Partial notes for review of Jia Pingwa's The Sojourn Teashop, having completed three fifths of the book (Chu T'ien-wen's designer rhapsodies, Eileen Chang, scholar-beauty romances, overtranslation)
□□□ I am reading Nicky Harman and Jun Liu’s translation of Jia Pingwa’s The Sojourn Teashop 暂坐. □□□ Two of the three commendations on the back are from pieces I have written in the past. This is proof that I am the only critical audience for the book, which I will write a review of and hope to see lines taken from to furnish the back cover of the next Jia Pingwa translation from the publisher. □□□ These are a few notes. □ □ □ □ [under / overtranslation] □□□ There are too many Jia Pingwa books in translation. This was not always the case. In his home country, Jia Pingwa’s stature is greater than any fame or renown attained by a living American author in their own country. His work has been celebrated and banned. His books have circulated in the underground and been assigned in high schools. But he remained mostly inaccessible to the English-speaking world. Until 2016 only one novel was available: Turbulence 浮躁, an early work, from before he made his name with Ruined City 废都, translated by Howard Goldblatt for the University of Louisiana Press in 1991. The reasons for this remain obscure. It might have something to do with the handling of the rights to Jia’s masterwork, Ruined City, published originally in 1993. These were granted to a friend of the author, who supposedly sent a translation to the University of Hawai'i Press, where it was inspected and then eventually rejected (some accounts I have heard have Goldblatt preparing his own translation of Ruined City around this time, which was held up due to the rights issue, but I don’t believe that’s true). It might have something to do with the precarious status of Jia in the cultural bureaucracy following the ban on Ruined City; despite not suffering public censure or being restricted from further writing, it became inconvenient for the author to make contact with foreign scholars. But, also, Jia Pingwa was indifferent to the prospect of his work being translated into English, and Howard Goldblatt, the preeminent translator of modern Chinese literature, was uninterested in the project. Goldblatt, since the 1970s, has been a booster of a particular strain of fiction, and Jia’s novels didn’t fit (Ruined City, which could be honestly marketed as BANNED IN CHINA, was the exception, but there was no interest in the spiritual Ruined City sequels, White Nights 白夜, The Earthen Gate 土门, nor in the mid-career meditations). By the time Jia Pingwa published his late career masterwork The Shaanxi Opera 秦腔 in 2005, and his most most accessible work, Happy Dreams 高兴, a year later, it was too late. The market for Chinese literature in translation could take more Mo Yan or more Yan Lianke or more earthy tales of the Cultural Revolution, but Jia Pingwa seemed impossible. □□□ And then, between 2016 and 2023, there was a flood of translations. The University of Oklahoma Press put out Howard Goldblatt’s translation of Ruined City in 2016. It was followed in 2017 by The Lantern Bearer 带灯, translated by Carlos Rojas, published by CN Times, and Happy Dreams, for Amazon, translated by Nicky Harman. After that came Broken Wings 极花, translated by Nicky Harman for Sinoist, and The Mountain Whisperer 老生, translated by Christopher Payne for the same publisher. A fairly obscure small press in England put out a translation by Hu Zongfeng, He Longping, and Robin Gilbank of The Earthen Gate. This year will see publication by Amazon of my translation with Nicky Harman of Shaanxi Opera, as well as The Sojourn Teashop 暂坐, translated by Jun Liu and Nicky Harman for Sinoist. Eight novels, across five publishers, involving nine translators. The cultural bureaucracy, having seen Mo Yan win the Nobel Prize in 2012, pushed authors to promote the translation of their work overseas. In Jia Pingwa’s case, it was aided by foreign boosters, like Nick Stember, who launched the Ugly Stone website in 2017 as a resource “for publishers who would like to make more of Jia’s work available in translation.” I have read all of these translations. I saw some of them before publication. I worked on one of them. They are mostly very good.1 But they were met with indifference. The only work that received a high profile review was Ruined City, which merited three hundred words from Jess Row in the New York Times.2 Happy Dreams and Broken Wings received limited attention, focused mostly on the book’s controversial evenhandedness on human trafficking. The other books left no mark beyond seemingly machine generated reviews on gamified review portals and notes on Paper Republic. □□□ This is the reality of publishing literary fiction. This is the reality of publishing translated literary fiction. I expect my translation of The Shaanxi Opera to go unreviewed. If I had to guess, even with Amazon juicing the algorithm, that it will be read by fewer people than read this entry. □□□ In the case of Jia Pingwa it arguably doesn’t really matter: most of the books were paid for by grants, meaning sales don’t really matter. The quality of the work, or the critical reception is also not meaningful to anyone involved, except perhaps the writer and translators, since the goal of the people funding the projects are to get the books in translation, without much concern about what happens after. This is as dignified as the Amazon seed scam. □ □ □ □ [misogyny] □□□ When Nicky Harman and I received Jia Pingwa’s invitation to visit him in Xi’an in 2018, I got to see where he writes. His large desk was occupied almost completely by towers of books. To get to the chair he sits at to write, which is draped with fur, you need to slide between a waist-high wall of novels, reference manuals, works on local customs history books, and volumes of poetry. When we visited in the spring, the small amount of available work area was covered in pages from a novel that he was writing—black felt-tip pen on white pages, longhand—a biscuit tin (for completed pages), and left open beside it, a book of Eileen Chang short stories. He said only that he was working on an urban novel. When I returned the next year for the 29th China National Book Expo, he was working on a final draft and speaking publicly about the book. It was inspired, he said, by a tea shop in the building that houses his studio, and his observations of the world of the owner and the women that drifted through. □□□ Jia Pingwa has gained a reputation as a literary misogynist. This is unfair. It’s further proof that nobody actually reads the books they criticize. His early novels recreate the archetypal scholar-beauty romance, in which a distinguished scholar seduces or is seduced by a beautiful woman. This is what happens in Ruined City, with the romance between literary celebrity Zhuang Zhidie and country girl Tang Wan'er. Women appear as parodies, but so do men. Romantic relationships are undertaken with nuance. Writing sleazy men does not make an author a misogynist. □□□ A more recent controversy erupted with the publication of Broken Wings. Based on a story Jia Pingwa heard in Southern Shanxi around 2006, while visiting his old village, it narrates the story of Butterfly, the daughter of migrant workers, who is kidnapped in the city and transported to a village in the countryside to marry a disabled man. Critics read it as an endorsement. This was strengthened by his expression of sympathy for men in rural China. Traditional ideas of family and masculinity keep men tied to the village. The dismantling of the social safety net makes it impossible for rural families to make a living without the help of their sons. □□□ There are women in the novels of Jia Pingwa, and he has written books centered on women. I won’t list Jia Pingwa’s women. □□□ For Jia Pingwa to write a novel about women now is perhaps still a response to recent controversies. It is interesting that he returns to the Xijing of Ruined City, and shows that it has been taken over by a sisterhood. □ □ □ □ [consumers / producers and surface] □□□ Women are consumers. These are middle-class women. They drive Porsche Cayennes and boast about French wine and handbags. They pass around great sums of money. The consumption is gaudy. They do not produce anything. They are stalwarts of a new service economy. The consumption is not meaningful (Chu T’ien-wen’s fiction features glorious consumption, but it appears beautiful and alienated [Jia Pingwa writes about “designer clothes” and “Italian bags,” but is not prepared to discuss Comme des Garçons collections or rhapsodize about the beauty of Louis Vuitton Epi bags, as Chu T’ien-wen does]). □□□ Jia Pingwa writes the surface of women’s lives very well. He apprehends the surface. He observes the vanity and hypochondria. But there is nothing there. Nothing is explained. Here, he fails to live up to Eileen Chang, who writes the surface, too, but captures what is below. □ □ □ □ [yi guang] □□□ The best character is Yi Guang, the Jia Pingwa stand-in, the boorish literary celebrity. It is startling that he allows his own stand-in to force a kiss on a Russian girl in his studio. □ □ □ □ [ books ] □□□ Now, so, knowing this—imagining, in fact, a reader that has the full context for Jia Pingwa’s career, and who can spot all the routines (Tang dynasty flies, sesame seeds on table, the author finds his autographed book in a second-hand market and mails it back to his friend that sold it, etc.), who can read in this the echoes of Ruined City, who can see in the teahouse sisterhood women from Jia Pingwa’s previous novels and from his own life, and so on… That reader for a translation is rare. I think I know all of them. They number less than twenty, probably. They will like this. But there are only twenty of them. This is the problem with irrational overtranslation, again: it doesn’t create a readership but dumps books into the abyss! There are no reviews to read! There is no context! But, so, does the second imaginary reader, most likely, never having read a Jia Pingwa book in their life, find the shortcomings more forgivable without knowing Jia Pingwa at all. Maybe. I don’t know. □□□ I have struggled over how to review it. My boosterism makes me lean toward vagueness: an urban book about women by a respect author! But I know I will have to attempt to say other things. □□□ But I need to find an editor to give their blessing. That is difficult. □ □ □ □
Some are not particularly good, though. Carlos Rojas’ The Lantern Bearer is one example. Put out by a publisher whose other books include works on Xi Jinping and a Tampa cigar aficionado’s cocktail recipes, it is printed on disconcertingly glossy paper and contains numerous errors (typographical mistakes, repeated text, etc). The translation itself is competent but flat, and Rojas is hopeless at dialogue. The Earthen Gate is a more interesting failure. The trio of translators mix registers and employ idioms in a way that feels unnatural, especially in dialogue. They use words that have not appeared in an English-language novel in decades (there are plenty of “maidens” in the book, “enchantresses” with “heaving bosoms,” and “city slickers”). They often translate Chinese phrases directly (a boy is described as having “diligent legs and a sweet mouth like a kitten or a puppy”), sometimes even preserving the grammar of the original text. It’s peculiar. The strangeness is appealing to me, but nobody I have showed samples of agreed.
Jess Row’s brief review is positive but lingers on politics and notes with dismay that no characters address the Cultural Revolution, which had ended eighteen years before the novel opens. M.A. Orthofer’s review remains the only substantial treatment.