MCLC: Goldblatt on Mo Yan

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: Craig Smith <smith_craig_a at yahoo.ca>
Subject: Goldblatt on Mo Yan
***********************************************************

Source: Tablet (12/10/12):
http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/books/118673/mo-yan-jewish
-interpreter?all=1

Mo Yan's Jewish Interpreter
The D-student translator behind the Chinese winner of the Nobel Prize in
literature
By Michael Orbach

“They say translators are frustrated writers,” Howard Goldblatt explained
as he waited impatiently in his blue stick-shift BMW behind a silver
sedan. “I’m not a frustrated writer. I’m a frustrated Formula-1 driver.”

Goldblatt, 74, is the foremost Chinese-English translator in the world.
Over the course of his almost 40-year career, he has translated more than
50 books, edited several anthologies of Chinese writings; received two NEA
fellowships, a Guggenheim grant and nearly every other translation award.
In the first four years of the Man Asian Literary Prize, three of the
winners were translations by Goldblatt. John Updike, writing in The New
Yorker, said 
<http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2005/05/09/050509crbo_books> that
“American translators of contemporary Chinese fiction appear to be the
lonely province of one man, Howard Goldblatt.”

Last month, the celebrated and prolific Chinese author Mo Yan won the
Nobel Prize in Literature, and today he delivers his acceptance speech in
Oslo. Goldblatt translated almost all of Mo Yan’s novels into English and
submitted a letter of nomination to the Nobel Prize Committee. NPR called
Goldblatt at 5:00 in the morning with the news. He was delighted that the
other Asian titan, Japanese author Haruki Murakami, who was heavily
favored for the Nobel, didn’t win, when so many other Asian writers get so
little attention in the West.

“I’ve reached a place that I have nothing to feel ashamed of,” Goldblatt
explained after we had parked and were eating in a restaurant not far from
the University of Notre Dame, where Goldblatt’s second wife and
co-translator Sylvia Chen teaches.

The prize was a strange culmination of sorts for Goldblatt, who became an
translator by accident. Goldblatt lives in the town of South Bend in
Indiana—a small pocket of wealth surrounded by basement churches and
boarded-up storefronts. He and his wife share their red brick Queen Anne
with a bossy, fat, black-and-white shelter cat named Orion. When I visited
Goldblatt in October, his lawn was one of the few in the neighborhood to
flaunt an Obama-Biden sign. An Ultra-Orthodox rabbi who teaches at the
local yeshiva lives next door. Goldblatt said he gets along better with
his hardcore Republican handyman who keeps a .38-caliber gun under his
pillow than his bearded, religious neighbor who refused to shake his
wife’s hand.

Initially, when I emailed him about the profile, he seemed bemused that
anyone would be that interested in him. “What in the world could we talk
about for several hours?” he asked.

***

Goldblatt was born in Long Beach, Calif., in 1939 to what he describes as
a “super-low middle class” Jewish family. His father worked a variety of
jobs from a jewelry seller to a watch repairman. Goldblatt’s grandfather
had been wiped out by the Great Depression, so his father had a
conservative streak.

“He risked nothing,” Goldblatt said. “We always had what we needed, but we
never had what we didn’t need.” In school, Goldblatt was a failure. “I
dated a lot; I drank a lot. I got D’s, C’s, and maybe an F.” He managed to
get a degree from a local community college and, realizing that he’d be
drafted anyway, signed up for officer school in the Navy. After completing
his training, Goldblatt was sent to Taipei.

“I was like a 21-year-old guy set free in a harem,” he said with a laugh.
“I had a good job; I worked for a three-star admiral. I was his
communications guy. I was a junior officer. I had a wonderful time. I
learned nothing; did nothing. I was almost amazingly stupid for the first
30 years of my life.”

When his stint was over in 1965, the signs of a war in Vietnam were
becoming imminent. The Navy asked him to continue on; he agreed so long as
he could go back to Taipei. This time, Goldblatt made better use of his
time and began learning Chinese. He enrolled in Taiwan’s Normal Academy
and met his first wife (they have two daughters who live in San Francisco:
One is a concierge at a Boutique Hotel there, and the other, Goldblatt
explained, is a wedding planner and a go-to-person for Asian-Jewish
weddings and Asian same-sex weddings). During his time there he was given
the Chinese name that he still goes by: Ge Heowen, which means “Vast
Literary Talent.”

“It was the best name ever given to a foreigner,” he laughed.

When his father died in 1968, Goldblatt flew back home. He had no idea
what to do with himself, and a former teacher recommended he go to
graduate school. Only one graduate school accepted him: San Francisco
State. After receiving his Master’s he pursued a doctorate at Indiana
University. His focus was 14th-century Chinese drama, but he gradually
broadened it to include modern Chinese literature as well.

Over the course of his studies, he fell in love with the work of a writer
by the name of Xaio Hong, the pseudonym of Zhang Naiying. “I started
translating because I had to translate some of the stuff I was using in
the classes since it wasn’t available to English-speaking kids,” he said.
Xaio Hong was the turning point. At the time of Goldblatt’s discovery, she
was largely forgotten. Her life had been brief and tragic. Born in
Manchuria in 1911; she fled an arranged marriage, but her fiancé found
her, impregnated her, and then abandoned her. She narrowly avoided being
sold as a prostitute by finding work at a newspaper and beginning to write
stories. She became a disciple of Lu Xun, considered to be the father of
Modern Chinese literature. While fleeing from the Japanese, she became ill
and underwent unnecessary throat surgery that left her speechless before
eventually killing her.

“She was my muse,” Goldblatt explained. “I wrote a lot of essays about
her; I translated a couple of her novels.” At the end of her life, she
wrote a novel and a sequel about a character by the name of Ma Bole, whose
journeys in the book mirrored her own. “There was no question she wanted
to make it a trilogy,” he said. Thanks to his efforts, Xaio Hong’s work
has largely been rediscovered in China. Goldblatt hopes to write the
concluding volume and have them all translated.

After earning his doctorate, Goldblatt returned to San Francisco State
University, where he taught until 1989. He translated several books while
teaching a full course load at San Francisco University. Often there was
so little interest in Chinese writers that Goldblatt would give away his
translations to small publishers for free. He began enjoying translating
more and more.
“It’s like Bach,” Goldblatt said. “All of a sudden you say: ‘I could
listen to him all day long.’ It just burrowed into the marrows of my
bones. I loved doing translation.”

At the same time across the world, Guam Moye, a soldier in the Chinese
army, began to write. Born in 1955 in the Shandon Province, the setting
that he would fictionalize in all of his novels, he dropped out of school
as a 10-year-old and took the only path out of poverty in rural China for
a young man: He joined the army. He took the penname Mo Yan, Chinese for
“Don’t Speak,” based on the advice his father gave him during the chaotic
time of the Cultural Revolution.

“My father and mother told me not to speak outside,” he said
<http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/12/books/nobel-literature-prize.html?pagewa
nted=all> at a forum at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2011.
“If you speak outside, and say what you think, you will get into trouble.
So, I listened to them and did not speak.”

Being one of the few literate soldiers, Mo Yan was paid to write.

Goldbatt found one of his stories in a 1985 anthology of Chinese writers.
Sitting in his French-style living room, Goldblatt was unable to recall
which story it was, however the story struck him as one of the first
really authentic Chinese stories he’d read after the country’s disastrous
Cultural Revolution. Mo Yan’s writing harked back to earlier modes of
Chinese folktales.
“They weren’t new in Chinese literature; they were new in modern Chinese
literature,” Goldblatt said.

Months later, when Goldblatt visited Taipei a friend handed him a magazine
with an excerpt of Mo Yan’s Garlic Ballads. The book, an unflinching
chronicle of a failed insurrection in a village, was initially banned in
China, according to Goldblatt. Goldblatt sent a letter to Mo Yan,
addressed simply to “Mo Yan, Peking” and the two began a correspondence
that culminated in a translation of both The Garlic Ballads and Red
Sorghum, which became a 1987 film by renowned director Zhang Yimou,
starring Gong Li.

When he was asked about Mo Yan, Peter Englund, permanent secretary of the
Swedish Academy that gave the Nobel Prize, recommended The Garlic Ballads.
“[Mo Yan] writes about the peasantry,” Englund said. “There is a strong
moral core of ordinary people struggling to survive, struggling for their
dignity. Sometimes winning but most of the time losing.”

In 1989, Goldblatt left San Francisco State for the University of
Colorado. He retired in 2000 and married Chen. (“It was easier than asking
her out,” he said.) Goldblatt focused solely on translating and produced
books at an astonishing rate. He continued translating Mo Yan:The Republic
of Wine in 2000; Big Breasts & Wide Hips in 2005; and Life and Death Are
Wearing Me Out in 2006; along with a short-story collection in 1999. Two
more novels with Goldblatt’s translations have just come out: Pow!
<http://www.amazon.com/Pow-Mo-Yan/dp/0857420763>, this month, and
Sandalwood Death 
<http://www.amazon.com/Sandalwood-Death-Chinese-Literature-Series/dp/080614
3398/ref=pd_sim_b_1>, last November.

The harsh realism of Mo Yan’s writing turned into a kind of supernatural
lyricism, or what the Noble Prize Committee called “hallucinatory
realism.” In Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out, the narrator becomes, in
turn, a donkey, a pig, a dog, and a monkey before finally morphing into a
small big-headed boy. Goldblatt likens Mo Yan to the American author
William Faulkner but says the writer’s main influence is traditional
Chinese fables.

The prize was not without its share of controversy
<http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/dec/06/mo-yan-nobel-prize/>.
 Days after the award, writing in the New York Times, translator Jeffrey
Yang and author Larry Siems accused Mo Yan of being a party hack and
criticized the lack of support he’s shown for other dissident Chinese
writers. “Throughout his life he has done little to jeopardize his status
as one of the country’s most honored writers; he is currently vice
chairman of the state-run Chinese Writers Association,” they wrote
<http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/18/opinion/chinas-nobels.html>.

Goldblatt didn’t mince words about his thoughts on the article. “It was
shallow, knee-jerk, and wrong-headed,” he said over a plate of beet salad.
“I like Yang, but his expectations were that Mo Yan should come out and
tell the officials in China that they should take a flying fuck. You don’t
do that if you want to continue living and writing in China. You can do it
there; in Israel, in a lot of places you can, but you can’t do that
there.” Goldblatt continued, “What Mo Yan had going against him is that
the government really loved the idea of him winning [the prize].”

While Yang and Siems see Mo Yan as being silent, Goldblatt instead sees a
subtle, sophisticated critique of the Chinese government throughout Mo
Yan’s writing. Early in our conversation he mentioned the Fu poets, whose
seemingly simple poems were, on occasion, broadside critiques of the
ruling government.

“Now you know why writers of the Fu are the first in the anthologies and
why so many of them were beheaded,” he said. Mo Yan himself has made
similar statements. “A writer should express criticism and indignation at
the dark side of society and the ugliness of human nature, but we should
not use one uniform expression,” he said at the 2009 Frankfurt Book Fair.
“Some may want to shout on the street, but we should tolerate those who
hide in their rooms and use literature to voice their opinions.”

A central question for translators is the notion of betrayal of the
original text. The celebrated translator Gregory Rabassa titled his 2005
memoir If This Be Treason. When I asked Goldblatt about the notion at the
tail end of our interview, he said he didn’t believe betrayal was the
right term. “I used to say I would give up five years of my life if by
some miraculous event I could play Max Bruch’s Kol Nidrei on the cello
once,” he answered. Translating, he said, “is not like music.” He searched
an aging six-CD player and put on the cello version of Kol Nidrei.

“You’re not betraying the composer when you’re doing this,” he said as the
music began. “But when you translate a text you’re taking this language
and changing it into your own. It’s not rape, but I’ve taken it and done
something terrible to it. That’s the only way I can make it available to
everyone else. Translators are always apologizing. We spend our lives
saying ‘I’m sorry.’ ”