MCLC: Nikil Saval on Mo Yan (2)

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: lklein <lklein at hku.hk>
Subject: Nikil Saval on Mo Yan (2)
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I'm not a specialist on Mo Yan, but I've read a number of his novels and
stories, and have paid attention to the way he's been covered in English
since being awarded the Nobel (I've posted everything I've found online,
including some pieces that have not made it to the MCLC list, here:
http://xichuanpoetry.com/?tag=mo-yan).

There's nothing really wrong with Saval's review per se--at least he's
read Mo Yan's fiction, which many commentators have not done. As you
notice, Saval is not a specialist on China (though does seem to know
Chinese), which affords him certain insights as it creates certain blind
spots. One thing to keep in mind is that Saval appears to have read all of
Mo Yan's fiction under deadline, a treatment very few writers could emerge
from without many of their quirks and charms turning into flaws.

Judgments I may or may not disagree with aside, one problem is where Saval
writes, "Mo Yan mentions Faulkner and García Márquez as writers who
inspired him but he admits to having ‘read little of their work’, a
confession which there is little reason to doubt." The "admission" of
reading "little of their work" is in his Nobel lecture
(http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2012/yan-lectu
re.html), or rather, from Howard Goldblatt's translation of the lecture.
In Chinese, he says 我没有很好地去读他们的书: "I didn't read their books
very well." 
(in "Politics and the Chinese Language" Perry Link also quotes Goldblatt's
translation to the effect that Mo Yan "had not read either of them
[Faulkner or García Márquez] extensively," when the Chinese is 我对他们的阅读
并不认真
: "My reading of them wasn't really serious"). Also worth keeping in mind
is how much Faulkner or García Márquez has been available in the PRC, and
when. The first full-length novels by Faulkner and García Márquez to
appear in Chinese translation were published in 1984, the year Mo Yan
began publishing; according to Zha Mingjian 查明建 and Xie Tianzhen 谢天振
in A 
History of the 20th Century Foreign Literary Translation in China 中国20 世纪
外国
文学翻译史, nearly twenty Faulkner short stories saw journal publication in
Chinese from the thirties to 1983, but since I count one hundred Faulkner
short stories to have been published in English before his death in 1962
(and another twenty-six since), Mo Yan could have read everything of
Faulkner’s available in Chinese at the beginning of his career and still
claim not to have read Faulkner extensively.

This is not a damning criticism of Saval's take on Mo Yan, to be sure, but
it does get at the issues of the relationship between translation and
international circulation and cultural specificity or cross-cultural
representation and communication, which concerns are very much at play in
the discussion of Mo Yan and his Nobel.

But I'm struck by Kristin Stapleton's statement that she doesn’t have
"much interest in reading [Mo Yan's] work." Why adhere to what another
critic has written when you haven’t done the work to verify or challenge
those claims on your own? Why not read a Mo Yan novel or some short
stories--he's one of the most translated contemporary Chinese authors into
English--and see if Saval's, or anyone else's, take resonates then?

Lucas