In response to Mo Yan's win of the Nobel Prize for Literature 2012

In response to 11 October 2012 12:58PM typingfromwork's comment

Wat.

Red Sorghum was about the Sino-Japanese war. It had nothing to do with the cultural revolution.

A good place to start on that topic would be To Live.

The fact that 3 people recommended your comment shows how ill-read the average Guardian reader is of contemporary Chinese literature.

"To Live" is by Yu Hua, NOT Mo Yan. Jeez.

Yu Hua is way better than Mo Yan, IMO, so I would second your recommendation of "To Live", but not as an intro to Mo Yan's oeuvre.

Also, Guo XinJiang's Soul Mountain is a masterpiece in Chinese, but sadly, it has seriously suffered from a muddled and far-too-literal translation so that the magical realism (Mo Yan isn't the best exponent of this genre of Chinese magical realism, either) inherent in the novel is grossly inelegantly distorted.

I would also refrain from relying on Goldblatt's commendations -- yes, Columbia U is and has been a key institution in training literary Chinese translators ever since it was one of the few pioneering Western institutions that sponsored Chinese academics and students at the turn of the last century. However, Goldblatt's own Chinese-to-English translated works leave a lot to be desired, the use of inelegant Americanisms being the least of the problems.

I'm still looking for a translator who can render Chinese literature into English to the same standard as what Thomas J. Harper and Edward G. Seidensticker were able to do for Tanizaki's In Praise of Shadows (original in Japanese). But I haven't been able to find that translator yet. (And don't mention Julia Lovell either, I'm still angry with her distortions of Lu Xun's writings). Murakami is "lucky" to be writing in Japanese, as generally the standard of literary translations from Japanese to English is far superior to those from Chinese to English.

As for a nominee for next year's Nobel Prize that fulfils the "non-European, non-male" criteria as suggested by a poster above, I would say: Banana Yoshimoto. Certainly she should be recognised before Murakami in terms of the beauty of her prose and the emotional depths of her novels, despite their languid pace and homely settings.