English-language magazines offer Chinese literature.

Seeking to deliver ourselves from living in a modern-day Babel, people have long been making efforts to overcome communication barriers. Today, champions of the Chinese literature field are doing this in their own way, introducing translations of Chinese works to the outside world. On November 18, People's Literature (a magazine founded in 1949, the same year as the PRC) launched its own English edition, called Path Light, following the example of Chutzpah magazine.

People's Literature spent about two months preparing the first edition of Path Light. Unlike Chutzpah, which publishes its English edition twice a month as an extension of its Chinese version, Path Light will publish four issues per year as an independent magazine. Although they take different forms, the two publications share the same goals.

Promoting Chinese Authors

"As our purpose is to promote excellent Chinese literary works and writers to the outside world, making a profit is currently not a consideration. In fact, it is impossible to earn money immediately," chief editor of People's Literature Li Jingze told the Global Times. "We have to do it this way. Chinese literature badly needs dedicated advocates."

According to Li, new Chinese writers are unknown to foreigners even though in the last decade, China's cultural communication with other countries has increased substantially.

Ou Ning, the chief editor of Chutzpah, founded the bilingual magazine after making the same observation. A few years ago, Ou was shopping in  a bookstore abroad, and found the Asian literature section filled with Indian and Japanese books translated into English, while Chinese works were few.

"Then I thought I wanted to do something about this," Ou told Global Times. 

Excellent Chinese literature has been undiscovered for too long and it's high time it gained more worldwide appreciation. Today, many foreign publishers appear to be clamoring to discover new Chinese writers, but they often don't know where to begin. These translated Chinese literature magazines step right into the void and provide them a proper platform to find celebrated Chinese writers.

Not long ago, Li Jingze and Qiu Huadong of Path Light, met the chief and vice editors of Granta, the respected and distinguished English literature magazine from the UK. The Granta editors were very pleased to receive the first issue of Path Light, saying they devoted their latest issue to Afghan authors and the following two to post-Soviet and Indian authors, and they were considering doing a Chinese issue.

"We can act as a window to them, providing access to the abundance of Chinese literature," said Qiu. It's definitely a win-win deal.

The Challenge of Translation

Anyone who has ever done translation work understands how difficult it can be, especially when it's between two fundamentally different languages. And anyone who's ever read a bad translation knows how it can cast a bad light on the writing itself.

 Literature translation is different from other, more straightforward kinds of translation. It's even harder and must be done by native speakers. Although many Chinese who are extraordinarily good in English may have no problem translating English into Chinese, translating Chinese into English is a different animal altogether.

The translation staff at both Path Light and Chutzpah are Chinese who immigrated to English speaking countries at an early age, generally four or five years old, and stayed there into adulthood. Aside from being skilled in Chinese-English translation, the ideal translators must have a "passion for Chinese literature," according to Qiu. "There are only a few people who possess these qualities in the whole world. Only dozens, I suppose, fit this description, and we scoured the planet to find about 20 of them."

Artistic Preference

Although translation is not an easy job, it is almost always possible, as human nature and sense of beauty have universal roots.

"It turns out that our idea of 'good' works almost perfectly coincide with that of foreigners!" said Qiu.

"It's reasonable," he added. "A novel by Mo Yan about life in a Chinese village and an American novel describing the life of a Las Vegas gambler may have the same essential theme - the brilliance of humanity." 

In the past, most Chinese novels published in the West were mainly about the Cultural Revolution (1966-76), but, in China, many of these novels are widely thought to be poor in quality.

The novel Red, which tells the history of three generations of Chinese women in one family, has been a best-seller in Britain for many years, but to literary experts like Qiu Huadong, it has "little value in literature, and is not very well written."

These books are quite influential abroad, regarded as a window to China. But in fact scenes in these stories are far from the reality of life in China, and they reflect even less the reality of today's China.

Both Path Light and Chutzpah insist on taking art as the only standard in choosing articles for their magazine.

"We only look at quality, not the whims of the market," Ou Ning told Global Times.

 Qiu Huadong also said, "Art is our ruler. With a wide scope and an open mind, we choose articles that truly exemplify and represent the abundant and complicated realities of our country, past and present. We will display only the highest level of Chinese literature."