Rebecca F. Kuang: evaluation

Transcript context

…I don’t because plenty of people read, say, Márquez or Vargas Llosa or many other Latin American authors — Borges. Most well-read, educated, say, Americans would have read them, or people in England. But again, you get into Chinese fiction, or if you look at a classic work, Dream of the Red Chamber — other than people with some kind of background in China or Chinese studies, I know very few people who’ve read Dream of the Red Chamber. Some would say that’s the greatest Chinese novel or even the greatest novel of all time. Is it that the modes of storytelling are different? Or we’re too closed? What do you think? I’ve actually never thought about this comparison. It wouldn’t have been my instinct to argue that more educated or literate anglophone readers would have read Márquez or Borges than they would have the Chinese Nobel laureates, but I don’t know. We don’t have the data on that, or maybe somebody does. I don’t have it at hand right now. My instinct, though, is to make an argument about translation and global literary prestige and linguistic inequality. There’s a whole host of theory and literature about this, so none of this is really original argument. It gets back to a paradigm called world literature, which means a lot of different things. But broadly, when we think about literature is produced in different languages and the movements within those literatures, and we compare them on a global stage and look at what’s gaining a readership, what isn’t, what is moving through translation, what isn’t, and which languages we associate with literary prestige, this is clearly influenced by history, geopolitical movements. Doesn’t just boil down to, are good works being produced, but what routes have been created for those works to travel? And what reception have they been anticipated to receive before they’ve even had the opportunity to travel? The kind of theories of literary economy and world literature I’m thinking of really start with Pascale Casanova’s The World Republic of Letters. She makes some good points about the Latin American authors here and how they have traveled in translation. She also brings up the fact that you see a lot of writers from formerly colonized territories becoming, her term, “self-translated men,” men who deliberately choose to move into English in order to get closer to the literary center of the anglophone. Casanova doesn’t talk specifically about the Chinese case, but a lot of people employing her framework later do. You may also be interested in Julia Lovell’s work on China’s quest for the Nobel Prize. Why, in fact, did it take so long for any Chinese writer to win a Nobel Prize in literature? I’ve quoted a lot of existing literature here, but the point, basically, is it’s not that good works are not being produced in Chinese or that they’re being produced in narrative frames or writing styles that are indecipherable or unattractive to anglophone audiences. I think that kind of cultural determinism is a little bit silly. I do think that there just aren’t enough routes of translation and routes through the market so that the average anglophone reader either hears about these works or has access to them from a publisher that’s poured a significant amount of marketing money into them. I do think that most of the readers I know who are curious about reading outside of English have heard of Mo Yan and have heard of Gao Xingjian and Dream of the Red Chamber, but maybe my circle of acquaintances is much more China-focused than the average circle. No, I think people have heard of them, but actually read them compared to, say, Pamuk — it seems to me obviously many fewer readers when it comes to the Chinese works. Pamuk is from Turkey, Islamic background. It’s not obviously something that would take off in the United States. I would think the ratio of people who have read Pamuk to any Chinese writer would be at least five to one, of the people I’ve known.…

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