PositiveThe Arts Fuse... thoroughly engaging ... The beasts are memorably charismatic, and that is good, because they have to overcome decisions made by translator Jeremy Tiang that undercut the book’s appeal for English-speaking readers. Still, the volume’s spirited imagination is strong enough to compensate for flaws in its translation ... The author takes marvelous advantage of the originality of her conception: each beast is given distinctive characteristics, a mix of modern circumstances, the otherworldly, and the bizarre ... Unfortunately, English-speaking readers’ appreciation of Yan’s beasts is undercut by decisions made by the publisher and translator. No footnotes are provided to explain crucial Chinese cultural references ... In addition, Tiang has smoothed out the challenging patches in the author’s prose style ... a frustrating work in English. The fantasy is well worth reading, even given the translation’s shortcomings, but the version reminds me of a Chinese phrase, 隔靴抓痒, which means \'to scratch an itch through your boot,\' that is, to feel something faintly and being only partly satisfied. Melville House should be applauded for its decision to bring such a wonderful achievement in mainland fiction to the English-speaking market, but it would have been even better to have been given a more comprehensive inspection of the beasts on display.
Yan Lianke tr. Carlos Rojas
PositiveThe Arts FuseThe more you understand of Chinese history, particularly the Cultural Revolution, the more you will get out of Yan Lianke’s powerful 2001 novel ... even for Western readers who come with limited knowledge of China’s convulsions in the ’60s, offers considerable rewards ... Descriptions of their frequent sexual encounters are vividly erotic, and that sensuality is a crucial part of the book’s daring realism as it examines the kinds of desires (physical, social) that pervaded the lives of ordinary people ... succeeds in using sensuality as a means to illuminate the period’s interwoven desires, from the physical to the ideological ... By examining this intractable conflict — between freedom and containment — without flinching, Yan proves to be a social analyst of impressive power ... Rojas’s handling of Yan’s dialogue is much too clean and conventional. He misses the novel’s linguistic idiosyncrasies ... Yan’s skill at concrete description does not extend to the environment: one struggles to get a sense of the look and scale of Chenggang. But there is no gainsaying that Hard Like Water is, in English, an important book, if only because of its refreshingly sensual vision of the appeal of the Cultural Revolution. And it should be pointed out to American readers that, in our era of heightened political tensions, with conservatives and progressives polarized, the experience of an ambitious Chinese revolutionary convinced of his correctness has much to tell us about ourselves.
Yang Jisheng trans. by Stacy Mosher and Guo Jian
PanArts Fuse... has the heft and pedigree to achieve a long desired goal: an objective, monumental history of China’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution ... Yang’s work fails to be the important work it could have been. It disappoints for a host of reasons, including issues concerning the translation that render what value the book does have opaque to the non-specialist ... I cannot recommend the volume ... The problem is that Yang’s treatment of history is rooted in the limited methodology of the Yanhuang Chunqiu, which is historical exposé. Yang applied it to writing a macroscopic history, and it doesn’t fit. Almost all the book’s limitations are rooted in this central issue, and they are only exacerbated when presented to an English-speaking readership ... First and foremost, Yanhuang Chunqiu tended to concern itself heavily with righting the historical record, which assumes a reader’s prior awareness of the story as it stood ... He approaches history as if he was writing for eyewitnesses, and that means he often takes it for granted that his readers have necessary background knowledge to fill in major gaps. For a Chinese readership, this is not a difficult challenge. But, in translation, it is crippling ... for all its promise, The World Turned Upside Down is far from a triumph of the historian’s art.
