MCLC: Mo Yan wins the Nobel lit prize (13,14,15)

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: Alexander Huang <acyhuang at gwu.edu>
Subject: Mo Yan wins Nobel lit prize (13)
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Voice of America interviews of Alex Huang and others on Mo Yan's Nobel
Prize in Literature:

http://www.voanews.com/content/nobel-prize-for-literature-spotlights-organi
zations-trouble-past-with-china/1524950.html

Alex

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From: Joseph Allen <jrallen at umn.edu>
Subject: Mo Yan wins the Nobel lit prize (14)

I have enjoyed following all the discussion of Mo Yan as a writer and
political figure.  But there is a political problem almost entirely absent
from the discussion.  The role of his translator, Howard Goldblatt, in the
process of this important recognition. The media's continued rendering of
Mo Yan as transparently available in English, without almost any
acknowledgement of Goldblatt's important and creative work, is expected;
but a similar blindness in the academic discussion is out of sync with
what translation studies have been teaching us since, at the very least,
Larry Venuti's _Invisibility of the Translator_(1994).

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From: Deirdre Sabina Knight <deirdresabina at gmail.com>
Subject: Mo Yan wins Nobel lit prize (15)

Source: The Guardian
(10/12/12):http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/oct/12/mo-yan-my-hero-howar
d-goldblatt

My hero: Mo Yan'The Nobel prize is a well-deserved honour for China's most
prolific, popular and widely respected novelist'
By Howard Goldblatt

If I'm excited, I can hardly imagine what Mo Yan
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/mo-yan> is feeling now. I've been
following the recent buzz, expecting disappointment but hoping for the
good news that he has indeed been awarded this year's Nobel prize for
literature. As Mo Yan's English-language translator, I can't help but feel
a bit of pride, not so much for my work on his wonderful novels, but for
having the insight or good fortune to spot him as a new and exciting
writer a couple of decades ago. When I wrote to ask for permission to
translate The Garlic Ballads (delayed till after the publication and movie
of his breakthrough novel, Red Sorghum), he was a bit of a nobody and I an
academic with a good Chinese name. He couldn't have been happier, nor
could I. Seems we've come full circle.

We first met, in Beijing, after three of his novels had appeared in
English, and have since met in a number of countries. He stayed with us in
Colorado during the launch of his brilliant satire The Republic of Wine, a
few days during which he seemingly read every Chinese novel on the
bookcase in the guest room. Autodidacts are like that, I'm told.

This is a well-deserved honour for easily the most prolific, most popular
and most widely respected serious novelist in China. Mo Yan writes big,
bold, often bawdy novels that are as imaginative as they are sensuous, and
always originate in his social conscience. To date I've translated nine of
his works into English; the French, Italians, Germans, Japanese and others
have done as many, sometimes more ­ we are all kept breathless by the
enormous fictional output of a writer who dropped out of school at the age
of 10 and amazed by the consistent beauty of what we read and translate.

The last time something good, but not this good, was on the horizon, he
said: "wo qing ni he liang bei" (something like "the drinks are on me"). I
can't wait.