Archive for December, 2006

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In contrast to the tropical weather that we’ve been having, this week fog and frost have settled in at last in these few days before Xmas. We walked home last night after a drinks party at one of our neighbours’ house and the street was very quiet and dark, with bare trees overhanging. The fog clung to everything and gave the street lights a yellowish halo. It was all marvellously spooky!

It now feels much more as Xmas should - with red noses from the cold and everyone wrapped up like Michelin men in scarves and winter woolies and bobble hats. In the morning, the grass is crunchy underfoot from the frost.

This is a short post as I have two weeks holiday from my day job starting from the end of today and I shall be cosy-ed up at home with lots of yummy food, good books I haven’t yet had a chance to read, chocolate and red wine and port for fortification against the bleak (-ish) mid winter - and I’m so distracted by the thought of all these goodies, I can’t think of anything profound to write today!

Happy holiday season, all!

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It will be all quiet at Fusion View over the holiday season and I will be back with new posts from Monday 8 Jan 2007. So see you in a couple of weeks!

Photo: thanks to gonwalkabout.info

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In the northern hemisphere, the Xmas cards that have been whizzing around this time of year invariably show scenes of snow and icy merriment.

Well, in reality, this year has been astonishingly warm in London. Normally, I would be wrapped in my ski jacket or in several layers of winter woolies. This year all I need is a light jacket over a thin blouse. And even so, when I pick up speed as I charge around town, I start to get hot and sweaty and have to start stripping off.

The other morning, as I was having breakfast, I noticed a red rose blooming in my garden. What?! In the middle of December?

This might have been an amazing omen if I lived in another era. But these days, with global warming in the news every day, I find my marvel and joy somewhat dulled by doom and gloom…

Thanks to everyone who emailed me to let me know that the article about Fusion View came out in StarMag on Sunday. I’ve had great feedback from StarMag readers by email and comments - and it looks like The Star Online has fans from all over the world, including the USA as well as those in Malaysia (and London - I catch up with Malaysian news regularly by checking out The Star online).

Many would-be authors from Malaysia have emailed me since the article came out and asked me for writing tips and if I could give feedback on their writing. While I would love to help everyone, I am busy with my own writing and projects as well as my day job and if I took on the role of editor for everyone who asks, I won’t have time to sleep either! But what I can do is give some general tips which you may find useful - specifically picking up some of the common themes from the writers who emailed me.

# Write from your heart - feel what you are writing about.

# Don’t try to write in a high literary style - keep it simple. Write in your own voice.

# Work on your use and mastery of language - whether you are writing in English or any other language. How many ways can you find to say the same thing? How many words can you use to describe an emotion or an object or a colour?

# Have in your mind your reader - it could be someone you know or just a person sitting with you as you write or a crowd. Address your story to them.

# Keep reading - all kinds of writers and genres. Keep learning from other writers. You may not naturally like romances or thrillers or literary fiction. Try them all out. What can you learn from them? Read actively - ask yourself why that sentence is so good, why that paragraph really works. Then try writing something of your own in several different ways - eg as if it were in a romance or thriller or literary fiction.

# Join a writing group or start one of your own, go to creative writing classes - helping someone else with their writing hones the editing skill. You know what works or doesn’t work in someone else’s writing - now apply that to your own.

# Try writing poetry - the old-fashioned kind that rhymes and has rhythm. I find it helps to remind you of the beauty of the language and also stretches your vocabulary (how many words rhyme with “orange”?)

# Oh, and keep writing that novel … just keep going, one word after the other.

Following on from the film of a young Russian “strolling” through an urban wasteland with amazing acrobatic derring-do, here are some Californian guys using their urban landscape as if it were made of ocean and surf…

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Thanks to Mark Stewart

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I’m delighted to post an article written specially for Fusion View by translator Nicky Harman about the current Chinese to English translation she is working on and the process of translating literature of one culture into another.

I invited Nicky to write this piece because I wanted to learn more about the process of translation. In particular - and rather embarrassingly - I do not read Chinese at all and can only manage a smattering of broken Cantonese. My French is miles better! I suppose it’s to do with having grown up speaking and reading English and then being over in the UK where I only ever use English - and a bit of French. So it’s especially interesting for me to meet an English person who is fluent in Chinese, which should be my mother tongue but isn’t!

With a couple of well-received transations to her name and a prestigous award from PEN, Nicky is looking for a literary agent to represent her new work “Striking Root”, a translation of Nanjing-born poet Han Dong’s first novel - so if you know anyone who might be right for her project, please contact me (by clicking on “Email Me” in the sidebar) and I will forward your email to Nicky.

Nicky writes:

I teach translation on a multi-lingual MSc (Masters) course at Imperial College London, and have special responsibility for teaching the Chinese to English and Spanish to English groups, and teaching translation technology tools. My chief love, however, is Chinese to English literary translation, and this I do in my spare time.

Striking Root

I have just completed a beautiful first novel by Nanjing-born poet HAN Dong. It’s called Striking Root, and is an account of a family sent to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution. Many Chinese writers have taken the Cultural Revolution as their theme, and much of their work makes painful reading. Han Dong’s book is different: it is written with great delicacy and wit, and somehow manages to convey the complexity of life during this momentous decade – the tragedy, the cruelty and the humour – in its description of the struggles of very ordinary people to make a decent life for themselves in extreme circumstances. I won an American PEN award for part of the translation, and have had chapters published in literary journals, but like all good books, this one works as a whole, and now I need a literary agent or a publisher who will take it on. Why this book? This was one suggested by a Chinese friend: it won a national literary prize in China. I believe it has a universal appeal.

Country Life in China

The book I translated before that was also set in the Chinese countryside, but China Along the Yellow River is non-fiction. The author, CAO Jinqing, is a sociologist and writes about the lives of country people in the 1990s. Dull? Not at all. Professor Cao is marvellous writer, with an insatiable curiosity about the lives of his interviewees. The book was first published as an academic hardbook (very pricy), but has now appeared as a rather more affordable Routledge paperback.

Racy Love Affair

The first full-length novel I translated was K – The Art of Love by Hong Ying, a marvellously racy and vivid fictionalised account of a love affair between a real-life Englishman teaching in Wuhan in the 1930s, and the wife of his head of department.

Chinese for Fun…?

I always loved languages, and when I was in my teens, I thought it would be fun to learn Chinese. I’m sometimes not sure that ‘fun’ is quite the right word! (Peering at characters is ruinous to the eyesight!). However, I was lucky enough to be able to do a university degree in Chinese, and I have never regretted it. In fact, every time I pick up a book in Chinese, I feel enormously privileged to be able to read it, to have a window into that world.

Chinese novels

Since the mid-1980s there has been an explosion of fictional writing in Chinese (I’m talking about mainland China, simply because that’s what I know most about). So much is being written in Chinese, covering such a vast range of topics and styles that it is hard to have a comprehensive understanding of what is going on. I know what I like, I suppose you could say – and I rely on Chinese friends suggesting books that they have enjoyed. I love some of the modern detective novels, for instance …. If only English readers and publishers knew how good they are!

The process of translation

Translation is a sort of partnership with the author, quite a different process from creative writing, and yet wonderfully creative in its own way - the process of conveying a work from one language that you love into another language that you love is a most satisfying one. So as a translator, you have to really want to make your book available to English readers. That’s the emotional bit. But you have to use your head too, or perhaps I should say, your ears. Your readership is important too. How does what you have written sound to them? Does it read as you imagine your author would want it to read, if he or she had written in English? Being a good translator means imagining yourself as the author, and as the reader too.

Chinese is a very different language from English, and describes a very different culture. That makes the translator’s work especially difficult. For example, people in China are often referred to by their job title and surname, where in English they would be called by their surname or first name. So shall we call ‘Teacher Wang’, Ms/Mr Wang in English? Or Teacher Wang (which will take a bit of getting used to as it sounds ‘foreign’ but is what the original Chinese says)? Do we translate Chinese characters meaning ‘father’s sister’ (as opposed to mother’s sister) simply as ‘aunt’? or should we be more specific? There are stylistic differences as well as cultural differences: Chinese writers sometimes add emphasis to their text by means of repetition. In English, we tend to prefer understatement, to add emphasis by choice of words or phrases, and to avoid repetition. These are just a few short examples – I could write much, much more about what is a fascinating process!

Ideally, I like to discuss my translations with a Chinese person who has good English and an interest in translation. That person may be the author, or may be someone else who agrees to check my work for me. I actually enjoy that form of collaboration, and find it very rewarding.

I have never translated into Chinese, as my written Chinese is not good enough. One of the rewards of translating into ones native language is having at ones command all that deep knowledge and life-long experience of ones native language.

Written by Guestblogger: Nicky Harman

Photo: of Nicky, thanks to Imperial College; of Han Dong & Striking Root Chinese book cover thanks to books.sina.com

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We’ve been having a great discussion about language and identity on Fusion View recently, with a number of comments from American and European perspectives as well as the East/ West view. I’ve also featured the longer comment by Matthew G on how being bi-lingual in English and Japanese brings out different aspects of his personality.

I had all these thoughts present in my mind this week when we went out to eat in London and found ourselves yet again having an extortionately expensive and depressingly untasty meal. It’s tiring to have one’s tastebuds dismayed and one’s wallet emptied so many times in London. It’s not just English food I’m feeling grumpy about - it’s cuisine from anywhere in the world served up in England, and specifically London. Perhaps in London and the high rents and a sense that the city is so huge that you don’t really have to offer great food, there’ll be enough people coming along to keep your restaurant afloat. Or perhaps it’s a state of mind.

When talking about food in Chinese, we have the word “heong”, which has no direct translation into English. In my mind, it means a combination of tasty, delicious, aromatic and lip-smacking. The taste occurs in the nose and palate as well as just the tongue. It involves more than just a taste like salty or sour or sweet - there are flavours and aromas and scents that happen as you chew and savour your mouthful. Sometimes, it’s about fried garlic or caramelized soy sauce or coriander or any other spice and other times it’s just about the aroma and flavour of whatever is the essence of the dish emerging.

I think it’s significant that there is no direct equivalent word or direct translation of this concept in English. If you don’t get the concept, how can you get the thing itself?

So if no-one around you cares about food being “heong”, why bother to try and create that experience for them just as a matter of course?

It is of course not true to say that all restaurants in England are awful and I am not saying that at all. I just think that there are a great many that are outrageously priced for the kind of tasteless dishes they offer up and it takes a lot of effort to find a good reasonably priced restaurant in England. In Malaysia, you can go to any road side stall run by someone from the back of their motorbike and have a really yummy laksa or fried noodles or satay for the equivalent of 50p. People expect their food to be “heong”, even at that end of the spectrum. Sigh. I feel very homesick for some “heong” food right now!

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The 1950s was a golden age of repertory theatre in the UK. That was a time when an actor might be playing Shakespeare one week while rehearsing for a Noel Coward play the next week and audiences might see Laurence Olivier in the lead role one night and as the second spear carrier the next night. It was also a key transition point as John Osbourne’s kitchen sink drama Look Back in Anger burst onto the scene to the challenge the established expectation of what theatre should be about. What was it like working as an actor at that important time in English theatre?

This is a special Fusion View podcast for the London Theatre Blog. To hear first hand about life in the theatre in the 1950s, I’ve coaxed actor Walter Plinge out of retirement to tell us about his experiences in repertory theatre during that golden age.

You can listen to the podcast interview by clicking on the grey player at the end of this post.

Or, you can listen to this and other Fusion View podcasts by clicking here.

You can also receive this and future Fusion View Podcasts free via iTunes.

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The London Theatre Blog was created by Andrew Eglinton and is full of information, reviews and opinions about all aspects of theatre, with a special focus on the London theatre scene. To find out more, go to www.londontheatreblog.co.uk.

Photo: scene from Look Back in Anger, thanks to www.gre enspot.info

Listen Now:

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This is a slow motion capture of a balloon filled with water being punctured - it’s fascinating to see the shape of the water before it all collapses in the blink of an eye.

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Thanks to Dr Phill

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The Guardian first book prize has gone to Chinese-born author YiYun Li who has only recently learnt to write in English. This is very exciting. She won it for her short story collection “A Thousand Years of Good Prayers”. Her stories have been described as “perfect and complete capsules” and one of the judges of the prize speaks of her as “a writer of rare perceptiveness and originality”. She has already won the Frank O’Connor international short story prize and the PEN/Hemingway award. Wow!

You can read the full article in The Guardian here.

I was taken by the samples of Li’s writing that the Guardian article gives:

“Li’s stories, the longest of them 24 pages, exploit the ability of the short form to register fine shifts in everyday lives. The background events that shape the people she writes about are the imperial centuries of feudalism, Mao’s communism and cultural revolution, Tiananmen Square and the plunge into capitalism.

In their speech, new half-poetical sayings mix with old proverbs: “a dew-marriage before the sunrise” (a one-night stand); “There is always a road when you get into the mountain” [see extract]; and, poignantly, in the same story, “The happiness of love is a shooting meteor. The pain of love is the darkness following.” “

I wonder if the influence of her mother tongue, Chinese, has blurred over into her use of English thus creating these powerfully evocative images. I have been exploring the issue of identity and language and even dialect in this blog, with thought-provoking contributions from commentors and guest-bloggers. We’ve looked at how our core selves may be formed by whether we speak English or Japanese and how one might change like a chameleon depending on whether one speaks standard American or working-class / regional American. Now, these examples of Li’s writing make me curious as to how the writing of multi-lingual writers is enriched by their many tongues.

The dense, intense writing of Joseph Conrad comes to mind. He made fictions from his experiences in Malaya and the Far East and Africa, having served as a merchant seaman. He was Polish originally, I believe, but wrote in English and is studied as a major figure in English literature. The intensity and power of his writing can in part, I think, be attributed to his writing in a language that was not his mother tongue.

Do you have any personal experience of this question as a writer? Or perhaps as a reader, certain phrases from books strike you - could those idioms come from the book’s author’s multi-lingual life?

Please add a comment or email me. I will post the most relevant and interesting contributions as individual Guestblog writings for Fusion View.

You can find out more about Li at her homepage www.yiyunli.com

Photo: thanks from Li’s homepage

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Will Buckingham’s first novel “Cargo Fever” is set in Indonesia, using a myth from the region as the basis of his story. He speaks Indonesian and is an expert on Buddhism - and I am delighted that he is joining our fusion community here at Fusion View with a post on how he came to write his novel, his connection with Indonesia and what he’s working on now.

Will writes:

When I travelled to Indonesia, it was not with the intention of writing a novel. The novel came much later. I had recently graduated in Fine Arts, and was planning to undertake postgraduate work in anthropology. In between, I had a year to spare, and I had been fortunate to be given a grant to undertake research in east Indonesia into the work of wood-carvers. So I caught three planes, two boats and finally another plane to Saumlaki in the Tanimbar Islands (http://www.tanimbar.org.uk), where I spent several months.

It was in Tanimbar that I first decided to write a novel. It was, I sometimes think, something as simple as nostalgia for the English language that got me started on my career in fiction. For months I had been speaking only in Indonesian and I missed my native tongue. So just after the rainy season had begun, when I borrowed a manual typewriter to write up my field notes towards the end of the stay, one afternoon a story came to me. I put a fresh sheet of paper in the typewriter roll, and I wrote. I still have the original story—a fable called “George’s Devil”—and whatever its literary virtues, I remain particularly fond of this tale that for me marks the beginning of my life as a writer.

It was almost ten years before my experiences in Indonesia, both good (the generosity of my hosts, watching master craftsmen at work, the insights into another culture) and bad (malarial fevers and exorcisms) found their way into what is now officially my first novel, Cargo Fever. I say “officially” because there are several now abandoned projects that preceded it. My first attempt at a book was a travel book, but somehow I felt restricted by writing non-fiction. Then I turned to fiction, writing two novels on other subjects, neither of which (I hope) will ever see the light of day. Somehow, however, I kept returning to my experiences in Indonesia. There was something that remained unsaid, and it wouldn’t leave me alone.

When I got round to writing it, however, it was not the novel that I had expected to write. At first I’d planned the novel as a kind of Heart of Darkness for the twenty-first century, but somehow it did not seem to take off. It was not until a small and curiously furry creature wandered into my mind—an orang pendek, the “short man” of Indonesian legend—that the story came together. So I left my fantasies of becoming the new Conrad behind, and wrote the first scene: Ibu Nilasera, a pious Christian, walks into the church one Sunday afternoon holding a clutch of plastic flowers that she is going to offer to the Virgin and sees, seated in the front pew, a devil, its head bent in prayer. It was a short scene, but by the time I had finished it, I knew I had my story.

From this moment to the final draft—sent to my publishers only a week or two ago—much has changed. Early on, I decided to shift the scene from the all-too-real Tanimbar islands to the fictitious island of Kenukecil: the change allowed me to invent much more freely than otherwise would have been possible. Whilst I was writing my second draft, I picked up the newspaper to find that my short man was front-page news: in a cave on the Indonesian island of Flores, archaeologists had discovered the remains of what they believed to be a new species of tiny human, Homo floresiensis. It was a strange experience looking at the front page and seeing a real-life prototype for my mythical hero.

In the constant writing and rewriting, my sense of the novel itself has changed. There are stories that I would have loved to have told, but that didn’t fit into the flow of the narrative. Inevitably many things have had to remain unsaid. But now that the novel is ready to go to press, it is a question of casting it adrift and seeing how it fares in the world. I wish it—and its protagonist—well. For now, however, my mind is on other things. The next novel is already in the early stages, set far away from Indonesia in Bulgaria and Paris.

Written by Guestblogger: Will Buckingham

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Will Buckingham blogs on literature and related subjects at http://www.willbuckingham.com/blog and on Buddhism at http://www.thinkbuddha.org.

Cargo Fever is due out from Tindal Street Press in the spring, and can be pre-ordered from amazon.co.uk - click here to pre-order Cargo Fever

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