Ethnic ChinaLit

Event: 4^th IEL Int’l Conference on Epic Studies and Oral Tradition Research (第四期 IEL 国际史诗学与口头传统研究讲习班)

Organizer: Institute of Ethnic Literature, CASS (中国社会科学院民族文学研究所)

Time/venue: May 22-25, 2012, Beijing (北京市建国门内大街5号中国社会科学院)

Info: iel-keyan@cass.org.cn    China mobile: 138 101 03906

Main topics and speakers:

哈布诺瓦 （俄罗斯卡尔梅克大学教授）
卡尔梅克《江格尔》搜集研究史略  (Jangar Epic)

荻原真子（日本千叶大学文学部 教授）
欧亚古层文化——“umaj”神话与礼仪  (“Umaj” Myth & Rituals)

中川 裕 （日本千叶大学文学部 教授）
阿依努英雄史诗概说 (Ainu Heroic Epics)

陈岗龙 （北京大学外国语学院 教授）
从图像到史诗——蟒古思故事研究 (Python Guth)

塔亚 （内蒙古大学蒙文系 教授）
蒙古史诗传承习俗研究  (Mongolian Epics)

斯钦巴图 （中国社科院民族文学研究所 研究员）
青海蒙古史诗研究  (Qinghai Mongolian Epics)

阿地里·居玛吐尔地 （中国社科院民族文学研究所 研究员）
突厥语民族英雄史诗的本土界定  (Turkic Heroic Epics)

With Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone already out in Tibetan, it was only a matter of time before more serious works would follow.

Sure enough, People’s Court Press (人民法院出版社) has announced the publication of the first-ever Tibetan-Chinese dictionary of legal terms, <汉藏对照法学辞典>.  Comprising 17,000+ entries and 550,000 words, it is not perfectly clear from the news item whether this is a full-fledged dictionary or simply a bilingual glossary.

Yan Lianke’s Dream of Ding Village (丁庄梦) has made the shortlist for the Man Asian Literary Prize and the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize.

Here’s my interview with Cindy Carter, Chinese-to-English translator of Dream of Ding Village:

Bruce Humes (Ethnic ChinaLit): You studied Japanese and lived in Japan for several years before moving to Beijing. Has your knowledge of Japanese, the people and/or the language been useful to you in mastering Chinese? What made you willing to leave Japan to pursue your writing career in China?

Cindy Carter: Japan was the path that led me to China. These days, it probably makes better sense to do one’s studies the other way around, but back in the 1980s, Japan was the economic powerhouse, the modern miracle, and China was just an afterthought, the slow cousin, an object of fascination for classicists and linguists. . .certainly not the most obvious starting point for anyone wanting to understand the rubric of 20^th century geopolitics or economic development in Asia. For every nascent Sinologist, there seemed to be a dozen budding specialists in Korean or Japanese contemporary history, politics or economics, and I was one of the latter. I did consider adding Chinese to a minor in Japanese and majors in Economics and Political Science, but decided it was more than I could handle and still manage to graduate in 4 years. I’ve been kicking myself in the arse for that lack of foresight ever since.

So, after studying Japanese for 7 years, I showed up in Beijing with a visual lexicon of about 4,000 characters, a few well-worn Chinese textbook phrases (courtesy of a 10-week Mandarin course in Osaka, in which I was the only non-Japanese student, and the dimmest bulb by far), and about 40,000 RMB ($5000, at the time) saved up from 3 years of working in Japan. Within a week of my arrival in Beijing, I had sorted out an Internet connection, a student visa, a shared dorm room and enrolment at a small satellite campus of Capital Normal University (where 90% of my classmates were Japanese or Korean), and had explored five different districts of the city by bus, just by navigating the signs.  My grammar sucked, my tones were abysmal, but boy oh boy, was I crushing those simplified characters. Two semesters and nine months later, I’d spent all my cash, was living in an outer fourth-ring road squat with a rocker from Shandong, and was reading Wang Shuo’s fiction, Gu Cheng’s poetry and Cui Jian’s lyrics with reasonable confidence. After a glorious yaogun summer and a 14-month stint working at the Los Angeles office of the Export-Import Bank of Japan, I returned to Beijing in late 1998 to pursue writing and translation full-time.

Sadly, Japanese doesn’t play much of a direct role in my work these days, although it certainly eased my transition into Chinese. When I first began studying Chinese, I didn’t have to learn the written language from scratch, as most western students do, mastering the stroke order and radicals; all I had to do was figure out how the traditional-form characters (used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea and elsewhere, to varying degrees) corresponded to the simplified forms used on the Chinese mainland. Read the rest of this entry »

The first director ever to film a movie entirely in Tibetan on the ground in China, Pema Tseden (万玛才旦), now has another award-winning flick to his name: Old Dog. It captured the Grand Prize at the Tokyo Filmex in late 2011, and will premier on the West Coast of the US in Los Angeles on May 11, 2012. The director will be on hand for a post-screening Q & A.

“Old Dog,” writes Nicola Davidson in Tibet New Wave for the South China Morning Post, “is a story centred on an aged Tibetan Mastiff. The creature has caused a rift between a father who dresses in Tibetan Garb and rides a horse to town, and a son, an alcoholic who rides a motorbike.”

The son sells the mastiff to a dog dealer, but his father retrieves it and sets it free in the mountains—only to find the dog once again in the hands of the dog dealer. In the end, the father takes drastic action to liberate his long-time companion.

Pema Tseden is arguably China’s poster-boy Tibetan filmmaker. The son of nomads, he went on to graduate from the Beijing Film Academy and shoot Silent Holy Stones (2005), the first-ever feature film in the Tibetan language and using an all-Tibetan cast and crew.  He followed this up with The Search (2009), which won the Grand Jury Prize at the Shanghai International Film Festival.

“I think Tibet has always been mythologized and worshipped, and made more remote,” says Pema Tseden in a revealing interview (audio and print) with NPR (Director Seeks to Capture Life in Modern Tibet). “People’s psychological expectations and experiences of Tibet are stuck in the past. They don’t understand the new Tibet.”

But he faces considerable obstacles in telling his story about the “new Tibet.” According to the NPR report, his second film The Search “was vetted by the State Administration of Film, Radio and Television, as well as by the Religious Affairs Bureau and the United Front Work Department, which manages relations with ethnic minority groups in China.”

Nor does he necessarily relish his role as the China-based director who has brought Tibetan film to the world’s attention.  The Silent Holy Stones won a Golden Rooster, a major Chinese award, in 2005—the year the PRC celebrated 100 years of film.“Lots of people asked me if I felt it was a very glorious and proud moment. But I felt very sad that it’s taken 100 years to have a Tibetan film. I’m not proud; I think it’s a matter of great sorrow,” he told NPR.

Event: Poetry reading by Xi Chuan and translator Lucas Klein

Date/Venue: May 10 Thursday, 19:30 pm at the Beijing Bookworm

Notes: Xi Chuan (西川) is an acclaimed poet, essayist, and translator. His poetry has been widely anthologized, and he has received numerous prizes and honors including the Modern Chinese Poetry Award (1994), the national Lu Xun Prize for Literature (2001), the Zhuang Zhongwen Prize for Literature (2003). His collection, Notes on the Mosquito (New Directions, 2012),  has recently been translated by Lucas Klein of City University Hong Kong.

Nowadays it’s getting harder to christen a book with a controversial name that will drive sales in an increasingly sexually liberated China, but first-time novelist Wu Jingya—or her publisher, at any rate—has seemingly hit upon a winner with Phallus Mountain (男根山，吴景娅著).

A PR piece about a recent seminar in Beijing held to discuss the novel (重庆女作家) is crammed with quotes from apologists—literary critics, actually—about the book’s provocative title. The novel, they insist, is “not promoting pornographic culture, it’s a serious literary work.” And so forth ad infinitum.

I’d like to tell you what the title means and describe the plot too, only there’s nary a word about those minor details in the 2,800-word piece of puffery. . .

Several years ago, UK publisher Canongate commissioned contemporary ethnic Tibetan writer Alai to pen his own creative version of the King Gesar saga. The plan: to launch Alai’s King Gesar (格萨尔王, 阿来著)  as part of its global Myth Series, joining other creatively re-told tales including The Penelopiad (Margaret Atwood’s take on Penelope of The Odyssey), Baba Yaga Laid an Egg (Baba Yaga as per Dubravka Ugresic), and Binu and the Great Wall (by China’s Su Tong).

The traditional Epic of King Gesar (Tibetan: གེ་སར་རྒྱལ་པོ), believed to date from the 12th century, relates the heroic deeds of Gesar, the fearless lord of the legendary Kingdom of Ling. It is recorded variously in poetry and prose, and is performed widely throughout Central Asia. According to Wikipedia, besides versions of the tale conserved by PRC-based minorities such as the Bai, Naxi, the Pumi, Lisu and Yugur peoples, other variations are also found among the Burushaski-speaking Burusho of Hunza and Gilgit, the Kalmyk and Ladakhi peoples, in Baltistan, in Sikkim, Bhutan, Nepal, and among various Tibeto-Burmese, Turkish, and Tunghus tribes. The first printed version was a Mongolian text published in Beijing in 1716.

When I wrote Canongate in 2010, they told me December 2012 was the likely publication date of Alai’s work in English. Now August 2013 is apparently the new target date. Why the delay? I don’t know the inside story. But perhaps it’s because they eventually recruited the hottest duo in the world of Chinese-to-English literary translation—Howard Goldblatt and Sylvia Lin—to render King Gesar in English.  It’s public knowledge that Goldblatt and Lin are the first choice of many publishers, and they are so busy that each new Chinese novel they translate has to (patiently) wait its turn. . .

Happily, asymptotejournal.com has now published an excerpt from King Gesar entitled The Shephard’s Dream:

‘My dear nephew, with so many people around, sometimes the gods simply cannot take care of us all, and that is why you feel out of sorts. When that happens, think about this syllable.’ Read the rest of this entry »

Xinhuanet reports (Minority Language Translation Software) that the China Ethnic Languages Translation Bureau has announced the development of several software programs for non-Han languages in China: 

These programs include electronic dictionaries for the characters of the Yi and Zhuang ethnic groups [彝文电子词典及辅助翻译软件 and 壮文电子词典及辅助翻译软件], a proofreading tool for the Zhuang ethnic language [壮文校对软件], and transcoding applications [编码转换软件] for the languages of the Tibetan, Uygur, Kazakh and Kyrgyz ethnicities, according to a statement released Friday by the State Ethnic Affairs Commission.

A Xinhua journalist’s recent visit with primary school teacher and Tujia scholar Chu Yongming (储永明在课间与孩子们进行土家对话) highlights a man with a mission—to ensure that the next generation of Tujia have the tools they need to speak the language of their people.

Working out of a primary school in Hubei’s Feng county, the 59-year-old has taken part in compiling two published works for language instruction (<土家语“原生态”土家语言校本教材> and <土家语言>), and is in the middle of editing a Dictionary of the Tujia Language (土家语辞典).

A few factoids re: the present state of the Tujia language cited in the article:

• 7.38m: Number of Tujia people in the PRC
• 0.67%:  Portion of Tujia who can actually speak the language
• Distribution: Tujia are concentrated in Hubei, Guizhou, Chongqing and Sichuan

Writes author Pedro Ceinos Arcones in his introduction to this new work on the Naxi, renowned for their Dongba pictographic language:

Every year thousands of travelers from all around the world visit the Naxi region [of Yunnan], turning their former isolation in a permanent exhibition of their lands and homes. During their stay in Lijiang they get in contact with some of the most outstanding characteristics of Naxi culture: Dongba pictographs, Old City traditional architecture, Alili popular dance, ethnic clothes, Baisha mural paintings, Dongjing music, etc., but unfortunately these dispersed manifestations of the Naxi culture fail to provide an overall understanding of the Naxi people, remaining instead as touristic activities without a link to the soul of the people who created them, and part of whose spiritual world they are.

This first and sudden contact with the Naxi culture arises the interest of many travelers that unfortunately cannot find any materials with whom satiate their thirst. This book was written to fill this void. Blending the most interesting Chinese and western academic materials in an easily readable and understandable guide to Naxi culture and history, we want to let the outside world understand the human environment of Lijiang, to help the travelers fully enjoy their visit to the lands of the Naxi, and to provide our readers a permanent emotional link to one of the most fascinating ethnic groups on Earth: The Naxi.

The Sons of Heaven, Brothers of Nature: The Naxi of Southwest China is available here on Amazon. To contact the author, e-mail him at peceinos (at) hotmail.com

And here is the Table of Contents: Read the rest of this entry »