Breaking into the Chinese market

Penguin has just announced that they are translating ten classic books into Chinese which will be hitting the mainland in November. Here's the list:

Cervantes Don Quixote
Emily Brontë Wuthering Heights
Charlotte Brontë Jane Eyre
Victor Hugo The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Charles Dickens Oliver Twist
Dante Divine Comedy
Dostoyevsky Crime and Punishment
Goethe Faust
Leo Tolstoy Resurrection
Herman Melville Moby Dick

I wonder how they'll be received? I'm not sure how many have been translated before, if any. A lot of modern Chinese authors (and by modern, I mean 1919 May Fourth writers) did read Tolstoy and Dickens and others, but I'm fairly sure that they mostly read them in Japanese because Chinese translations simply weren't available. Also, their concern at that time was specifically to create a new literature to aid China's social revolution, and translated literature played a big part in making that happen. The times have changed, and as the author of this article notes, "the most popular publications are usually management guides, self-help books and biographies of the rich and famous". This is because these books are what meet the need of China's urban populace at this time - I'm not sure if a leisure reading market even exists. There is no such thing as nationwide best selling lists that are available in book shops; each book shop has its own list of bestsellers, which vary depending on what that particular shop stocks, and books on English language learning are invariably up there somewhere.

I would have thought Penguin would be better translating some of China's classics for the Western markets. There is such a vast, rich literary tradition in China, and with the surge of interest in everything to do with China, surely the country's significant literature will soon catch the public interest here in the West. Everyone knows Tang dynasty poets are to be admired, but what about the four great story cycle novels - who even knows what they are? What about all the revolutionary authors from the 20th century - Lu Xun, Shen Congwen, Lao She, Mao Dun, Ding Ling? None of these are widely available, if available at all. Penguin currently carries two Chinese classics - The Story of the Stone (extremely long, undoubtedly a classic, hugely popular in China, but perhaps not the best to start with if you are new to Chinese fiction) and Fortress Besieged, by Qian Zhongshu, which I haven't read. Of course, since winning the N0bel Prize for literature, the works of Gao Xingjian have been translated and are available almost everywhere, and there are a few contemporary authors who are regularly published but by and large, Chinese fiction is not translated.

Maybe this will change soon. I find it ironic that to find English translations of many of the authors I mentioned above, one has to go to China. While I'm waiting for more English translations of Chinese authors, I hope China enjoys Dante!

Reunion

Book Number 11: Reunion, by Fred Uhlman
Country: Germany

While I was in London this weekend, I took the opportunity to make a beeline for my favourite book shop. I first discovered it last year, while I was doing an internship in London. Naturally an early riser, I found myself with nothing much to do one Saturday morning, so I headed out to a book shop I'd read about in a London guide with the intent of finding something new to read and spending the rest of the weekend curled up with my new treasures. Much to my delight, the book shop was blissfully empty of other customers, and I spent an entire morning wandering round the impresive selection on the shelves, pulling out books, then sprawling across a huge squishy couch with a pile of books beside me, reading Pablo Neruda and Isabel Allende while Ella Fitzgerald played softly in the background. I was in heaven.

This weekend, while meandering slowly around the fiction shelves, a small book caught my eye; partly because the author's name hinted at a European origin, and partly because of the book's publisher, which I know from experience selects books I enjoy and also creates beautiful covers for them which immensely enhances the pleasure of reading. I glanced at the brief blurb on the back, and settled down onto the same couch to read the book and was shortly lost in the captivating story.

It is an enchanting tale of unlikely friendship between two boys, one a rich German aristocrat from an old established family, and one a middle class Jew. As so often happens with children, their differences never bothered them until Hitler arrived on the scene and society turned against all Jews. Their friendship was torn apart, and the young Jew was sent to America by his parents in order to avoid persecution by Hitler's regime. I can't tell you the ending, because that would spoil a first reading of the book, but it is exceptionally good. I should really implement some kind of ranking system, because I seem to have been quite nice about all the books I've read so far - but this one would definitely merit 11 out of 10. It is very delicately written and I never can resist emotionally charged books. Heaven revisited!

*In case you're wondering what this wondrous book shop is I've been raving about, I have to confess it is Borders on Oxford Street. I'm sorry it's an evil corporate giant and not an independent, but I love it so. I can't help myself! The fact that they don't mind you reading the books in the store without buying them is amazing; for me, reading is never better than when I am surrounded by masses of books with masses of time to dip into as many as possible.

Journey In Blue

Book Number 10: Journey In Blue, by Stig Dalager
Country: Denmark

Firstly, apologies for the prolonged absence of entries - I went to London for a few days and had no internet access. But on the other hand, I got to hang out in my favourite book shop and read, which is always a highlight of London! More on that tomorrow.

I finished Journey In Blue, which is the novel I mentioned in my last post about Hans Christian Andersen's fairytales. It is a fictionalsied autobiographical novel about Andersen's life, told through snapshots of memory as Andersen lies on his deathbed and morphine sends his thoughts drifting through time. Reminiscences are punctured by brief moments of decreasing lucidity as his grip on reality slips away and Death stalks his dreams.

This book is fantastic in so many ways - stylistically, it is frequently one of the best examples of stream of consciousness writing I've read. Dalager suceeds utterly in painting a portrait of Andersen and all his neuroses and insecurities, but where others have condemned Andersen as a boring personality, Dalager takes us inside Andersen's thoughts so we can empathise with him and see the world through his eyes. In his afterword, Dalager emphasises that in his opinion, "poetic genius corresponds to a complex, rich and enthralling personality", accounting for his need to represent Andersen in a different light to that in which his critics cast him, redressing the balance where Andersen himself could not. Dalager adds that where appropriate, he has used Andersen's own words; at other times, he has paraphrased or rewritten some of his stories, underlining themes in his fairytales to themes in Andersen's own life - unrecognised beauty, unfair persecution, the differences between poor and rich. Anyone who enjoys Andersen's fairytales will find this beautifully written book an invaluable companion for enriching and enhancing the stories, and even if you aren't a fairytales fan, I would still recommend this as an exceptional portrait of an enduring artist.

Along with reading about Andersen's life, I've been rereading some of his fairytales (my last post reflected my first initial foray into them since childhood, and my horrified reaction), and I hope to do more reading and research into the fairytale genre over the next couple of weeks, so look out for that post. Being able to link Andersen's writings to his own feelings at different times in his life has enabled me to see more in them already, and I've been given some names to look up and some things to think about relating to the fairytale genre so I'm looking forward to revisiting more of them. As Andersen himself said, his fairytales are not just for children. Adults will see more in his works than a child can.

Links and random trivia:

- A $12.5m theme park based on Andersen's tales and life will open in Shanghai by the end of 2006. Multi-media games as well as all kinds of cultural contests related to the fairytales will reportedly be available to visitors. He was chosen as the star of the park because he is a "nice, hardworking person who was not afraid of poverty", Shanghai Gujin Investment general manager Zhai Shiqiang was quoted by the AFP news agency as saying.
From this Wikipedia entry on Andersen.

- The Guardian review by Michael Faber from last year

Fairy Tales Revisited

I'm currently reading an excellent novel about Hans Christian Andersen, which has encouraged me to pull a book of his fairy tales off my shelf and start reading them again. It's actually scary how...well, scary, his stories are!

When I hear the label 'fairy tales', I immediately think of princes and princesses and happy endings. Above all, happy endings! I watched a lot of Disney as a child (still do, really) and I never realised just how carefully selected and edited their stories were - take The Little Mermaid, for example. Mr Andersen's version is horrible, quite unlike the Disney one. As in Andersen's tales, Disney always preserves a moral, but they are diluted down versions - Belle loves the Beast despite his appearance; moral is, beauty isn't just about external appearances. Ariel gets her prince in the end and the evil sea witch is duly punished; moral is, love conquers all and/or if you're a bad person, bad things will happen to you. Same goes for Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty and all the other heroines. But in Andersen's tales, if you're not a model Christian, terrible (and I mean really terrible - we're not talking all-singing-all-dancing teapots here) things happen to you.

I'm going to illustrate this point with two of Andersen's less well-known stories, which, incidentally, focus on females and their shoes. Firstly, there's the case of the little girl who was born poor and coveted red shoes like all the other little girls had. Sadly, because she was poor she had to make do with what her mother could afford, which was rather second rate brown shoes. When her parents both died, she was taken in by an old woman who took care of her every need and bought her whatever she needed. One day they were out shoe shopping and the little girl, quite naturally, chose a pair of stunning red shoes above all the others. Revelling in the special feeling that a truly beautiful pair of new shoes can give you, the little girl wore them to church but everybody disapproved of her vanity (including the old woman who was blind and therefore had no knowledge of the colour of the shoes). The little girl, having slightly limited understanding as children do, danced for joy in her red shoes and didn't understand why something that gave her so much joy could be as awful as everyone seemed to think. It seems red shoes were a bad choice for her however, because once she'd started the shoes wouldn't come off her feet and she couldn't stop dancing. She danced and danced and danced until she was exhausted, terrified and in floods of tears, whereupon a helpful woodcutter stepped in and cut off her feet. Now is it me, or does a love of pretty shoes seem an insufficient crime to warrant the punishment she recieved? Namely to be permanently crippled, unable to wear any shoes at all ever again because of the clunky wooden feet she had instead of her own feet and thus condemned to never again recieve joy from a pair of beautiful shoes or indeed, probably many other things - because if having a sense of aesthetics gets your feet cut off, who knows what enjoying the taste of cheese or the melodies in a piece of music might get you?

Second example: another poor little girl who had the good fortune to be taken in by a rich family. Admittedly, this little girl is not quite as likeable as the first; as she gets older, she turns into an ungrateful little cow. She doesn't visit her birth parents very often as she is a bit ashamed of her humble beginnings (although this seems to be inherent in her - her foster family are by all accounts lovely people). One day, her foster mother sends her with a loaf of freshly baked bread to visit her birth mother. As the little girl walks through the forest, she comes to a part of the path which is rather muddy. Not wishing to dirty her pretty shoes, the little girl then throws the loaf of bread onto the mud so she can use it as a stepping stone and thereby keep her shoes pristine. Reprehensible, certainly - although possibly not worthy of the punishment she received, which was to sink down through the mud into Hell where she remained for many many years until she turned completely to stone. (Some dear soul eventually rescued her, pointing out to God that the little girl's crime was not horrendous enough for the punishment she had endured.)

I am not impressed with these stories, and not just because I see nothing wrong with having a certain amount of love for one's oh so beautiful shoes. Stories with a moral are a fantastic idea, but there is so much wrong with these! Firstly, of course I appreciate that it is important to educate children while they are young so they don't grow up to be young offenders or 'yobbos' (as English people of a certain age like to label almost all teenagers). But the way to do it should be to tell them stories of what happens to children who grow up to be horrible adults, a) because adults should know better whereas children are still learning, and b) because everything Andersen said was simply a mean ploy to terrify children into submission - to their parents, to the Church, to anyone older than them. I feel this is akin to cheating, personally. I know he was writing in the early 1800s and was a product of his time, but still! What an awful thing for the son of a shoemaker to tell millions of little children, when the truth would have sufficed just as well.

First Monthly Review

Wow! A whole month (and a day) since my first post. Exciting times! Each month on or around the 2oth, I'm going to do a review post listing the books I've read that month, the continents I've been reading from, how much I've enjoyed my reading, and so on.

Basically I worked out that in order to attain my 100 books in a year mark, I need to be reading nine books each calendar month. (Usually I read far more than that anyway, but I do tend to read a lot of rubbish interspersed with my literary novels, which is generally less time consuming.) I'm delighted to report that I am right on schedule, having read nine books in my first month of my World Literature Tour. Here they are:

1. In Lucia's Eyes, by Arthur Japin (The Netherlands)
2. Les Liaisons Culinaires, by Andreas Staïkos (Greece)
3. Spring Flowers, Spring Frost, by Ismail Kadare (Albania)
4. No Saints Or Angels, by Ivan Klíma (Czech Republic)
5. Embers, by Sándor Márai (Hungary)
6. The Czar's Madman, by Jaan Kross (Estonia)
7. The Three Cornered Hat, by Pedro Antonio de Alarcón (Spain)
8. The Fish Can Sing, by Halldór Laxness (Iceland)
9. Les Enfants Terribles, by Jean Cocteau (France)

It goes without saying that these are all European countries. So far, I'm loving my literary travels so much I feel as though I could happily devote an entire year just to reading European authors. I'm feel as though I'm learning so much about Europe - Europe is scarred not only by the Holocaust but also by Napoleon, for example, which I never realised. I'm going to have to do more reading about him and what he got up to, because he is mentioned in almost everything I've read. I was surprised that I liked Jaan Kross' The Czar's Madman because before reading it, I would have said I loathed historical novels - I think my definition of what a historical novel actually is was somewhat limited, because now I stop to think about it most of what I've read is not in a contemporary setting. For the first time in ages, I'm happy with everything I've been reading recently. Not in the sense that I have enjoyed everything, because some books I have enjoyed more than others, but more because everything I've read is an example of the best literature from each country. Or if it isn't great literature, it is at least fun or deeply rooted in that country's culture or it has won international literary prizes or something.

Blogging is definitely part of enjoying reading. It is somehow very satisfying to stop and reflect on books and put my thoughts down on my blog, and I love reading other people's blogs to find out about new authors or books I might enjoy, or just reading their musings on anything bookish. Plus I love the fact that I have a record of what I've been reading and what I thought of it. It makes it more real, because I forget books very fast, even those I loved reading. Blogging about them helps them stick in my mind and form clear impressions, whereas I always used to read, reflect for about two seconds, and move on (unless I had to write an essay on sex and death in the works of author x, or something equally terrible).

Reading purely for myself on my own random reading mission is proving to be more rewarding than I thought.