When Chinese novelist Mo Yan opened a translated volume of William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, he encountered Yoknapatawpha, the fictional county in Mississippi that Faulkner populated with people like those he knew in real life.Translating Culture: American and Chinese Scholars and Artists Gather for Roundtable Discussions.
“After reading Faulkner, I realized that my own experience and my own life could become stories and literature,” said Mo. “The people that I’m familiar with, the villages, they can all become characters.” Mo has become one of China’s most prolific authors, setting his novels in a fictional village based on his hometown in China’s Shandong province.
This author, born in 1955 into a peasant family in northern China, sets a groaning table of brutal incident, magic realism, woman-worship, nature description, and far-flung metaphor. The Chinese novel, perhaps, had no Victorian heyday to teach it decorum; certainly both Su Tong and Mo Yan are cheerfully free with the physical details that accompany sex, birth, illness, and violent death. Right at the start of “Big Breasts & Wide Hips,” we are witness to two difficult births, one by the very long-suffering heroine, Shangguan Lu, and the other by a donkey:As an aside, there's this rather uncomfortable possibly revealing passage from Updike: "So impressive and ardent are Jintong’s evocations of nursing’s primal pleasure that this reader was slow to realize that Mo Yan intended our hero to be not a healthily typical male but a case of arrested development."The donkey struggled, yellow liquid shot out of its nostrils as its head jerked around and banged on the ground. Down at the other end, amniotic fluid and wet, sticky feces sprayed the area.
YO MAN MO YAN NO BEL STOPOLD CARY GRANT FINE HOW YOU STOPIn POW! Mo Yan writes in the voice of a child. The narrator is adult, he has decided to become a Buddhist monk, but his childhood has not left him. He recounts his experience of childhood to a certain silent Wise Monk in a ruined temple; his story flows uncontrollably. ‘Verbal diarrhea’, that disgusting cliché that I have always hated, now begins to make sense. Make no mistake about it—the flow in POW! is not just verbal. Having mostly read very middle-class-friendly books, where even the most passionate sex is prettified and lifted above the dailiness of life, POW! is most disconcerting in its obsession with the physical and the vulgar. The brutal genius of Mo Yan lies not just in making you identify with characters and situations as all great literature does but also in his refusal to omit the minutest, ugliest, most embarrassing detail of any experience. The ugliness makes the experience eerily intimate:More on Mo Yan speaking up in support of Liu Xiaobo and Ai Weiwei's reaction to it:
[T]he old woman hobbled up to me, took a piece of turnip from her mouth and stuffed it into mine. That was sort of revolting, I don’t deny it. But thoughts of how pigeons exchange food turned revulsion into intimacy. I was reminded of something that had occurred in the past. It was back when my father had gone off to the northeast and Mother and I were surviving by dealing in scrap. We were taking a break at a roadside stall. . . . A blind couple with a chubby, fair-skinned baby were eating at the stall. The baby, obviously hungry, was crying. The woman, hearing my mother’s voice, asked if she would feed the baby. So Mother took the baby from her and a hard biscuit from the man, which she chewed into pulp before feeding him mouth to mouth. . . . I swallowed the turnip the old woman had put in my mouth and suddenly felt sharp-eyed and clear-headed.
I have seen this happen in my country, in my culture, on the streets, on the trains. But I have never read it in a book. Realism is newly defined, all its orifices gaping wide.
His pen name might translate as "don't speak", but Chinese Nobel literature prize winner Mo Yan has just spoken out about the plight of his jailed fellow laureate Liu Xiaobo.[Source: The Guardian]
Xiaobo, the dissident who is currently serving 11 years in jail for "subversion", won the Nobel peace prize in 2010, sparking an angry reaction from the Chinese authorities. Mo Yan – whose real name is Guan Moye – took the literature Nobel on Thursday, prompting celebrations from state media, although prominent Chinese names have criticised the Nobel jury's decision to award the prize to a writer close to the establishment, with Ai Weiwei calling it "an insult to humanity and to literature".
The dissident artist added: "He has been very clearly pursuing the party's line and in several cases he has shown no respect for the independence of intellectuals."
But yesterday, speaking to reporters in his home town, Mo Yan said: "I hope he [Liu] can achieve his freedom as soon as possible." The Red Sorghum author went on to add that although he had read some of Liu's literary criticism in the 1980s, he "had no understanding of Liu's work once it had turned towards politics", Reuters reported.
A tweet from journalist Mark MacKinnon, East Asia correspondent for Canada' Globe and Mail, said he had spoken to Ai about Mo Yan's comments. "He says he's 'very surprised' to hear Mo Yan spoke out for Liu Xiaobo. 'If he really did... I'm very grateful to him.'"
Yesterday also saw Mo Yan tell press that he wanted "to express my gratitude to all friends who support me, as well as those who criticise me".
"My works are Chinese literature, which is part of world literature. They show the life of Chinese people as well as the country's unique culture and folk customs," he said. "Meanwhile, my novels described human beings in the broad sense. I wrote in the perspective of a human being. These works stand beyond regions and ethnic groups."
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