MCLC: Xue Yiwei's war stories (1)

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Xue Yiwei’s war stories (1)
Xue Yiwei's story 《一段被虚构掩盖的家史》is included in the first edition of LEUCHTSPUR, the German version of Pathlight magazine, published last fall. I wonder if it is included in the five stories published in Chinese Literature and Culture. You could say it's a war story, although, as the title says, it's mainly about a family with a hidden family story. A family story covered up in fiction, that's what the title says.Shakespeare is quoted at the beginning - "Our fears do make us traitors." The narration begins with an editor, who says he received a manuscript from the person who tells the story within. That second narrator, who becomes the main one, heard the story from his grandfather, who finally began to speak when he was very old. Ceausescu and Gheorghiu-Dej come up in the beginning, also Thomas Mann. In the middle of the grandfather's story, the grandfather's father is being forced to confess something that doesn't exist. No matter what he says, even if he stays silent, it won't help him. Language and revolution don't go together. The grandfather had loved Shakespeare and revered language, but after his father's death he flees, ends up in another part of China, makes up another family story, and apart from that stays silent for decades. The paradox and conundrum of revolution versus language is the heart of the whole story. After we had translated and edited the whole issue - Xue Yiwei's story was translated by Carsten Schäfer -, People's Literature had one person who knows German go through everything before it was printed. That person wanted to excise the passages with language versus revolution, the heart of the story. We had all assumed that every work in the issue had already been published in China, so we hadn't expected cesorship issues. But the people in charge at People's Literature didn't listen to that suggestion anyway. Everything was printed the way we had translated and edited it.
Xue Yiwei is a remarkable author. I hope there will be more translations of his works coming out in the future.
Martin
P.S.
LEUCHTSPUR is available in China through the same channels as Pathlight. At present, People's Literature do not want to ccooperate with a publisher or publishers in Europe, so the distribution overseas remains a problem. But I still have four or five copies, and maybe there are a few at Löcker Verlag in Vienna, one of the publishers in the German-speaking realm who volunteered to cooperate with People's Literature.
by denton.2 at osu.edu on April 25, 2016
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