Bruce Humes

Just starting 波斯少年 (The Persian Boy), the newly launched Chinese translation of Mary Renault’s classic tracing the last years of Alexander’s life through the eyes of his young male lover. Amazingly, this rendition by Silvano Zheng (郑远涛) represents Renault’s first appearance in Chinese.

When I read about 海神家族 (Mazu’s Bodyguards) in Asiaweek, I had to go and get a copy.  Taiwan-born author Jade Y. Chen, who did tertiary studies in France and emigrated to Germany, will appear today (Jul 23) at the Hong Kong Book Fair. It’s her protagonist’s background (and her own, I believe) that piqued my interest: Mongolian great-grandfather,  father left mainland for Taiwan at 18, Japanese maternal grandmother. . .

I chose 就说你和他们一样 (Say You’re One of Them), a collection of short stories by Uwem Akpan, partly because so little from or about Africa appears in print in China. But the book is misrepresented on the spine where the word America (美国) in brackets precedes the name of the author who was born and raised in Nigeria, not the US. I’ve written elsewhere about the way that Chinese publishers mislead readers about the ethnicity and language of foreign authors. The first short story, about the Rwanda genocide in 1994, seems to have been so heavily edited in the Chinese that I can hardly follow what is going on. So I’ll have to get the English original and compare before I can figure out what has happened: Disjointed original? Poor translation? Heavily censored? Hopefully I can locate the translator Lu Xiangru (卢相如) and get the low-down.