Posts Categorized: Translation

Supplement #3: A Little Primer of Tu-Fu, by David Hawkes

This slim little volume has a whole lot packed into it. Not only does it give the reader a concise history of a crucial moment in Chinese history, but it also beautifully explains to a non-Chinese audience just why Du Fu was so brilliant. 

Record of Regret: An Interview with Dylan King

Lee and Rob got the chance recently to sit down with Dylan King, a scholar and translator of Chinese literature. In this podcast the three talk about the eccentricities and fascinations of post-Cultural Revolution fiction, and dive into Dylan’s recently-published English translation of Record of Regret, Dong Xi’s beautiful, and darkly humorous, account of a countryside […]

Get Ready to Root for the Bad Guy: Zhang Yingyu’s Book of Swindles

Look, no matter how law-abiding we all are, there’s always that part of us that wishes we didn’t have to be, and just about every culture has its stories that celebrate that. Robin Hood, anyone? How about Ocean’s 11 and its sequels? China has its own long history of outlaw stories, and we talk about […]

October Dedications: An Interview with Lucas Klein on the Poetry of Mang Ke

Back in action after a brief hiatus, Lee and Rob interview translator and professor Lucas Klein, whose most recent work, October Dedications, is a book of translations of the poet Mang Ke. Prof. Klein is best-known for his work with Xi Chuan, but gives a nice guided tour of historical trends in poetry translation, the differences […]

Liberia By Way of Beijing: The Appeal of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in Late Qing China

So here’s a question for you: why was one of the most popular books in the late Qing Dynasty (1895-1911) a translation of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin? Lee and Rob attempt to answer this question, and along the way discuss matters of representation and legal rights in America and China.   http://traffic.libsyn.com/chineseliteraturepodcast/Uncle_Toms_Cabin_-_Edited.mp3