A round-up of new fiction for the young in age, and the young at heart

 

Nicky Harman reviews three books for young readers translated from Chinese

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I have to confess that I am an absolute sucker for young adult novels. Given half a chance, I devour them. So I was excited to be given the opportunity to read and review the latest Cao Wenxuan novel, and decided to add two of my own by different authors.

Dragonfly Eyes

 

Cao Wenxuan is easily the most-translated Chinese writer for young readers, and he and Helen Wang, his translator, have won major awards. (Cao Wenxuan, the Hans Christian Andersen Award 2016; Helen Wang, the Marsh Award for Children's Literature in Translation 2017 for her translation of Bronze and Sunflower.)

 With Dragonfly Eyes, Cao and Wang have given us a substantial read (384 pages in paperback), pitched at 12+ years. This is a family saga spanning fifty years and three generations, which takes the reader from 1930s France where Ah-Mei's grandparents, Nainai and Yeye, met and fell in love, to poverty-stricken post-war Shanghai and the turbulent decades that followed in China. Ah-Mei and her French grandmother, Nainai, share a rare bond – Ah-Mei is the only granddaughter, and takes after her Nainai in looks too. Times are hard in Shanghai – money and food is in short supply ­– but she has loving parents, cousins, uncles and aunties, as well as Nainai and Yeye, and the family is resilient.

Cao Wenxuan has a lush, lyrical style which is beautifully translated by Helen Wang (anyone who has read Bronze and Sunflower will know what I mean) and I was lulled by the sweetness of the beginning into thinking that it was really intended for younger readers. But with the 1960s, life gets darker and more complex for Ah-Mei: society disintegrates around the family, Nainai is attacked simply for being foreign, and the story ends with what might be a natural death or might be suicide. Enthralling.

Dragonfly Eyes by Cao Wenxuan, translated by Helen Wang (Walker Books, January 2021)

 White Horse 

I was delighted when my translation of White Horse, a novella by Chinese writer Yan Ge, made it onto the short-list of the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation 2020. It was in serious company: Tove Jansson and Natalia Ginzburg were also on the short-list, chosen from 132 entries in 34 languages, but White Horse is a book that can hold its own. As the judges said, ‘[This novella] portrays adolescence as heartachingly-recognizable the world over. Translated with charm and wit by the outstanding Nicky Harman.’

White Horse is about Yun Yun, a young girl growing up in a small West China town. Her mother has died in mysterious circumstances, but she lives happily enough with her father, aunt and uncle and older cousin Qing. Until her once-secure world falls apart, that is. Her cousin, who is a couple of years older than her, gets a boyfriend and clashes with her repressive parents, and Yun Yun is inevitably affected by the ensuing rows. Gradually, terrible family secrets are revealed, and Yun Yun is left isolated and alone as the adults, and her cousin, struggle to live with them.  It takes a while before we learn about Yun Yun’s mother (and I’m not going to spoil the plot here) but in the meantime, Yun Yun finds relief from the stresses and strains of growing up in this toxic atmosphere: she starts seeing a white horse. Is the white horse a friend? Is it a sign of something much more sinister? It’s certainly a fantasy, liable to pop up when Yun Yun is feeling at her most vulnerable and abandoned. 

This story is funny as well as spooky. It’s pitched as a teen novel, but don’t let that put you off if you’re a teen-plus. It’s creepy, and it gets under your skin, and it’s worth reading slowly, because some of the clues that the author drops are very subtle. Give them time to sink in.

White Horse by Yan Ge, translated by Nicky Harman (Hope Road, 2019)

 I Want to be Good

 

Huang Beijia is another writer who is famous for her books for young readers. I’ve translated two of her novels, I Want to be Good, and Flight of the Bumblebee (forthcoming) and I’m struck by the differences. Flight of the Bumblebee is a wartime novel, while I Want to be Good is contemporary and deals with that bugbear of Chinese children and their parents – school exams. You think that doesn’t sound like a racy read? Think again. It’s a mark of Huang’s skill as a writer that she creates two great characters, Ling and her put-upon mother, who, when they’re not struggling with her maths marks, live life to the full. Ling is an average sort of kid: cheerful, kind, brave when she needs to be, good at writing stories, but hopeless at maths. Her mother is an unexpected heroine: she had ambitions of her own as a young woman, but had to ditch them when her husband gets a demanding job. She tries so hard to support her daughter but she’s anything but a Tiger Mum.

 Ling and her friends get ready for their middle school entrance exam in their last year at elementary school, and the pressure piles on.  We share Ling’s adventures and misadventures, enjoy her small triumphs, and despair with her over her test marks. Then, just before the exams, something really special happens to Ling, something she is determined to keep a close secret. As the school year comes to an end, Ling has learnt a lot about life, and herself, and is ready to face the next stage of growing up.

I Want to be Good by Huang Beijia, translated by Nicky Harman (GDB Books, Delhi, India. https://www.amazon.in/dp/9384401528/ref=cm_sw_em_r_mt_dp_IZd8FbAK90NA5. A UK edition is also forthcoming in January 2021.) Ages: 10+

 For more information on translated Chinese fiction for young readers, see Chinese books for young readers.

 

 

A translated novel: a team effort

 Nicky Harman reads Zhang Ling’s latest historical novel, A Single Swallow (Amazon Crossing, 2020.)

One of the best-written novels I’ve ever translated is Zhang Ling’s Gold Mountain Blues, about a family from Guangdong, China, torn apart when the men emigrate to work in Canada and their women wait long, long years to join them. So I was all agog to read Ling’s latest novel, A Single Swallow, translated by Shelly Bryant. I found it gripping. Better still, I got to interview all the main players, author, translator and editor.

The story: Three men – two American and one Chinese – reminisce about life in the rural village they were all stationed in during WW2. …and about Ah Yan, (‘Swallow’ in Chinese) who means different things to each of the men, although they each have strong and complicated feelings for her. This novel is set during a horrific time in China, but the human spirit triumphs.

The Girl who did a Strip-Dance, by Wang Bang, translated by Nicky Harman

 In this post, Nicky Harman translates an article by Wang Bang, a writer, film-maker and translator based in the UK and featured here in September 2020. Wang Bang says, ‘I agreed to write for Love Matters because I think it is all about the making of girls, daring, dashing unconventional girls, about how our girls break away from social norms, toxic masculinities and a rigid, patriarchal society. …The results have been great. Most of my articles have been well received, with some of them getting more than 3,000 likes.’

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The thing that completely changed my relationship with my body was not losing my virginity, but watching a private striptease. It happened one hot day during the summer holidays, when I met Star. We had a lot in common: we were both at the ‘Bonjour Tristesse’ age; and she, like me, had dark skin, and came from a single-parent family. From then on, I used to tell my mum that I was going to a classmate's home to do my homework and hang out with Star instead.

There was something particularly fascinating about her body. It seemed to be softer and lither than anyone else's. I remember we found a dress in the suitcase her mother had left behind – round-necked, with an A-line skirt – and took turns to try it on. I got it tangled around my neck and then my elbows got stuck, but she just wriggled like an eel and the woollen fabric, shrunk from the wash, slid down over her body.

That summer holiday, Star seemed obsessed with trying on clothes. It was as if she was desperately trying to find her grown-up self in this jumble of fabrics and fibres. One evening, she drew the curtains and whispered to me that she was going to show me something special. With a mischievous smile, she began to pull her shirt up, then stopped half-way, pouted, and made a pretence of pulling her shirt down again, all the time swaying her hips. Finally, she pulled it up to reveal her small, flat belly… And she danced her way through taking her clothes off. There was no soundtrack, but her body seemed to open and close rhythmically, the way a seashell does. It was its own musical box. There was no stage lighting, but countless beads of sweat at her hairline caught the light instead.

Her dancing was naughty and provocative. It seemed to me then that she had made it up herself, though thinking back now, it was a lot like the striptease in a black and white photo of the American burlesque dancer Mae Dix. Mae Dix wears a hat with sparkly tassels, and holds a slender wand between her fingertips. Her silky dress has fallen to her hips, showing her alabaster backbone, her pert, fleshy buttocks, shaped a bit like a French snail, and her bum crack. She wears a neat pair of dance shoes, with copper-plated soles designed for tip-tapping around the dance floor.

Mae Dix’s act became a sensation. In those days, few women even wore trousers, and hardly anyone had heard of ‘striptease’. Instead, the mainstream media dubbed her teasing, flirty dance moves ‘burlesque’. The male reporters sent to cover the shows practically mobbed the stage, even if afterwards, they wrote about it with scorn. 

As girls, Star and I were separated from Mae Dix by nearly a century, but the society in which we lived did not seem to have grown much more tolerant towards women. My space, growing up, felt flat, crude and rigid, like a cardboard straitjacket. After I developed physically, I seemed to lose any right to do anything with my body apart from gymnastics to the radio broadcasts, sprinting and skipping. We had to sit bolt upright, walk with our toes turned in, and wear skirts down over our knees. It was a sin to touch ourselves in private, let alone make a spectacle of ourselves in public. Only the beautiful were allowed to dance, because only they qualified to join the dance troupes that added glamour to every public celebration. And only bad girls combed their hair into giant quiffs, wore bat sleeves and jeans, and sneaked into pop-up discos in basement fire tunnels. Our bodies were controlled, as rigidly as if we were statues of women displayed on the square, by a hidden but highly effective mechanism which reached right down to the micro level, to our families.

‘You should stop showing off your body every time you go out, okay?’ my mother would say, casting a stern, anxious eye over the sleeveless top I liked to wear because it was hot. ‘You’re asking for some hoodlum to slash your back. Have you any idea how many perverts there are out there, just waiting to slash a girl who’s showing a bit of back?’ My mother tried to teach me that clothes fell into two categories: ordinary, workaday, old clothes, were one sort. The other sort were for special occasions, when it was permissible to wear something a bit prettier. Jeanette Winterson writes in her memoir Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal about her mother: ‘She had two sets of false teeth, matt for everyday, and a pearlised set for “best”.’ Every time I read this, I smile wryly.

If I hadn’t met Star, I would never have had the guts to stand in front of the mirror, examine my body, caress it, dance with it, go with it, let alone set off with it to cross continents and find my own way in life. No matter how critical other people are about my body, I have learned to accept it. I’m in love with all the ways it allows me to express myself. I think of it as a musical instrument, its every movement performing a dance. And I am the only person with the right to play it. 

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Wang Bang’s column was written for RNW Media, Netherlands radio station, Love Matters Chinese website

 

Translation goes in both directions

Nicky Harman writes: It seems obvious that there is literary translation from English into Chinese, as well as from Chinese into English, but very little has been written in English about what travels in that direction, and what impact it has on Chinese readers. It is a subject that fascinates me. So I was delighted when I got the chance to interview Wang Bang.

Wang Bang has translated Peter Hughes’s Behoven poems (Oystercatcher Press, 2009) for Professor He Ping, a well-known critic, author and professor at the College of Arts at Nanjing Normal University. Readers can explore them on this bilingual page here. I asked her to tell me more about this project.

N: How did you come across Peter Hughes and Oystercatcher Press, and what do you like about his poetry? 

W: The first time I bumped into ‘oystercatchers’, they were not those waders with red beaks, dressed in black cloaks, they were well printed pamphlets with abstract, geometric, mostly hand-painted covers, the kind of visual vocabulary that recalled me to Abstract Expressionism. I soon learnt that they were poetry pamphlets produced by the poet Peter Hughes, who also used his own paintings for the covers. I was immediately intrigued and was hoping to write an article about Peter. I asked David Rushmer, my husband, who is also a poet and had been published by Oystercatcher Press, to introduce me to Peter. A week later, we were in Norfolk, walking against the brisk wind, the oystercatchers rising swiftly from the waves, whilst Peter narrated his early life stories to me from his house on the coast; his surreal adventures working as a translator for the Italian Army and how he endeavored to make sense of the instructions on Russian landmines. I then wrote a story titled ‘The Poet Who lives next to the Lighthouse’; it was surprisingly well received and hit over 600 likes overnight. I thought it could be a great opportunity to introduce Peter’s work to Chinese readers, so I started work translating a small section of his poems. His work is not easy to digest at all but I found them fascinating, it’s like playing with a Rubik’s cube, I have to solve one word (normally a verb) first, before I can rotate to the next layer, and the magic is dark, sensory, musical, dreamy, imaginative and philosophical. 

 

N: How did Professor He Ping get involved?

W: I thought it would be great if I could persuade someone to publish a pamphlet of Peter’s work, a duplication of Oystercatcher Press in both Chinese and English. And an independent publisher in China had agreed to publish the pamphlet. I sent off the work, which is a small part of ‘Behoven’, kindly chosen by Peter and waited, but nothing was certain with the unsettled publishing rules in China. Bored of waiting I sent the manuscript to Professor He Ping, and amazingly he published it right away on a literary journal ‘A Flower to You’ run by his MA students. 

 

N: Which is your favourite poem in the selection published here? 

W: Sonata 1 in F minor, op.2, no. 1, Sonata in A major, op. 10.no.2 and the bears in Sonata in A major, op. 10.no.2.

N: Could you say something about the challenges of translating them?

W: The hidden cultural references, the metaphors, they really did my head in. For instance, the phrase

 “even if it is called a patio”. What is special about a patio? Is it because it’s a posh word from Spanish? Or, because of its overly ornamental design by the English? 

Some sentences seemed to be more straightforward, but can still require a lot of cultural understanding.

“when strangers 

         with sledge-hammers 

       & shorts passed

    the whole piano 

through a bangle”

I had to peep through a keyhole of time to understand that he is talking about “Piano Smashing Contests” in England in the bonkers 1950s!

N: Did you listen to Beethoven while you were translating?

W: No, I really needed to concentrate! 

N: Anything else you'd like to say about the special challenges of translating poetry?

W: Poetry often takes liberties that prose would not. Poetry by its nature is often very compact and can include a duplicity of meaning in a single word or phrase which is very difficult to reproduce in another language. I wish I were a poet, it would be easier for me to undertake such an impossible task. I would love to see more work being translated from both languages, work from my generation, and from new emerging writers.

 Here is my article about Peter and his press, with some beautiful pictures: The Poet Who lives next to the Lighthouse, in Chinese with a selection of the poems in English.

 

N: I'm fascinated by which English writers have an impact in China and in Chinese, so He Ping's project seems particularly interesting.

W: This is from Professor He Ping on why he published my translations. I think his response is great: “I am interested in what British writers, including poets, are writing recently. All literature today, regardless of nationality or mother tongue, is part of world literature. And of course, it is also out of friendship with Wang Bang and my trust in her judgment, that I promoted the works of these two poets [Richard Berengarten and Peter Hughes] on my graduate students’ WeChat public account. Modern Chinese literature has always had strong links with British English writing, so I am keen to promote contemporary British writers, poets and their writing wherever possible, in any Chinese literary media where I have some influence.”