Fiction In English Translation Research Articles

Translation and canon formation

Abstract As an essential part of the “Globalization of Chinese Culture” strategy, the translation of Chinese fiction into English has gained more significance and deserves more academic attention. Through making a survey of Chinese fiction in English translation from 1978 to 2018, the article not only presents different trajectories of the development of Chinese fiction in English translation in mainland China and the English-speaking countries but also shows that different canons of Chinese fiction in English translation have been formed in the course of this development. Reasons for the formation of the prevailing canon(s) are explored and explained from perspectives taking into account concrete factors such as ideology, poetics and patronage as well as influences of the literary award mechanism. Based on this description and explanation, the article concludes with a few suggestions for the future development of cultural activity of introducing Chinese literature into English-speaking countries.

Broken Stars: Contemporary Chinese Science Fiction in Translation

the voice notes that the couple complement each other, Artur says, “We complement each other.” When it announces, “The rhinos are outside,” Printz thinks, “It’s good that the rhinos are outside.” The voice becomes their shadow. Twentieth-century history has marked these lives. Isabella talks to her thirty-six garden gnomes, one for each family member lost to the Holocaust. Printz’s mother’s silver was confiscated from Isabella’s Jewish family . Kindhearted Printz obsesses over Bosnian war victims. Pervasive lists—Artur’s hats, “his past,” Isabella’s bonbon wrappers , Printz’s notebook of famed suicides and fateful events from his birth year—add backstory and history. Memories mingle violence and sex. As Isabella manipulates Artur, the voice lists alphabet letters, below each a Holocaustlinked noun. After “Z / Zyklon B” comes “Done . . . A one-minute wank, ten years of history, ten years of Isabella’s life.” Printz, meanwhile, frequently invokes the film The Night Porter, in which a Nazi officer and Jewish prisoner enact a doomed fusion of sex and power. These bodies have histories, too, aging and disease portrayed with graphic specificity . The old couple wear diapers; selfharming Printz cleans his mother after she defecates. Artur has epilepsy, Printz a mental condition. Alongside interior alter egos—former, repressed, or imagined selves—external doppelgängers emerge. Printz’s beloved rhinos , “tame and self-destructive,” resemble him. Spies watch citizens, commodified, tracking their compliance. Isabella asks if Artur is a spy; police report on both. Printz’s father was a spy, and Printz, to please him, reluctantly became one—he’d yearned to be a sculptor. Containers for the emptied and redundant , trash cans acquire spiritual weight. Those beneath Artur’s window signal “poverty”; landing beside them after his jump, Artur becomes waste. Expelled by his brother from their dead father’s flat, Printz subsists on rubbish- bin discards. Isabella , “a carapace,” tells Artur she’s “empty.” “Disappearing,” Printz removes his shirt in the final scene. The narrator declares his torso “fine,” but Printz comments, “Inside, my torso’s empty.” Newspapers and police report Artur’s and Isabella’s separate suicides on 1/1/2000. In 2001 Printz joins the rhinos, “an endangered species.” Imitating them, he crushes his head against an iron wall and, weeping, declares death “superfluous .” Forms drained of their content, these three enter the “dustbin of history.” Drndić’s memento mori reveals the skeleton . It warns: rhinos are our doppelgängers , too. Michele Levy North Carolina A&T State University Johannes Göransson Transgressive Circulation: Essays on Translation Blacksburg, Virginia. Noemi Press. 2018. 96 pages. If you’ve noticed that translated books are enjoying an uptick in popularity, you are not alone. Indeed, the griping about a widespread disregard for the artform has given waytotranslationsbeinglaudedasapanacea for the dark times we’re living in. Everyone is on board, it seems, from magazine editors to publishers, whose lists now include Books in Review Broken Stars: Contemporary Chinese Science Fiction in Translation Ed. and trans. Ken Liu. New York. Tor Books. 2019. 480 pages. Broken Stars is author, translator, and editor Ken Liu’s second anthology of contemporary Chinese science fiction in English translation, and it’s been highly anticipated ever since Invisible Planets was published in late 2016. Like its predecessor, Broken Stars features some of the most accomplished Chinese authors writing in the genre today: Xia Jia, Zhang Ran, Tang Fei, Han Song, Cheng Jingbo, Baoshu, Liu Cixin (whose The Three-Body Problem won the 2015 Hugo for Best Novel), Hao Jingfang (whose Folding Beijing won the 2016 Hugo for Best Novelette), Fei Dao, Anna Wu, Ma Boyong, Gu Shi, Regina Kanyu Wang, and Chen Qiufan. Again, like Invisible Planets, Broken Stars includes essays on the growth and development of science fiction in China over the past few decades. What sets these two anthologies apart, though, is Liu’s decision to include a greater number of authors and fewer stories per author in Broken Stars, specifically so he could “expan[d] the range of voices included as well as the emotional palette and the narrative styles,” as he explains in his introduction. Despite this wider range of voices and styles, Liu emphasizes that this book and its predecessor are...

Reality in Translation

Reality in Translation Allison Epstein (bio) Out of the Blue: New Short Fiction from Iceland Edited by Helen Mistios University of Minnesota Press https://www.upress.umn.edu/ 208 Pages; Cloth, $24.95 “When foreign readers open books by contemporary Icelandic authors,” writes Sjón in his forward to Out of the Blue, “they automatically compare their contents to yardsticks that do few people any favors.” In other words, Western readers have become comfortable with a certain definition of what makes a story. That definition is reinforced by the authors we’re most often exposed to and the Western canon that shaped them. These stories are what we know. They’re how we expect fictionalized versions of reality to work. And that’s what makes Out of the Blue: New Short Fiction from Iceland such a delight—because that’s not what its writers are bringing us. Click for larger view View full resolution Out of the Blue is the first of its kind: an anthology of contemporary Icelandic short fiction in English translation. It contains compact, varied stories from twenty of Iceland’s leading living fiction writers. And, as you might expect when soliciting fiction from across an entire country, the subject matter covers quite a bit of ground. The collection opens with the story of a dysfunctional family reconciling over a disastrous vacation and ends with a CEO driven to near-madness by Renaissance astronomers, so you can only imagine what sorts of adventures we’ve gotten up to in between. If you’ve never read these authors before—and, unless you speak Icelandic, you probably haven’t—you’re in for a ride. Out of the Blue is a satisfying read in both its compelling stories and its sheer variety of narrative structures. Einar Már Guðmundsson’s “The Horse in Greenland,” for example, unfolds the way a story told on the street might. The unnamed narrator spins his tale with the narrative ease and put-upon tone of someone who knows these characters well and has fallen for their tricks one too many times. At the other extreme, there’s Guðmundur Andri Thorsson’s heart-wrenching “Harmonica Sonata in C Major,” which zooms so far back from a middle-aged man’s family trauma and romantic disappointment that they take on an almost epic sense of tragedy. Snatches of song weave through the story, both actual lyrics and the motif of a guitar that “was always going out of tune, so that he was eternally turning the pegs to increase the pitch.” The reader is put in mind of the markers used to spark the memory of an oral storyteller, but they all fit within the compact, methodical container of the short story. Narrative urgency, in the hands of these authors, can be found anywhere: in micro-interactions, or in the span of an entire life. Out of the Blue has plenty to surprise and delight fans of mythology or magical realism, too. [End Page 26] As a reader who spends a lot of time wading in this genre, I was struck by the fascinating ways these authors deal with the Norse mythology that suffuses Icelandic history. Traditional belief and modern skepticism appear in almost equal measure. How much of the world is truly suffused with magic, or at least the inexplicable? How much can we believe our senses, and when should we turn to our instincts instead? It’s hard to say, and the answer comes out differently depending on which writer is exploring the topic. Two standout stories in the collection dive into this intersection between the mythological and the real, and while they handle it differently, both points of view are remarkable. Þórunn Erlu-Valdimarsdóttir’s “The Secret Raven Service and Three Hens” begins with the striking image of Odin and his ravens and then plunges into the perspective of an adolescent girl with an inimitable opening sentence, “Three years ago, two ravens got burned onto the floppy drive in my head.” What follows is a haunting, exceptionally voiced exploration of fate in the modern world, cut through with sightings of ravens said to...

Paris Berlin New York: The Color of the City by Mark Miscovich

Perspectives: An Anthology of Telugu Short Stories. Trans. Srinivas Rayaprol. Goa, India. Under the Peepal Tree. 2016. 192 pages. Perspectives: An Anthology of Telugu Short Stories is a collection of nineteen short stories by as many authors (sixteen men and three women), selected and translated from the Telugu by Srinivas Rayaprol (1925–98), arguably one of postcolonial India’s most interesting and least-appreciated anglophone poets. Telugu, a Dravidian language spoken by some seventy-five million people in the southern states of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, was Rayaprol’s father tongue as well as his father’s literary medium. This may explain his choice of English, and American English, over British models. His father, the distinguished poet, scholar, and academic Rayaprolu Subbarao, was a great admirer and translator of English Romantic poetry. Back in India, he founded and edited a short-lived but important literary magazine , East and West, and published three collections of poetry in three decades, eventually turning his creative attention and skills to the translation of modern and contemporary Telugu poetry and short fiction . At the time of his premature death, he had contributed to various anthologies and prepared at least one selection of his own. The present volume was “nearly finished ” when Rayaprol’s daughter, and manager of the Rayaprol Literary Trust, asked the editors to prepare the manuscript for publication. In their prefatory note, they explain how the translator’s method was “so radically different” from their own that they “decided not to tamper ” with it, simply ensuring consistency across the entire volume. They further point out how the selection “seems to be purely personal” and its arrangement “unique, for it defies chronology.” In reality, Rayaprol’s choices are fairly representative of what scholars and critics tend to see as the single most significant subject in modern Telugu fiction, namely the condition of women in India’s rapidly developing society. Most and some of the best stories are about women (although not always written by women), whether they have female protagonists or subjects or address various (and variously disguised) representations of femininity and its discontents. More relevant—and revealing—than the selection of the stories, though, is their arrangement, which is indeed “unique” although in a different and deeper sense than what is indicated by the editors. By juxtaposing stories with obvious affinities and stories linked by more intimate, subtle , and subterranean meanings, Rayaprol effectively invites readings that are both complementary and alternative to those suggested by previous anthologies of the same kind. This makes the present volume an important addition to both Telugu fiction in English translation and to Rayaprol ’s body of published work. Graziano Krätli North Haven, Connecticut Wolfgang Hermann. Paris Berlin New York: The Color of the City. Trans. Mark Miscovich. Greenville, South Carolina. KBR. 2016. 217 pages. Western literature is full of accounts of vagrancy and tales of the flâneur. So why would we need yet another? Wolfgang Hermann’s Paris Berlin New York, collected here in one translated volume with a critical essay by Mark Miscovich, is a work that exceeds expectations and proves that the theme is anything but exhausted. In fact, Hermann’s book situates him in the same orbit as Baudelaire’s Paris Spleen, Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London, as well as the postmodern master W. G. Sebald. In terms of writing style, Hermann’s is closer to Baudelaire’s than the others, despite carrying the feeling of being absolutely contemporary. Paris Berlin New York reads more like prose poems than a series of short stories. What the reader gets is a series of snapshots of place, often eerily uncanny places like those that arrive in dreams. Reading Hermann is like grasping at the residue of a dream that stays with us just long enough to either make a suggestion or leave an ephemeral imprint on our consciousness. The book is divided into four sections . “Paris,” “Berlin,” and “New York,” which make up the first three sections, are told in the first person, and the narrator wanders those cities like a ghost moving through the walls of some ancient ancestral home. There is a sadness, an errancy, to these pieces...

‘La dolce vita’ meets ‘the nature of evil’: the paratextual positioning of Italian crime fiction in English translation

ABSTRACTIn this article I explore the way Italian crime fiction is presented to prospective Anglophone readers through paratextual bindings: titles, cover images and blurbs. I focus in particular on the way Italian settings are – variously – described, elucidated, emphasised and promoted, as publishers and their marketing teams seek to place a text within a space of familiarity or exoticism. Through the very act of circulation across cultures and languages, new forms of national allegory are attributed to these crime novels, on the basis of the perceived needs and prior associations of their new readership.

Desert ethics, myths of nature and novel form in the narratives of Ibrahim al-Koni

This broadly comparative essay contrasts environmentalism in the fiction in English translation of the Libyan writer, Ibrahim alKoni, with dominant trends in contemporary environmentalism. An analysis of three of the most ecocritically pertinent of the novels in English translation suggests that the natural world is viewed through the lens of the mythical, encompassing the religious worlds of both Tuareg animism, as well as monotheism represented by Islam and early Christianity. The novels to be considered are The Seven Veils of Seth, Anubis and The Bleeding of the Stone. Unlike environmental approaches which derive from the European Enlightenment of procedural rational disenchantment, human beings in Al-Koni’s work are accorded a place in the sacred order which allows non-parasitic modes of existence within the framework of a sacred law. This conviction is articulated most powerfully through the symbol of the desert which inspires all of Al-Koni’s work. The social and sacred desert ethic out of which Al-Koni’s fiction is forged, strains at the form of the novel, the genre which constitutes and is constituted by an immanent, individual vision of the world. As a consequence, Al-Koni’s narratives tend towards allegorical modes which highlight the radical complexity and simplicity of allegory.

Big issues around a small-scale phenomenon: Vernacular pulp fiction in English translation for Indian readers

This paper explores the implications of the recent appearance of some Indian vernacular pulp fiction texts in English translation for Indian readers. As background, the first of three main sections outlines the current scope of Indian Translation Studies, and also briefly examines recent thinking about the position of English in India. The second section examines the habitual Indian English-readers’ perspective of such pulp fiction in translation, and the third that of Hindi commentators insofar as relevant here. These two latter sections do not offer a linear argument, or undertake a close reading of specific texts. Rather, they draw a picture of vernacular and English popular print culture in India, wherein various slippages and cross-connections are apparent.

The Marginalization of Arabic Fiction in the Postcolonial and World English Curriculum: Slips? Or Orientalism and Racism?

Despite the renewed interest in Arabic writing following Naguib Mahfouz's winning of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1988, the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the war on terror, and the US invasion of Iraq, texts by Arab authors are surprisingly absent from the major anthologies and textbooks of postcolonial and world literature in English. Postcolonial literature has been too narrowly defined so that it refers to Commonwealth literature, excluding Arabic writing altogether, whether it be Arabic fiction in English or Arabic fiction in English translation. It is perhaps even more troubling that anthologies of world literature, which include many works in translation, tend to exclude or marginalize Arab writing. Drawing from Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's statement that “such slips become the rule rather than the exception in less careful hands” (1989, 272) and from the relevant ideas of other key thinkers (such as Edward Said, Roger Allen, Arif Dirlik, Waïl Hassan, and Slavoj Žižek), I explore whether such exclusions are painted with orientalist and racist attitudes toward Arabic writing. I conclude with suggestions on how teachers of world literature today can partially overcome the problems in such useful and indispensable textbooks and anthologies. The article asks whether Arabic writing in English can be given no more and no less than the level of attention other Englishes enjoy in our global village today.

Cat Named Sobaka

On the coldest day of the year, in St. Petersburg, Russia, as my daughter Eva, friend David, and I walked up the stairs from Brodyachaya Sobaka (an underground tavern, Stray Dog), we beheld a shivery kitten crouching on a cement step along the stone wall. David, a delinquent publisher of Israeli fiction in English translation, picked her up. She could be sick, I said. You pick her up just like that? What should we do with her? he asked. We'll take her, we can't let her freeze to death, I said. She's cute! said Eva.

Chinese fiction in English translation: The challenges of reaching larger Western audiences

Chinese fiction in English translation: The challenges of reaching larger Western audiences

The Babel Guide to Brazilian Fiction in English Translation

The Babel Guide to Brazilian Fiction in English Translation

Translational migration of martial arts fiction East and West

This paper explores the translational phenomenon of why so little of martial arts fiction has been translated into Western languages, compared to the copious amount into other Asian languages. Investigation into the translational migration of martial arts fiction demonstrates that the “normal” position assumed by translated literature tends to be a peripheral one. However, different patterns of behaviour can be observed, depending on the hegemonic relations between source and target cultures. In the West, martial arts fiction in English translation is being relegated to an extremely peripheral position. But martial arts fiction is able to make inroads into Asian countries, to the extent of stimulating a new literary form or (re)writing martial arts fiction in some indigenous languages.

The Golden Phoenix: Seven Contemporary Korean Short Stories (review)

Reviewed by: The Golden Phoenix: Seven Contemporary Korean Short Stories Bruce Fulton (bio) The Golden Phoenix: Seven Contemporary Korean Short Stories, translated by Suh Ji-moon. Boulder, Colorado: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1998. 297 pp. $55.00 cloth; $19.95 paper. The seven stories in The Golden Phoenix are not exactly short, and most are contemporary only in the sense of having been written after 1945, the year Korean critics use to distinguish pre-1945 Korean fiction (kŭndae, "early-modern" or "modern") from fiction written thereafter (hyŏndae, "contemporary"). The works are more accurately chungp'yŏn sosŏl, "middle-length fiction," the Korean term for any work intermediate between a short story and a novel. The chungp'yŏn sosŏl has been increasingly in evidence in Korea in recent decades as stories have become more discursive and less tightly focused. Averaging forty pages apiece of rather dense type, the stories in The Golden Phoenix would each be difficult to read at one sitting before the next class meeting—a possible concern for instructors contemplating the book as a course text. As for contemporaneity, [End Page 195] translator Suh Ji-moon states in her introduction that "since the long-yearned-for and fought-for termination of military dictatorship in the late 1980s, . . . Korean literature is experiencing a dynamic resurgence, experimenting exuberantly and delighting in uninhibited self-expression." The Golden Phoenix, though, contains scant evidence of any such resurgence. Only two of the stories were published after the 1987 democratization movement; the remainder first appeared in print in the 1970s and early 1980s. It may be that Professor Suh overstates the case. In terms of dynamism, exuberance, and uninhibited self-expression, are there any postdemocratization fiction writers who can compare with Ch'ae Man-shik and Yi Sang, who flourished in the mid-1930s? The 1990s saw the publication of a dozen-odd collections of Korean fiction in English translation. What can The Golden Phoenix offer this increasingly crowded field? Among the seven authors, O Chŏng-hŭi and Yun Hŭng-gil are already well represented in English, and Yi Mun-yŏl and Ch'oe Yun are gaining ground. The remaining three—Yun Hu-myŏng, Yi Mun-gu, and Kim Yŏng-hyŏn—are mostly new to an English-language audience. Yi Mun-yŏl enjoys tremendous respect in his homeland but a comparatively limited following outside it (except in France, where, thanks to translations of his works by Patrick Maurus and Ch'oe Yun, he enjoys modest recognition). Primarily a novelist rather than a writer of short fiction, Yi has tackled some of the most weighty issues of modern Korean history—the fate of a younger generation made to suffer because of the political misadventures of the older generation; the territorial division of the nation; the vanishing of Korean tradition; conflicting expectations of the role of women in Korean society today. And he has a style to match, deliberate verging on tendentious. Yi is represented here by the title story (1981), one of his best-known works in Korea, but the esoteric background of calligraphy and art and the discourse on Eastern aesthetics make it a forbidding read in English for readers new to Korea. Yi Mun-gu, on the other hand, deserves more representation in English for his colorful stories of farm village life, his strong characterization, and his sense of humor. "The Sunset Over My Hometown" (1972), the first selection of his acclaimed Kwanch'on supil (Kwanch'on essays, 1977) collection, is a nostalgic remembrance of a grandfather, inspired by the narrator's first visit to his ancestral home in a decade. It is one of the more successful stories in The Golden Phoenix. Yun Hu-myŏng is known for his poignant 1996 Yi Sang Literature Prize-winning story "Hayan pae" (The white boat), a tale of ethnic Koreans in the former Soviet Union. The story translated here, though, [End Page 196] "The Girl from the Wind-Whipped House" (1982), reads like two narratives patched together. It would be more compelling if the first part—about a village girl orphaned by a bombing raid during the civil war—survived alone. Kim...

Contemporary Spanish American fiction in English: Who is translating whom?

Writing, we know, is men's work; translating is women's. Or is it not so? This study investigates the power relations between writers and translators, men and women, and colonisers and colonised, approaching its subject matter from three distinct angles. On an abstract level, that of translation theory, however basic, it considers the roles of the writer and translator, with the powers and limitations implicit in their relative positions. On an historical plane, it highlights some moments and periods of the past that have contributed to the present hierarchised and, in my view, unbalanced state. And to bring our knowledge up to date, it incorporates an empirical study into the contemporary Spanish American novel, my own primary area of research. Looking at the entire range of narrative fiction in English translation, this study draws some perhaps surprising conclusions regarding the question posed in my subtitle: Who Is Translating Whom?

The Babel Guide to German Fiction in English Translation

The Babel Guide to German Fiction in English Translation

The Babel Guide to French Fiction in English Translation

The Babel Guide to French Fiction in English Translation

Loyalty and Licence: Thomas Mann's Fiction in English Translation

Loyalty and Licence: Thomas Mann's Fiction in English Translation

Japanese Science Fiction in English Translation

Japanese Science Fiction in English Translation

Modern Arabic fiction in english translation a review article

Heinemann's Arab Authors series: Naguib Mahfouz, Miramar (transl. by Fatma Moussa‐Mahmoud; ed. and revised by Maged el‐Kommos and John Rodenbeck; notes by Omar el‐Qudsy; introduction by John Fowles. Arab Authors 9, London, 1978). Tayeb Salih, The Wedding of Zein and Other Stories (transl. by Denys Johnson‐Davies and illustr. by Ibrahim Salahi. Arab Authors 13, London, 1978). Ghassan Kanafani, Men in the Sun and Other Stories (transl. with an introduction by Hilary Kilpatrick. Arab Authors 11, London and Washington, D.C., 1978). Egyptian Short Stories, selected and transl. by Denys Johnson‐Davies (Arab Authors 8, London and Washington, D.C., 1978). Sonallah Ibrahim, The Smell of It and Other Stories (transl. by Denys Johnson‐Davies. Arab Authors 10, London, 1978).

The Golden Tapestry. A Critical Survey of Non-Chivalric Spanish Fiction in English Translation (1543-1657)

The Golden Tapestry. A Critical Survey of Non-Chivalric Spanish Fiction in English Translation (1543-1657)