A round-up of reviews of works in translation from Chinese, including fiction, story collections, poetry, classics and essays. Click on the title for the review.
Novels
Cocoon by Zhang Yueran, translated by Jeremy Tiang
Whether Jeremy Tiang chooses the books to translate or the books choose him, his name on the cover nigh guarantees that the novel is extremely good, remarkable or, in the case of Zhang Yueran’s Cocoon, a triumph… To say that Zhang is an important voice from contemporary China and that Cocoon is an aid to understanding the effect of Chinese history on present and past generations is, while undoubtedly true, to diminish an accomplishment which transcends the specificities of time and place.
Graft by Li Peifu, translated by James Trapp
With its satirical dissection of sharp practice, as well as keen observation of the frailty of human principles, this novel appears to be an anti-corruption manifesto. However, in a final note, author Li Peifu says this is not his purpose. Instead, he is writing “the spiritual ecology of a specific region” and that he believes, for human society, the only thing which is eternal is “change”.
Celia, Misoka, I by ue Yiwei, translated by Stephen Nashef
We are used to novels by expats written in the language of home and then occasionally translated back, sometimes as a curiosity, into the language of the place where the work is set. But the expats are usually Western and the language English. Xue Yiwei’s Celia, Misoka, I, translated from Chinese by Stephen Nashef, is a rare example of this process operated from the other side of the mirror.
The Age of Goodbyes by Zi Shu Li, translated by YZ Chin
Form is very much function in The Age of Goodbyes. Not only is the novel’s structure unconventional, but the author makes direct reference to it: the structure is not just the means to an end but to some extent is the end. This tendency to employ non-traditional forms or surrealism (and sometimes both) seems surprisingly prevalent in Chinese-language literature from outside China proper—Ho Sok Fong and Ng Kim Chew from Malaysia and Hong Kong’s Dorothy Tse, Hon Lai-Chu and Dung Kai-Cheung come to mind—at least in the relatively few such works that make it into English translation. YZ Chin can have had no easy task rendering this complicated novel into English, one with many moving parts that flow together, yet can stand apart.
Strange Bedfellows by Liu Zhenyun, translated by Howard Goldblatt and Sylvia Lin
In this delicately-paced, fast-moving satire that takes us across provincial China and a number of its second- and third-tier cities, no one turns out to be what they present themselves as—and are as often as not molded into people they never thought they would be…The artistry that Liu adds to this genre is to be found in the formal structure of his narrative, which at first appears to be comprised of distinct novellas, until gradually the characters’ lives.
Kingdoms in Peril: A Novel of the Ancient Chinese World at War, Feng Menglong, translated by Olivia Milburn & The Rise of Lord Zhuang of Zheng: First Ten Chapters of “Chronicles of the Eastern Zhou Kingdoms”, Feng Menglong, translated by Erik Honobe
The Chinese claim to have invented many things. To paper and gunpowder, we should probably add historical novels. The English language only came into this genre with Walter Scott’s Waverly novels in 1814, while Chinese readers had been enjoying The Romance of the Three Kingdoms already for five centuries. Late Ming literatus Feng Menglong’s Chronicles of the States of the Eastern Zhou (東周 列國 志）brings to life another eventful period in Chinese history, that of the Warring States. Kings and courtiers, concubines and ministers dream, scheme, take counsel and spill blood in dizzying succession. Feng’s story did not, however, captivate generations of readers by offering nothing but sex and beheadings. Rather, readers concerned about the decline of the Ming, or even 21st-century America, can find compelling narratives of how empires fall. Two new translations, one by Seoul National University’s Olivia Milburn, the other by Erik Honobe from Japan’s Tama University, tackle this classic text for English readers.
Stories
A Catalog of Such Stuff as Dreams Are Made On by Dung Kai-cheung, translated by Bonnie S McDougall and Anders Hansson
Dung Kai-cheung’s A Catalog of Such Stuff as Dreams Are Made On is an exercise in the influence of late-90s, mainly Japanese, popular culture on young women in end-of-the-century Hong Kong. The “catalog” consists of ninety-nine sketches, perhaps in an homage to Raymond Queneau’s Exercises in Style, where Queneau took an unremarkable short episode and retold it in ninety-nine discursive styles. Queneau’s exercises are clever play with the structures and uses of language. Dung Kai-cheung’s catalog is a cultural “thick description” of popular culture filled with dry wit and humor. His sketches are not short stories. He offers flights of fancy.
The Dragon Daughter and Other Lin Lan Fairy Tales, edited and translated by Juwen Zhang
A swamp turns into a castle. A princess shapeshifts into a squid of one pound and four ounces. An ugly toad by day transforms into a handsome young man at night. A betrayed sister reincarnates into a black bird to haunt who hurt her. Metamorphosis is a core mechanism that regulates the Chinese folktales collected in The Dragon Daughter and Other Lin Lan Fairy Tales, edited and translated by Juwen Zhang, part of Princeton University Press’s “Oddly Modern Fairy Tales” series dedicated to “unusual” fairy tales of the world.
Poetry
In the Roar of the Machine, selected poems of Zheng Xiaoqiong, translated by Eleanor Goodman
Zheng Xiaoqiong has come to be known as a “migrant worker poet”, accurate in the sense she is, or has been, both, and that a great deal of her work is informed by the life and hardships endured by Chinese migrant factory workers. “Overwhelmed by what she encountered in the hardware factory where she first found employment,” translator Eleanor Goodman writes in the introduction to In the Roar of the Machine, a recent collection of Zheng’s work, she “turned to writing as a release from emotional and psychological pressure, but also as a form of protest and witness.” But this moniker, Goodman suggests, is to pigeonhole her.
The All-Seeing Eye: Collected Poems by Shang Qin, translated by John Bolcom
The late Taiwanese poet Shang Qin’s poetic world is the purest surrealism; it’s a world infused with dreams, fantasy, and odd juxtapositions, often seemingly controlled by the workings of the unconscious mind. Shang Qin (1930-2010) appears to have taken this to heart. In The All-Seeing Eye “the fleeing sky is flooded with roses” … and “A girl with two eyes like moons pours a cup of starlight onto the hill of my face, and I awaken.”
Non-fiction
The Silk Road and Cultural Exchanges between East and West by Rong Xinjiang, translated by Sally K Church