MCLC: Sandalwood Death review (2)

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: jiwei xiao <jiweixiao at gmail.com>
Subject: Sandalwood Death review (2)
***********************************************************

Response to Jonathan Stalling’s comments on Jiwei Xiao’s review of
Sandalwood Death:

Quoting without footnotes is not uncommon practice for non-academic review
essays. Those who are familiar with New York Review of Books, London
Review of Books, LARB and other non-academic book review magazines might
have noticed a similar format. That said, my original essay, which is 5400
words long, almost double the size of the published version and way too
long for a magazine like LARB, does have footnotes. Not mentioning Prof.
Howard Goldblatt’s name in the review and indicating that the quotations
are taken from his English translation is an unintended mistake on my part
partly due to the heaving revising I had to do. As to specific comments on
the quality of translation, I did choose to cut, but on my own.

I believe a book reviewer’s professionalism should be tied primarily with
his/her display of qualities such as being substantial, judicious, and
impartial. It is at reviewers’ discretion to choose which particular
aspects of the book to comment on. In any case, my choice to take out my
comments on the translation have nothing to do with ideology or
epistemology of the magazine; my two editors at LARB never told me to do a
particular cut in any particular place. The truth is that I have my own
reservations about my comments. I hope to have a chance to elaborate on
them in details in the future. Here I just want to say one thing: unlike
many other commentators on Mo Yan’s work, I favor the original. This is
surely not a judgment against Prof. Goldblatt's monumental contributions
to Chinese Literature and World Literature. Neither would I say my
preference is entirely due to the fact that I am a native speaker. But I
do think my preference for Mo Yan's version rather than Goldblatt's
version has something to do with my more intimate feel of the original
storytelling, both its strength and weakness.

This is my loss, I admit--having read the originals, I only did the skim
reading of the translations. But there is also the gain. One thing that
drove me to write this review essay is my dissatisfaction with the general
indifference shown to the writer’s texts here in the US. I recognize that
something I could do to help, in a very limited way, is to offer my
“translated criticism” (if there is such a phrase)—which is exactly as
Prof. Stalling points out in his comments, to give the Chinese writer’s
work a reading as if it were a text “miraculously transparent to English
readers’ mind.” My review is surely just one take on Mo Yan and his
novel—one voice among many who are engaged in this important conversation
about the writer. Imperfect as it is, I think my voice, or any like mine
for that matter, is wanting, perhaps precisely because my review is based
mainly on the reading of the original work. I also believe by bringing Mo
Yan’s work to the attention of readers of a well-regarded English-language
magazine, I am seriously engaged in bridging contemporary Chinese
literature and the world. But you can’t expect too much from a 2400-word
essay.

Jiwei Xiao