Why does modern Japanese fiction have an audience in Britain while its Chinese counterpart plays to an empty house? How come substantial numbers of British readers of literary fiction can conjure up a few names from recent Japanese literature Yukio Mishima, Yasunari Kawabata, Haruki Murakami while the Chinese Shen Congwen, Qian Zhongshu and Mo Yan languish in near-total obscurity?
The Cold War has a lot to do with it. In the 1950s, as part of the broader US project of reinventing Japan as an unthreatening regional ally against communist China, the American publisher Knopf set about marketing a picture of Japan through carefully selected and translated works of its modern fiction as a non-bellicose land of exotic aestheticism; the very opposite of Japan's aggressive, jingoistic pre-war image.
These were the years in which authors such as Mishima and Kawabata became the representative, languishingly melancholic voices who later slipped comfortably into canon-forming collections in Britain: Penguin Modern Classics, the Everyman's Library.
Although the themes and styles of those contemporary Japanese novelists now best known in the West Murakami, Banana Yoshimoto are a far cry from the taciturn, elusive qualities of Mishima and others, both owe large swathes of their Western audiences to the trails blazed by their predecessors.
At almost exactly the same historical moment as the Cold War gave Japanese fiction an enter into big-business publishing, a bamboo curtain clattered down around China, shutting off Western access to many of its most interesting, free-thinking writers in the eyes of the Western public with the stigma of communism.
At about this time, the earliest courses in modern Chinese literature began in British universities. To an Anglophone reading community that is, at best, timidly selective about reading translations, these two publishing and teaching trends helped promote a timesaving shorthand for stereotyping both literatures in audiences' minds: Chinese as dully propagandistic; Japanese as aesthetically humanist.
In a major British review journal four years ago, a work of Japanese fiction was praised as "a hymn to the resilience of the human spirit," while the reviewer of a Chinese author, a couple of column inches higher up, dismissed all the Chinese mainland fiction as "socialist realism."
But something momentous has just happened: Penguin Modern Classics has for the first time allowed a work of 20th-century Chinese fiction on to its list. After skulking for decades in small, academic presses from the Chinese mainland (the Panda Books), translated fiction from China has, 50 years after a similar gesture transformed Japanese fiction's profile in the West, been beckoned into Penguin's modern canon.
Modern Chinese fiction, long regarded at best as an educational source of information on China, or at worst, providing none at all, looks to have made a great leap towards the bookshelves of British readers.
'Fortress Besieged'
The novel itself, Qian Zhongshu's "Fortress Besieged," is a fairly uncontroversial choice. The last hurrah of modern Chinese literature's pre-1949 cosmopolitan age, this 1947 satire of an intellectual dilettante enduring love, disappointment and hypocrisy in 1930s Shanghai, enjoyed two years of best-selling success immediately after publication.
After New China was founded in 1949, Qian an outstanding product of early 20th-century China's internationalist cultural revolution, fluent in both Chinese and European literatures was erased from the State literary canon. But after 1976, liberated Chinese critics and readers gleefully rediscovered Qian's novel, enthusiastically enshrining it as a modern classic.
Ribald, sardonic, set against the tragic turmoil of wartime China without ever collapsing into patriotic bluster, its pages populated by young Westernized Chinese harried by their traditional families, "Fortress Besieged" has, it would seem, something for everyone. It certainly ought to stand a better chance of reaching into the hearts of Anglophone readers than many other works of modern Chinese fiction.
What is disappointing, is that despite expending a good deal of trouble on producing a beautiful-looking book, fronted by an original Chinese print Penguin has used an old (1979) and uninspired translation by Jeanne Kelly and Nathan K Mao.
It is, for the most part, competent, but hardly reproduces the dazzling, spiked wit for which the original is renowned. Dialogue, in particular, is wooden and unidiomatic "I've heard about you for a long time;" "This is certainly neglect of filial duties to the extreme!" and littered with empty filler adverbs ("really," "simply") and literally translated Chinese proverbs with explanatory footnotes bolted on.
Descriptive prose, while more serviceable, also contains the occasional puzzler, such as "sleep... like a club suddenly knocked him into its dark bottom."
This is the kind of careless characteristic of most mainstream presses in Britain when they very unusually venture to produce translations of modern (late 19th-century to 1976) or contemporary (1976-) Chinese literature. It is as if they are already so convinced of its fundamental aesthetic poverty that when they do finally stir themselves to publish, they seem barely to bother with the quality of the translation.
If they do, they certainly do not apply the kind of rigorous critical standards to be expected in the editing of other books on their lists. This is strikingly true in this instance, but the same criticism could also be levelled at both Faber and HarperCollins; Rebecca Carter's painstaking work at Chatto & Windus "Red Dust," "The Noodle Maker," "Village of Stone" is a wonderful exception.
A kind of vicious circle results in which large publishers are chary of producing modern Chinese literature because it is little known, generally viewed as being of poor literary value and therefore unlikely to attract audiences. When they do publish it, slack editing often allows unsatisfactory translations to slip into print. All in all, it merely confirms general readers and other editors in their instinct that China's recent literature can be safely ignored.
Language barrier
There are, of course, reasons other than translation and editing that help explain why modern Chinese fiction has not taken off among Anglophone readers. One is logistical: China's cultural remoteness from the West makes it inevitable that audiences from very different reading traditions will have difficulty fathoming its literature.
The Chinese language is an especially intimidating barrier. It is no coincidence that post-1976 filmmakers (particularly Zhang Yimou) have scored the kind of global success international prizes, Hollywood distribution deals of which their literary counterparts can only dream. Cinema trades in the direct, universal currency of images; it does not have to worry about losing value across the uncertain exchange rates of translation.
Although "Fortress Besieged" contains plenty of comic character types and situational slapstick that entertainingly convert into English without too much confusion the chubbily pompous author of "Adulterous Smorgasbord," a pseudo-cosmopolitan sonnet littered with meaningless foreign words; the innkeeper who insists that maggots stirring drowsily from their "greasy slumber" on a slab of ham are no more than harmless "meat sprouts" other parts of the book are studded with puns and allusions that would challenge the most inventive translator.
Although in "Fortress Besieged" Qian emerges as a refreshingly sceptical chronicler of 1930s China, with a sharp ear for the comic hypocrisy of his fellow intellectuals, the book has the unmistakeable failures of discipline and control of a first novel: The flow of the prose trips a little too frequently on Qian's pointed analogies and asides, as if he cannot quite suppress his admiration at his own cynical cleverness. Qian himself rapidly became dissatisfied with his work.
But there are Chinese novelists who managed, at times, to sidestep the 20th century's circumstantial exigencies, and whose work can compare with European or American writing of which educated British readers could be expected to have some knowledge. For example, Qian Zhongshu could be termed a scurrilously Chinese Evelyn Waugh; Shen Congwen a Hunanese Turgenev, awash with ambivalent nostalgia for his war-wracked homeland in Hunan; Zhang Ailing (Eileen Chang) a bleakly claustrophobic Katherine Mansfield, for her intricately oppressive stories of Shanghai domesticity.
Absent point of reference
And the most accomplished translators of Chinese fiction at work today are certainly capable of producing versions of the best works elegant enough to tempt the insular appetites of British readers, if major publishers are prepared to believe that these works can provide not just worthy pseudo-documentary information on Chinese history, but also more universal literary satisfactions delicate psychological portraits, powerful evocations of time and place, philosophical insights into the human condition.
And this is what is required to give Anglophone audiences access to the reading pleasures of recent Chinese literature. Although translations of post-1976 fiction into English have been coming steadily over the past 20-odd years, it is hard to think of more than one or two robustly selling succs d'estime.
One reason is that contemporary Chinese fiction in English translation emerges into a vacuum, artificially wrested from its modern antecedents. While British readers lack points of reference from earlier, formative decades in modern Chinese literary history, their capacity for understanding and appreciating more recent writing is always going to be shaky.
I am not claiming that British audiences have any kind of obligation to read Chinese fiction in translation. Arguments about China having the longest continuous literary civilization, or being the most populous nation in the world might help spark a utilitarian kind of interest in its literature, but in a publishing free market, its fiction has to stand on its own merits.
Yet that is so often precisely what it is not allowed to do by publishers; at least not relative to its competitors fiction in English or translated from other languages. Most major publishers do not even give modern Chinese fiction a platform on which to rest beside their glossily marketed rivals.
What 20th-century Chinese literature badly needs, in order to convince foreign readers that it is worth the investment of time and concentration necessary to make some sense of it, is a gesture comparable to that made towards modern Japanese literature in the 1950s.
Cosmetically, Penguin has started on this very worthwhile endeavour. But if it wants any kind of meaningful return in terms of satisfied readers eager for more on its initial outlay, it will have to make a commitment not just to the dust jacket and paper quality of works of 20th-century Chinese literature in translation, but also to the words that make them modern classics.
(China Daily June 23, 2005)
