Ethnic ChinaLit

Time/date: 8 pm, March 18 (Monday)

Venue: Beijing Bookworm (Bldg 4, Nan Sanlitun Road, Chao Yang District)

Topic: Canaan Morse speaks with Heilongjiang author Chi Zijian (at left) about her newly translated novel, Last Quarter of the Moon (额尔古纳河右岸，迟子建著), recounting the twilight of China’s nomadic reindeer herders, the Evenki. Morse (below) is an Associate at Paper Republic, Ltd., and poetry editor of the new journal Pathlight: New Chinese Writing. A poet, he is reading an M.A. in Classical Chinese Literature at Peking University. Read the rest of this entry »

If you don’t know Chinese and prefer not to read Chi Zijian’s classic <额尔古纳河右岸> about the twilight of the Evenki in English, later this year you can enjoy it in Dutch—Het laatste kwartier van de maan. It will be available from The House of Books beginning August. But please note: the Dutch is based on . . . my English translation.

You might like to compare this Dutch cover with that of the Italian edition and the English. The eyes (above) look distinctly Chinese to me, which is a bit odd; the Evenki are a Siberian people more closely related to the Manchu than the Han.

Bertrand Mialaret examine la traduction anglaise du roman chinois de Chi Zijian, Last Quarter of the Moon (额尔古纳河右岸, 迟子建著), l’histoire de la crépuscule des Evenki dans la dernière partie du XXe siècle (l’article français en entier):

Les Evenki ont de l’amour pour leurs rennes qui sont beaucoup plus qu’un troupeau, presque des partenaires. « In my eyes, white reindeer are clouds fleeting across the face of the earth. I’ve never encountered another animal that possesses the docile temperament and endurance of the reindeer . . . Reindeer were certainly bestowed upon us by the Spirits, for without these creatures we would not be.»

Les hommes et les rennes s’accompagnent mutuellement dans les migrations à la recherche des mousses pour les rennes et de nouveaux terrains de chasse. Ils sont libres avec leurs grelots mais reviennent chaque soir au camp. On ne mange pas leur chair, on boit leur lait et on les utilise pour transporter hommes et campements.

Les rennes sont l’obstacle majeur à une vie plus sédentaire. Comme dit la narratrice: « my reindeer have committed no crime and I don’t want to see them imprisoned either .»

Update: Mialaret has just put this piece up in English: Chi Zijian, the Death of Shamans and Reindeer Herders.

The first 8 of 55 volumes—one for each officially recognized ethnic minority in the PRC—have been jointly launched by the State Ethnic Affairs Commission and the Liaoning Publishing Group (辽宁出版集团). The series is titled <走进中国少数民族丛书> (Inside China’s Ethnic Minorities).

Each book focuses on the culture and history of one ethnic group located in the northeast: Manchu (满族), Chaoxian (朝鲜), Mongol (蒙古), Xibe (锡伯), Daur (达斡尔), Oroqen (鄂伦春), Evenki (鄂温克) and Hezhen (赫折).

A quick look at the contents page for the Evenki volume (鄂温克族) indicates a fairly formulaic approach, with chapters on their origins, history of interaction with the Chinese empire, culture and customs, animism and folk tales and art. News reports stress that each book has been written by members of the featured ethnic group, a major break with the past where Han ethnologists were usually the authors.

The section names in the second chapter on warring periods and the “outlook for a brighter tomorrow” are an indicator of the “positioning” of the Evenki vis-à-vis Chinese dynasties across the centuries and up to our day:

• Establishment of the Banner System under the Qing
• Battle Over the Evenki Mink Tribute to the Qing Court
• Defending the Chinese Homeland
• Struggle Against the Japanese Imperialists
• New Society, New Life

It’s unlikely that you will find much here on the impact of post-1949 PRC ethnic policies such as those documented by Richard Noll and Kun Shi in their The Last Shaman of the Oroqen of Northeast China in 2004, or Richard Fraser in his 2010 study, Forced Relocation amongst the Reindeer-Evenki of Inner Mongolia.

伦敦出版商 Harvill Secker 一月 17 日推出了东北作家迟子建的第一本译成英文的小说，《Last Quarter of the Moon》。为了《中华读书报》，慷慨先生找到我，进行了有关我翻译这本小说的初衷的采访：

《读书报》：为什么使用现在这个英译书名，而不是原书名《额尔古纳河右岸》的直译？

徐穆实 [Bruce Humes]：首先要明白一个事实：书名一般由出版方来定，译者甚至原作家的想法只是建议罢了。要知道，外文版权是外国出版社拥有的，当然是他们说了算。

我的建议本来是直译：The Right Bank of the Argun。这书名不仅忠实原作，也方便引起西方读者的好奇心。因为用“右岸”表达河流的方位有点莫名其妙，西方读者习惯用东南西北来表达。就算西方读者 不知道这条河是几百年以来中俄边境的界线，单凭这种奇特的表达方式，也会引起他们的好奇心。

但英格兰的出版人被早些出版的《额尔古纳河右岸》意大利译文的书名 Ultimo quarto di luna 所吸引，就把它译成英文的The Last Quarter of the Moon。

全文可以在此下载 PDF 版或者在线读。

My translation of Chi Zijian’s Last Quarter of the Moon (额尔古纳河右岸) can now be ordered—e-book and hard cover—online. Read the opening for free here (click on the cover), the author’s Afterword, an English-language book review roundup, a review en français, or an interview with me in Chinese about translating the novel (中华读书报).

Narrated in the first person by the aged wife of the last chieftain of an Evenki clan, the Right Bank of the Argun—as it is dubbed in Chinese—is a moving tale of the decline of reindeer-herding nomads in the sparsely populated, richly forested mountains that border on Russia. Read the rest of this entry »

In Rudolph and Our Early Ancestors—a Love Story, Alice Roberts recollects:

I first visited the icy north of Siberia five years ago while making a BBC documentary about ancient human migrations. We were filming with indigenous Siberians of the Evenki tribe, and staying in a remote reindeer-herders camp – living in tents that were kept warm with larch stoves while it was a bone-chilling -40C outside. (The stoves went out overnight and in the morning I would wake up to find my eyelashes stuck together with ice.)

For an English excerpt from Last Quarter of the Moon (额尔古纳河右岸)—a moving novel about the reindeer-herding Evenki on the Sino-Russian border to be published in early 2013—read From the Mountains to the Sea.

The Last Quarter of the Moon

(额尔古纳河右岸，迟子建著)

Afterword

From the Mountains

 to the Sea

The birth of a literary work resembles the growth of a tree. It requires favorable circumstances.

Firstly, there must be a seed, the Mother of All Things. Secondly, it cannot lack for soil, nor can it make do without the sunlight’s warmth, the rain’s moisture or the wind’s caress.

In the case of The Last Quarter of the Moon, however, first there was soil, and only then was there a seed. For this land that turns muddy as the ice thaws in the spring, is shaded by green trees in the summer and is covered by motley leaves in the autumn and endless snow-white in the winter, is very familiar to me.

After all, I was born and raised on this land.  As a child entering the mountains to fetch firewood, more than once I discovered an odd head-shape on a thick tree trunk.  Father told me that was the image of the Mountain Spirit Bainacha, carved by the Oroqen.

I knew the Oroqen were an ethnic minority who lived on the outskirts of our mountain town. They resided in their open-top cuoluozi (teepees) where they could spy the stars at night.  In the summer they fished in their birch-bark canoes, and in the winter they hunted in the mountains wearing their parka and roe-deerskin boots. They liked to go horse riding, drink liquor and sing songs. In that vast and frigid land, their small tribe was like a pristine spring trickling deep in the mountains. Full of vitality, yet solitary. Read the rest of this entry »

According to China’s Ministry of Education (数据库), several minority language projects underway during the current 12^th Five-year Plan (2011-15) have been appraised and approved by experts. They are:

• Database of Modern Tibetan Grammar Research (现代藏语语法信息辞典数据库研究)
• Database of Daur, Evenki and Oroqen Voice Acoustic Parameters (达斡尔、鄂温克和鄂伦春语语音声学参数数据库)

Undertaken by the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology under the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (中国社会科学院民族学与人类学研究所), applications for these databases include promotion of minority language education, language engineering research, and in the case of the Tibetan database, text annotation and machine translation. Read the rest of this entry »

I grew up in places with names like “Winnetka” and “Sewickley,” spellings no doubt based on mangled transliterations of old, even ancient Native American words. I vaguely recall that Sewickley meant “sweet water,” but no one seemed sure.

How many cities, mountains and rivers in China, I wondered, hide their non-Han origins?

The reindeer-herding Evenki (鄂温克族) of northeast China once hunted in an area that includes parts of today’s Heilongjiang Province, Inner Mongolia and Siberia. Sadly, due to the vagaries of Sino-Russian politics, Evenki in China have little access to their relatives on the northern side of the Amur—known as the Heilongjiang (黑龙江, “Black Dragon River”) in China—or to their traditional homeland in Russia. Read the rest of this entry »