and cried yesterday

 

I got though a recent re-reading of 活着 unscathed but then re-read the first part of 兄弟 and had to skim through about 20 pages of what I remembered as the horridest part.

[realmayo]

25 minutes ago, Lu said:

it would be good if people all over the world read more quite-good-novels from different cultures

 

I suppose that's true, but I can't help thinking that diving into a book written from within one literary and cultural tradition will be a lot less rewarding than it would be if the reader had at least some understanding of where the book's being written from. At the risk of sounding even more pompous than usual: let's say a big reason we are affected by novels is because they portray aspects of being human that are universal. But in a novel the action takes place not within a universal society, but a specific one: so if you don't know much about that society, the author will be less successful at portraying those aspects of being human that are universal.

 

So I can't help thinking that 活着, say, would be a lot less successful if the reader knew nothing of China and nothing of the the Cultural Revoultion etc.

And 兄弟 would probably be slightly less successful if the reader had never been exposed to any Magic Realism before.

 

That implies that a Western translator very knowledgeable of China, when selecting a novel to translate, might pick a book that means a lot to them but will mean a lot less to its target audience (assuming that target audience is western readers with little knowledge of China).

 

And in fact the guy Eric on that talk seemed to kind of touch on that - the success of the 三体 books might be partly because they are part of a shared tradition, sci-fi writing.

[Lu]

1 hour ago, realmayo said:

I can't help thinking that diving into a book written from within one literary and cultural tradition will be a lot less rewarding than it would be if the reader had at least some understanding of where the book's being written from.

Yes, and that is part of the chicken and egg problem: if we'd read more books by authors from different societies (or a specific different society), we would be able to place them better and understand them better, which would make the reading more rewarding, which would cause us to read even more of them.

 

1 hour ago, realmayo said:

That implies that a Western translator very knowledgeable of China, when selecting a novel to translate, might pick a book that means a lot to them but will mean a lot less to its target audience (assuming that target audience is western readers with little knowledge of China).

That is a different problem, but at the same time it seems editors, publishers and agents also don't seem to know what books Western readers will like.

[realmayo]

36 minutes ago, Lu said:

if we'd read more books by authors from different societies (or a specific different society), we would be able to place them better and understand them better, which would make the reading more rewarding, which would cause us to read even more of them

 

That's the optimistic take! I suppose a proportion of people are inveterate 'culture-samplers', but I'm not convinced that's necessarily a good thing - or a normal one, really. (Edit: not a moral judgement, just in terms of a constituency of potential readers of translated fiction.)

[Luxi]

This is the You Tube link for the 2nd event.   

The event comprised a bilingual reading reading of a short section from Chapter 1, and a rather interesting chat on 活着ㄝ, Yu Hua, translation and more with Michael Berry and Song Mingwei.  Yesterday's video isn't up yet.

 

Enjoy the film today (registered participants will have received the link by now).  

[realmayo]

1 hour ago, Luxi said:

Enjoy the film today

 

I remember this being such a good film, I saw it long before I read the book, I think it was the first time (but certainly not the last) I ever saw both Gong Li and Ge You. Would be very interested to hear what people think about the difference between the book and the film. Was that discussed at all in the 2nd event (which I will get around to watching)? [Actually this gets mentioned just after the hour mark - and they say this will be discussed more fully tonight, hopefully that will end up on youtube too eventually.]

 

Quote

Professor Michael Berry was 22 and a senior at Rutgers University when he sent a fax to Yu Hua requesting permission to translate To Live into English in 2003.

 

That is very cool indeed! A couple of people from China have given me a copy of the Berrry translation over the years - both thinking highly of the book but not thinking highly of my ability to read Chinese, although in fact to date I've only read the original text.

 

 

 

[Luxi]

2 hours ago, realmayo said:

I saw it long before I read the book

I did too, and when I finally got the book at first couldn't quite figure out whether it was the same book or had I bought the wrong one. A wonderful film, I never tire of it.  

Yes, they did touch on the differences in the third event, but were leaving most of it for tomorrow's talk (4th event) with a film expert.

 

Third video is on You Tube now, here   

I'm so glad these videos are up, there's so much content in them that I need to watch them twice.