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Oct. 11th, 2015 09:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jhameiaYL loaned to me her copy of Renditions, a Chinese-to-English translation journal; it's the special double-issue of translated Chinese SFF. It's got "The Poetry Cloud" by Liu Cixin", lots of older writers, some newer writers, a really cool mix. Besides "The Poetry Cloud" I also really liked "1923--A Shanghai Fantasy" because a) Shanghai and b) character obviously based on Brigitte Lin's Peking Opera Blues character, who was one of my first girlcrushes and tomboy ideals. It's about the nature of memory and dreams, and trying to capture them during a time when political stride means no one really cares about that. It also has a rumination on the nature of being a woman doing the work of revolution, and how the two kinds of work cancel each other out during a time when no one is allowed to be both. It's also a hella cool Chinese dieselpunk story :D
Maybe it's the way the translation works, but there's something I recognized in the stories, in terms of storytelling style, narratival frames and priorities. It makes me think about the first criticism I got of "Between Islands," that it was hard to get into Johari's head (which was kind of confusing because Johari is, after all, not the only character; the story unfolds through the head-hopping of the ensemble cast, but not focused on one character in particular). And also about voice, and reader. These are voices that, despite being from a different language in translation, that I felt an actual kinship to, for the first time. Is this what white people feel when they read white fantasy? And it looks like most of these writers are men, so what about Chinese women writers in translation?
The only other time I've felt like this was reading Laurie Tom's "Even The Mountains Are Not Forever" and I thought, oh, it's because Laurie's my friend and we've spoken about this difficulty before! Of course I would recognize something of voice and storytelling style in it. Now I'm not so sure. So this makes me even more excited to pick up THREE BODY PROBLEM (although YL says that Ken changed the genders of a few characters, reassigning them to make it more palatable to the Western audience).
Maybe it's the way the translation works, but there's something I recognized in the stories, in terms of storytelling style, narratival frames and priorities. It makes me think about the first criticism I got of "Between Islands," that it was hard to get into Johari's head (which was kind of confusing because Johari is, after all, not the only character; the story unfolds through the head-hopping of the ensemble cast, but not focused on one character in particular). And also about voice, and reader. These are voices that, despite being from a different language in translation, that I felt an actual kinship to, for the first time. Is this what white people feel when they read white fantasy? And it looks like most of these writers are men, so what about Chinese women writers in translation?
The only other time I've felt like this was reading Laurie Tom's "Even The Mountains Are Not Forever" and I thought, oh, it's because Laurie's my friend and we've spoken about this difficulty before! Of course I would recognize something of voice and storytelling style in it. Now I'm not so sure. So this makes me even more excited to pick up THREE BODY PROBLEM (although YL says that Ken changed the genders of a few characters, reassigning them to make it more palatable to the Western audience).
(no subject)
Date: 2015-10-12 10:01 am (UTC)Really??? I just finished Three-Body Problem and am intrigued - do you happen to know which characters' genders were changed?
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Date: 2015-10-12 03:24 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2015-10-12 03:24 pm (UTC)