Columbia University Press

This week our featured books are Sources of Tibetan Tradition, edited by Kurtis R. Schaeffer, Matthew T. Kapstein, and Gray Tuttle, and The Tibetan History Reader, Edited by Gray Tuttle and Kurtis R. Schaeffer.

Today, we have a few excerpts from the Epic of King Gesar, “often described as the Tibetan national epic and as the longest poem in the world,” taken from Sources of Tibetan Tradition.

The Epic of King Gesar, excerpted from Sources of Tibetan Tradition

Set in the turbulent years of the transition from the shogunate to the Meiji Restoration, Kiku’s Prayer embodies themes central to Endō Shūsaku’s work, including religion, modernization, and the endurance of the human spirit. Yet this novel is much more than a historical allegory. It acutely renders one woman’s troubled encounter with passion and spirituality at a transitional time in her life and in the history of her people. A renowned twentieth-century Japanese author, Endō wrote from the perspective of being both Japanese and Catholic. His work is often compared with that of Graham Greene, who himself considered Endō one of the century’s finest writers. Today we have an excerpt from the first chapter of Kiku’s Prayer.

Kiku's Prayer: A Novel, by Endo Shusaku by Columbia University Press

“[W]hat is perhaps most remarkable about Dr. Keene is that Japan, a racially homogeneous nation that can be politely standoffish to non-Japanese, has embraced him with such warmth.”

Donald Keene began teaching Japanese literature at Columbia University in 1955. Over the course of the second half of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first, he has written and translated over thirty books (many with Columbia University Press), has been awarded the Japanese Order of Culture (the first Westerner to be given this prestigious honor), and was an instrumental figure in bringing the classics of Asian literature to the attention of Western academia. Already a beloved figure in Japan, Keene earned “status approaching that of folk hero,” according to Martin Fackler in a profile in the Saturday New York Times, when he applied for and gained Japanese citizenship in the wake of the Fukushima nuclear accident after last year’s earthquake and tsunami.

Fackler and Keene agree that the most important factor in Keene’s popularity in Japan is his genuine affection for that nation:

Dr. Keene has spent a lifetime shuttling between Japan and the United States. Taking Japanese citizenship seems a gesture that has finally bestowed upon him the one thing that eludes many Westerners who make their home and even lifelong friendships here: acceptance.

“When I first did it, I thought I’d get a flood of angry letters that ‘you are not of the Yamato race!’ but instead, they welcomed me,” said Dr. Keene, using an old name for Japan. “I think the Japanese can detect, without too much trouble, my love of Japan.”

That affection seemed especially welcome to a nation that even before last year’s triple disaster had seemed to lose confidence as it fell into a long social and economic malaise….

BUT what is perhaps most remarkable about Dr. Keene is that Japan, a racially homogeneous nation that can be politely standoffish to non-Japanese, has embraced him with such warmth. When he legally became a Japanese citizen this year, major newspapers ran photographs of him holding up a handwritten poster of his name, Kinu Donarudo, in Chinese characters. To commemorate the event, a candy company in rural Niigata announced plans to build a museum that will include an exact replica of Dr. Keene’s personal library and study from his home in New York.

He says he has been inundated by invitations to give public lectures, which are so popular that drawings are often held to see who can attend.

“I have not met a Japanese since then who has not thanked me. Except the Ministry of Justice,” he added with his typically understated humor, referring to the government office in charge of immigration.

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In his novel, Atlas: The Archaeology of an Imaginary City, Dung Kai-cheung writes from the unified perspective of future archaeologists struggling to rebuild a thrilling metropolis. In the following excerpt, Dung mixes the real-life Chek Lap Kok airport with a fictional plan that would make the airport itself mobile:

The secret of the Chek Lap Kok Airport plan is now beyond the reach of anyone to uncover. The only clue that remains to us is a blueprint drawn up in 1990 of Hong Kong’s seaport and airport development, called “Construction for the Future.” This blueprint, which displays the development of port facilities in Hong Kong at the end of the twentieth century, includes sea-lane plans, container wharves expansion, and harbor reclamation projects. It also outlines the so-called new airport plan in documents and records, that is, the enormous concept that begins with the new Chek Lap Kok location of the airport on the north shore of Lantao Island and includes a range of developments such as the airport railway and residential, industrial, and commercial sites along the shoreline. It is worth pointing out that this blueprint emphasizes the importance of Hong Kong as a seaport and airport, by hinting at its two possible exits—by sea and by air.

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In the third section of his novel Atlas: The Archaeology of an Imaginary City, Dung Kai-cheung describes the streets of the fictional city of Victoria (based on Hong Kong) in the following excerpt he recounts the strange history of Public Square Street:

Yau Ma Tei’s Public Square Street is now called Jung-fong Gai (literally, “people’s quarter street”) in Cantonese, but before the 1970s it was known as Gung-jung Sei-fong Gai (public square street, that is, “square” as in an equal-sided rectangle). Some commentators have said that gung-jung sei-fong was a mistranslation of the English term “public square” and that the correct translation should have been Gung-jung Gwong-cheung (literally, “public plaza”). The name in English referred to an empty space in the street popularly known as Banyan Head. Itinerant performers would gather there at nightfall, casting divinations and telling fortunes, or singing and storytelling. Afterward, when street names were being revised, it was called People’s Quarter Street in Cantonese, taking on the meaning of a space where the populace at large would gather….

The only way of finding one’s way in the square street seems to have been by determining the direction. The four sides of the square street were fixed according to the four points of the compass, north, south, east, and west, but because there were no door numbers along the street (for no one could say where the street began and where it ended), it was rather difficult to determine if one were proceeding along the east street, the west street, the north street, or the south street. To be sure, this was not a problem for the local inhabitants, because whatever side of the street they lived on made no difference to them. Another special characteristic of the square street was that there was a flight of steps at each corner. It was said that if you kept turning right as you walked, the steps would lead upward, but if you went in the opposite direction, to the left, the steps would lead down. But whether you went up or down, you would still return to your original place by way of the four flights of steps and the four corners. Experts in cartography maintain that such phenomena can occur only on the surface of maps, or in pictures with fanciful optical illusions.

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Dung Kai-cheung sets Atlas: The Archaeology of an Imaginary City in the long-lost City of Victoria (a fictional world similar to Hong Kong).

In the book’s preface, Dung explains his “history as fiction” approach:

It is the task of literature to make visible the invisible. (Or, as is sometimes said, to articulate the unarticulated.) Curiously, in contrast to visual art forms like film, literature has a special capacity for rendering visibility. Words are nonvisual signs and many steps removed from the actual and the visible. By virtue of this removal, however, words invoke an imaginative power that is not bound by a photographic image. Telling and writing play on the dialectic between the visible and invisible, and that is the true meaning of “making visible.” This making is no less than the work of an artisan, in whose hands a world of objects is made and an abode of dwelling is built. What is more, it is not an abode of bricks and tiles but an abode of meanings.

It was in this spirit that I wrote Atlas, a verbal collection of maps. It was written and published in 1997, in the year the colony of Hong Kong was returned by its British rulers to become a Special Administrative Region under Chinese sovereignty. Nevertheless I chose not to write directly about the event or the contemporary situation in the narrow sense. The perspective was set in an unknown future time but with a retrospective, archaeological orientation, inquiring into the origin and the long-lost past of the city. The city is supposed to have vanished, and efforts are made by scholars to re-create its history through imaginative readings of maps and documents unearthed only recently. The city is literally rebuilt by relics and fragments, casting a shadow on the question of reality and authenticity and in turn making way for the introduction of fiction into the process of history making.

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Earlier this summer, Dung Kai-cheung, author of Atlas: The Archaeology of an Imaginary City was interviewed by Christopher Mattison in a wide-ranging discussion. Among the issues discussed were translation, the impact of English on Dung’s writing, Hong Kong as a “fiction,” and Hong Kong literature.

The interview begins with a conversation about the translation of Atlas, which was both self-translated and done in collaboration with Bonnie McDougall and Anders Hanson. Dung mentions how his knowledge of English shapes and benefits how his Chinese writing is translated:

The influence [of English] is not just in terms of subject matter and literary forms but also of sentence structure and diction. My Chinese has been regarded by some language purists as “Europeanized,” which is meant to be a criticism for not writing in a proper Chinese. It is in this sense that I said the language of Atlas “lends itself to translation.”

Moving on to Hong Kong itself, Dung views the city as a fiction, an idea that shapes his “archaeology of an imaginary city.” Dung explains:

The truth is, Hong Kong was created by the British, at least at the very outset. I am not placing a value on that; it is simply a fact. And the fictitious or created nature of Hong Kong has its advantages. It has made this city wonderfully open to change and innovation. It is mirrored in the creativity of its people. Ironically, this advantage has been on the decline since the return of Hong Kong to China, a historical event which was supposed to have ended the city’s rootlessness.

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This week our featured book will be the novel Atlas: The Archaeology of an Imaginary City, by Dung Kai-cheung and translated by Dung Kai-cheung, Anders Hansson, and Bonnie S. McDougall

Throughout the week we will highlight aspects of Atlas: The Archaeology of an Imaginary City. We are also offering a FREE copy of Atlas: The Archaeology of an Imaginary City to one winner.

To enter our book giveaway, simply e-mail pl2164@columbia.edu with your name and address (U.S. and Canadian mailing addresses only, unfortunately). We will randomly select one winner on Friday at 1:00 pm. Good luck and spread the word!

For more on the book, you can browse Atlas: The Archaeology of an Imaginary City in Google Preview; read the preface and excerpts, or an interview with Dung Kai-cheung.

Leo Ou-fan Lee wrote of Atlas: The Archeology of an Imaginary City:

A cross between fact and fiction, history and mystery, Jorge Luis Borges and Italo Calvino, this work defies all generic categories and now stands as a contemporary classic.

Earlier this week we featured the cover for Atlas: The Archaeology of an Imaginary City. In the following post, Julia Kushnirsky, the book’s designer, describes the thinking behind this beautifully evocative cover:

Atlas: The Archaeology of an Imaginary City is translated from Chinese and is an imagined literary history of Hong Kong.

The author sent us a cover of the Chinese edition that was published in Hong Kong. We felt that the significance of the bird may not be familiar to American readers, and we wanted a bolder, literary look.

I liked the concept of showing a map with the section of Hong Kong missing since it gave the reader a sense of wanting to discover the lost city. I decided to choose historic images to show the archaeological aspect of the book. I had found an antique map of Hong Kong that was created in 1841 by Captain Edward Belcher, which added to the sense of discovery and adventure felt by the explorers of the 18th century.

To “age” the black and white image I gave it a sepia tone. I wanted to fill the “missing” section of the map with a nostalgic image of the “vanished” city. I found an original hand tinted photograph of Hong Kong harbor circa 1900. It was beautifully naturally faded with sepia tones that worked really well with the map.

Finally for the title type I wanted it have movement and handwritten quality as if someone wrote across the map with a quill pen. For the final jacket design I added ragged yellowed edges to the flaps and splotches of ink on the spine and back flap.

Our printer, Coral Graphics did a beautiful job picking up the colors and adding dimension with matte and gloss effect.

Our featured cover this week is from Atlas: The Archaeology of an Imaginary City, by Dung Kai-cheung. The cover was designed by Julia Kushnirsky.

Three Percent, one of the best resources for fiction in translation, is featuring Zero and Other Fictions, by Huang Fan as part of their weekly Read This Next section.

Their focus on Huang Fan’s Zero and Other Fictions includes a review of the book, an excerpt, and an interview with John Balcom, the book’s translator.

In the interview John Balcom discusses how he first came across Huang Fan’s work; the political nature of his writing; how he fits in with Taiwanese literature and how he is viewed in Mainland China; and the diverse nature of his writing, which includes elements of absurdism, science fiction, and postmodernism. The interview concludes with John Balcom and the interviewer Lily Ye discussing the stories Zero and How to Measure the Width of a Ditch:

Lily Ye: The story “Zero,” which makes up most of this collection, calls to mind very clearly Orwell’s 1984, including even a cameo by a “Winston” in its course, who reveals to Xi De, our protagonist, a potential conspiracy that underlies the seemingly utopian world that he lives in. What are the elements of this dystopian tale that make it remarkable?

John Balcom: I read Zero shortly after it was published and was quite taken with its novelty within the Taiwanese literary context. One really must bear in mind the political situation in Taiwan in those days: martial law was still in effect and people were still being imprisoned or done away with for political reasons. It’s a far cry from the island today. In the West, where we have a tradition of such dystopian fiction, a work like Zero may come across with less force than it had for a Taiwanese audience. Many of my friends who have read the translation find the work a powerful one. It is a bleak story, with Huang writing more darkly than usual. The piece has the usual elements one expects – technology and a monolithic state, but there are some interesting twists. Dystopian tales have a lot to say to us given the dismal state of the world these days.

LY: Perhaps the story that stands out most in terms of style is “How to Measure the Width of a Ditch,” with its self-aware narrator, what are your thoughts on this piece, or on Huang’s postmodern period in general?

JB: “How to Measure the Width of a Ditch” is probably be the most accessible story in the collection, and more in line with contemporary taste. This sort of absurdist metafiction travels very well.

Chad Post has a great post on the Three Percent blog about what sounded like a very lively panel on Korean fiction during the Pen World Voices Festival held last week.

Entitled, “Word from Asia: Contemporary Writing from Korea,” the panel included Korean novelist Kim Young-ha, novelist Susan Choi, and translator Bruce Fulton. The panelists discussed how the literary scene worked in Korea while Kim Young-ha talked about his novel about a forgotten North Korea.

Bruce Fulton recommended three recent Columbia University Press translations. Here is Chad Post’s summary:

Eastern Sentiments by Yi T’aejun, translated by Janet Poole. These short pieces cover a range of topics and were aimed at preserving a sense of Korean history and culture against Japanese absorption. Tragically, Yi T’aejun moved to North Korea, and since no one really ever heard from him again, he’s most probably dead.

Who Ate Up All the Shinga?: An Autobiographical Novel by Park Wan-suh, translated by Yu Young-nan and Stephen Epstein. Park Wan-suh wrote a ton of novels, but according to Bruce, this book is one of the very best, depicting her life during Japanese occupation and the Korean War.

Lost Souls: Stories by Hwang Sunwon, translated by Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton. Bruce read the opening part of the first story in this collection, which is also the first story Hwang Sunwon ever published. It was a charming story about sexual tension between a young tutor and the girl he’s trying to teach.

In an essay for The China Beat, Christopher Rea, assistant professor of modern Chinese literature at the University of British Columbia, calls Qian Zhongshu, “the best Chinese writers you’ve never heard of.” So who was Qian?

Qian is perhaps best known as the author of the novel Fortress Besieged but as the forthcoming collection Humans, Beasts, and Ghosts: Stories and Essays reveals, Qian was also a talented short story writer and essayist. As Rea writes, Qian had an urbane wit and breadth of vision that distinguished his essays and fiction. His work, Rea suggests, transcends the political readings that seem to dominate Western interpretations of Chinese writers.

This, despite the fact that Qian’s life was very much shaped by Chinese history and politics. Qian and his wife remained in China after Mao and the Communists took power in 1949. He was assigned to translating Mao’s poetry in English but during the Cultural Revolution as sent off for re-education. After Mao’s death Qian’s work enjoyed a resurgence once again.

Rea concludes by summarizing the meaning, impact, and legacy of Qian’s work:

Qian himself treated life like “one big book” and claimed to be content with merely jotting down “piecemeal, spontaneous impressions” in its margins. In fact, the panoramic vision we find in Qian’s “jottings” marks him as one of the twentieth-century’s great literary cosmopolitans. If he remains little known in the West, it is mostly because he wrote in Chinese.

Qian’s writings thus pose a challenge not just to overpoliticized views of China, but to the presumption that to be cosmopolitan is to play on the West’s terms. Living under three governments (Nationalist, Japanese, and Communist), Qian’s most “political” act was to establish his own autonomous republic of letters. Worldly and multilingual, he chose to live in China and write in Chinese. This is not to romanticize Qian as an “apolitical” author or, conversely, a patriot. The point is rather that he sustained an extraordinary degree of creative independence from his immediate circumstances. In Qian’s works, then, we find one “China” that rarely makes headlines.

The Web site, PRI’s The World consistently reviews books in translation that other mainstream publications might overlook. Recently, they discussed two “horror” novels, one from Iran, The Blind Owl, and one from Japan, The Curious Case of Mandogi’s Ghost by Kim Sok-Pom.

Kim was a zainichi, meaning a name attributed to individual living in Japan but of foreign ancestry (Kim was Korean). This the reviews suggests imbues the book with an “existential sense of humanity lost somewhere betwixt and between – between colonial subject and colonizer, human and inhuman, heaven and hell. The book appears be an “inspiring” yarn of the marginal (perhaps in ghostly form) striking back at the tyrannical, but it consistently undercuts being a simple allegory of good versus evil, suggesting that sin has spread to the point that ‘heaven and earth are full of bitter spirits who keep screaming and searching for something…’”

The review concludes:

Kim balances … a number of emotional tones, from the fractured fairy tale doings of Mandogi’s life in the temple to his truly bizarre sexual encounters, instances of apocalyptic terror giving way to wry comedy…. The Curious Tale of Mandogi’s Ghost succeeds as a very dark black comedy, almost Swiftian in its ferocity. Even “ghosts,” such as the hapless Mandogi, have to rethink how they go about frightening flesh-and-blood targets who have been coarsened by unspeakable atrocities…For Kim, the barbarity of the 20th century meant reinventing the ghost story.

Our titles in Asian literature are frequently reviewed but is always particularly gratifying when they are praised by reviewers in Asia. Most recently, the Taipei Times gave a glowing review to Courtesans and Opium: Romantic Illusions of the Fool of Yangzhou.

The novel written by an anonymous author and translated here by Patrick Hanan, depicts the brothels of Yangzhou and the lives of its customers and the women who work there. From the review:

So, what does this literary trail-blazer have to offer? It’s about the loves and fortunes — often misfortunes too — of five married males who are all enthusiastic brothel-goers. Two things are clear about them, as Patrick Hanan, the book’s highly accomplished translator, explains. First, they are by no means unhappy in the experiences they encounter, so that the novel’s ostensible function as a warning to future customers is undermined from the very beginning. And second, the women they fall for are a long way from being only exploitative gold-diggers. They too have their feelings — their pride, their hopes and their affections.

The review also mentions two other East Asian novels focused on similar themes, Nagai Kafu’s Rivalry: A Geisha’s Tale and The Sing-song Girls of Shanghai by Han Banqing. All three novels are published by Columbia University Press, leading the reviewer to praise us for our efforts in bringing Asian literature to English-language readers.

Also, you can save 50% on all three novels during our Spring Sale.

“What we’re doing is creating a new history of India that’s not in the textbooks.”—Omprakash Valmiki, author of Joothan: An Untouchable’s Life.

The above quote comes from a recent interview with Valmiki published in an article from the Wall Street Journal. The article looks at the increased recognition of writing by the Dalits also known as “untouchables,” India’s lowest social group.

The article explains how Dalit literature offers a new way of looking at Indian history and society. The article quotes Valmiki, “We [Dalits] are drawing on a body of practical experience that we’ve gained through all the things we have made, the crafts, the carving, the carpentry, the textiles. Very little that you see in India was made by Brahmins—and everything carries the touch of those they call untouchable.”

Moreover, Christophe Jaffrelot, a leading scholar of Dalits, suggests that “Not only have their [Dalit's] books attracted a mass audience, but they are profoundly impacting the political landscape.” Jaffrelot points to Mayawati Kumar, a Dalit who has become chief minister of India’s most populous state, Uttar Pradesh, as leader of the Bahujan Samaj Party.

While Dalit literature has helped to bring a new recognition to Dalits, social and political problems persist as Valmiki claims, “”How can we take the constitution seriously? There are still at least 1.3 million of us condemned to a scavenger class sent out each day to collect human feces—and their main employer is the Indian government.”

Joothan, is unfortunately one of the few books translated from Hindi into English. In a related story, there is a very interesting interview with the translator Jason Grunebaum just published on The Quarterly Conversation.

Last night the shortlist for The Best Translated Book Award was announced at Idlewild Books. Unfortunately (for us), There’s Nothing I Can Do When I Think of You Late at Night, by Cao Naiqian, which was on the longlist did not make it to the next round.

However, the list of fiction finalists is certainly impressive and offers a lot of interesting selections. No books from the Asian languages were selected for the fiction finalists but there were several selected for poetry.

Earlier this month, Three Percent, which organizes the award reviewed all the books from the fiction longlist including There’s Nothing I Can Do When I Think of You Late at Night. The book was also recently reviewed by The Complete Review.

The winners will be announced at Idlewild Books on March 10.

Apologies for the long title to the blog post but the title to Cao Naiqian’s novel requires such length.

The reason for the headline is thatThere’s Nothing I Can Do When I Think of You Late at Night was named to the fiction longlist for the Best Translated Book of 2010. The finalists for the award will be named on February 16th.

As with last year’s list, the selections for 2010 represent works written in a wide variety of languages. For those looking for new fiction to read this year could do far worse than working through the books from the list.

Cao’s novel was the only book translated from Chinese to be represented this year on the longlist. This is not surprising given the paltry number of books translated into English from Chinese this past year. In a post entitled 1.4 billion Chinese. 300 million Americans. 10 measly books, published on Paper Republic, Cindy Carter laments the lack of new translations. Based on a translation database compiled by Three Percent, the post reveals that there were “7 contemporary Chinese novels translated into English for the American literary marketplace in 2009. Seven. Books. From China. To America.”

One of the more interesting year-end lists comes from Bill Marx at PRI’s The World. Marx, a champion of books in translation and works published by university and independent presses, chooses a list of titles that raise the thorny issue of the relationship between literature new and the old.

Among his choices and the one he refers to as “the nerdiest pick on my list” is Theory of Literature and Other Critical Writings by Natsume Sōseki (see picture).

Here’s what Marx has to say about the book:

The nerdiest pick on my list, but for fans of one of Japan’s greatest novelists (“Kokoro,” “Kusamakura”) this volume of his literary criticism offers insights into his fiction as well as some prescient ideas about realism and multiculturalism. Much of the volume is made up of excerpts from Sōseki’s science-minded “Theory of Literature” – some of which are dated and dense. I suggest reading the informative introduction and skipping around until you hit pay dirt. For example, this interesting passage on the value of individuality from Sōseki’s essay “Philosophical Foundations of the Literary Arts”:

It is only when one has an ideal that is new, profound, or broad, only when one tries to realize that ideal in the world but finds the world foolishly prevents this – only then does technique become truly useful to the person in question. When the world prevents us from developing our ideal in real life, then the only avenue remaining is to use technique to realize that ideal in the form of a literary work.

Check out Bill Marx’s full list here and for more on The Theory of Literature and Other Critical Writings, you can browse and preview the book.

Julia Lovell, translator of Zhu Wen’s I Love Dollars and Other Stories, has a great article on China Beat that discusses the author’s currently untranslated novella My Little Brother’s Performance (Didi de yanzou).

The novella recounts, in often graphic detail, the adventures of group of sex-starved adolescents. My Little Brother’s Performance might, as Lovell suggests, appear to some readers to be a kind of Chinese version of American Pie. However, Lovell also argues that there are other, more interesting ideas informing the novella. Despite the occasional crassness of the novel, Zhu Wen offers an incisive examination of life in 1980s China—the greed and materialism that began to take root in the country as well as the political movements that came to a climax in 1989. Lovell writes:

“What we’re left with, then, is a paradox: a novella whose apparently slapdash crudeness is part of a careful literary design; whose surface sensationalism overlies an audacious desire to probe difficult historical questions. For Zhu Wen, no subject is sacred: neither the establishment fantasy of a wholesome socialist civilisation, nor defiant student idealism. There are plenty of works of Chinese fiction written in the 1980s that seem rooted in the feverish cultural atmosphere of that decade; there are plenty of works written in the post-1989 period that are steeped in the crass materialism of the 1990s. There aren’t many that look back at the late 1980s from the subdued perspective of the 1990s, trying to make sense – within the censorial limits imposed by the Chinese government – of a period that the authorities would prefer to pretend never happened. For the time being, Didi de yanzou is one of the few that are available to us.”

For more on Zhu Wen there is of course I Love Dollars and you can also listen to a 2008 interview with him on the Guardian Web site.