When you’ve stared at the past for so long that time dissolves, you’ll be able to wake from your slumber
In the forty seventh episode of The Translated Chinese Fiction Podcast we are falling into Beijing Coma (肉之土 / Ròu Zhī Tǔ). Avid Ma Jian reader Ronald Torrance is here to guide me from perimeter to epicentre of this colossal novel, and the weighty events it reckons with. Even without politics, stakes are high here: life/death, time/memory, flesh/history, and the intimate bonds that can exist between translators and writers.
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// NEWS ITEMS //
- Pen Fairy
- The TrChFic Mailing List
- Lost in Translation: The World of Chinese Literature in English
- ‘The atmosphere has become abnormal’: Han Chinese views from Xinjiang
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// WORD OF THE DAY //
(地标 – Dìbiāo – Landmark)
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// MENTIONED IN THE EPISODE //
- The People’s Republic of Amnesia by Louisa Lim
- Beijing from Below: Stories of Marginal Lives in the Capital’s Centre by Harriet Evans
- Do Not Say We Have Nothing by Madeline Thien
- What Has Passed Shall in Kinder Light Appear by Baoshu
- Prisoner of the State by Zhao Ziyang
- Death Fugue by Sheng Keyi
- Balloon by Pema Tseden
- The loneliness of Yan Lianke
- Mo Yan & censorship
- How China’s censors are taught about ‘restricted topics’
- Meng Po and her memory-erasing soup
- Cui Jian, rock music, and socialist/patriotic anthems at Tiananmen
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The Translated Chinese Fiction Podcast 