MCLC: Censorship and salesmanship at US book fair (15)

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Censorship and salesmanship at US book fair (15)
I don't agree with Lucas Klein on Eric Abrahamsen's NY Times article. Everyone who cares to read new Chinese literature knows there is stupendous and great stuff produced in many places in China. Eric and many others involved in Pathlight have done a lot to make more of today's stories and poems from China available in English. The distribution of the printed magazine is still a problem, it seems. But on the whole, Eric has conducted a great boon for us translators and for everyone interested. So Pathlight is great, but that article isn't. Not at all. Nick Admussen has enumerated many weak spots, I completely agree with him. Especially the point at the end. Eric's quoted comments, his first post here and the NYT article all create an impression that it is not the state doing does most of the stifling. The state of everything that sometimes pokes through, if you will. The premise behind the current state. It's not pretty at all, as Kevin Carrico has said. And everyone in China is working with it, everyone involved, including myself.
If you get flippant about one dissident's poems, or other belles-lettres, you create false impressions in general. Eric has corrected that with very clear words in his latest post. Woeser's 唯色 poems are suppressed because she is a dissident. Not because of the poems at all.
For many years, there have been too many flippant remarks in our field in this regard, by W. Kubin and others.
My own reaction was emotional. Eric's politics-poke-through-framework is untenable as a general argument. Lucas and everyone else in the discussion seem to agree on this. And if the critique of the Writer's Association and the social climate it makes for is the main point of the article, then you have to know that Eric and everyone working for Pathlight, including all of us translators etc, are paid by the Writer’s Association. No matter what kind of reader you are.
Lucas does have an interesting point when he finds Nick Admussen's and Eric Abrahamsen's points about social roles not necessarily exclusive. I think Nick is right, and Eric isn't. Is Yi Sha 伊沙 anti-social, because he cultivates his anti-authoritarian stance? Obviously not. Except in his poems, sometimes. He has to work with censorship, but he does not have to belong to the Writer's Association to be successful. Yes, he is an exception.
Eric does make very good points in his reaction to all the criticism he has received. These points, at least one or two of them, should have been in the article. On the whole, China is more authoritarian, draconian etc. than you get to think when you see what is possible in the arts and in other achievements. I think Eric does say something like that in his latest post. Not in the article, unfortunately. And so I don't think that NY times article is good for us translators at all. Or for the general reader. Except for the attention created. Attention is crucial, and in this way all the hullabaloo about censorship and human rights etc. at any book fair is probably very good for everyone involved. Maybe even book fair chairman Rüdiger Wischenbart privately agrees on this, although he has to say something to the opposite in public. Mr. Wischenbart used to produce great radio programs in Austria. In recent years, he has made himself an expert on book trade.
Pathlight and all the book fair scandals of recent years have certainly increased attention paid to Chinese literature. It's very understandable that Eric is feeling tired from all the generalized and sometimes ill-informed criticism he has seen and felt over the years. But I think all the critique is a good thing, on the whole. It should be addressed like in Eric's latest post.
Martin Winter <dujuan99 at gmail.com>
by denton.2 at osu.edu on June 24, 2015
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