Questions and answers

Questions and answers: 
a translation into English of questions recently put to me by a young Chinese scholar engaged in writing a thesis on Mo Yan’s writings.
Q : Now that Mo Yan has been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature I guess that no other Chinese writer will be awarded the Prize in the next few years? Which Chinese writers are in your opinion potential candidates for the prize?
A : The Nobel Prize in Literature is given to authors, not to nations! The only criterion for the award is literary excellence. It is therefore theoretically possible that two writers of the same nationality be awarded the Prize in consecutive years. But this has never happened and I very much doubt that it will ever happen. The rules of the Swedish Academy do not allow me to answer the second part of your question. It is important that you realize that the Nobel Prize is not awarded to the best writer in the world, but to a writer whom the majority of the eighteen members of the Academy consider a very good writer.

Q : You have previously stated that you consider Shen Congwen, Mo Yan, Li Rui and Cao Naiqian, whose works you have translated into Swedish, as “xiangtu” writers, describing life in rural areas only. Do you feel that works by these authors are free from ideological interference?
A : I don’t remember ever stating that I consider Shen Congwen, Mo Yan, Cao Naiqian and Lirui as “xiangtu” writers. What I have said is that both Shen Congwen and Mo Yan to me are “xiangbalao”, country bumpkins, and by that I mean that the two of them are totally unaffected by the value judgments of persons brought up and living in an urban milieu, distanced from Nature. But that does not make them xiangtu writers. I strongly feel that one mustn’t pidgeon-hole writers! Anyone who reads Shen Congwen’s stories depicting life in his native Fenghuang and compares them with stories such as Jing (Qietness) or Zai Kunming de shihou (The time spent in Kunming) which are both placed in different milieus will appreciate the tremendous difference between them, and yet they are written by the same master. And take Li Rui’s magnificent novel Jiuzhi (Släktgården) and compare it with his equally magnificent novels Wu feng zhi shu (Träden vill vila) or Wanli wu yun (Den molnfria rymden)! ------ I cannot imagine any writing, or any utterance for that matter, that is unaffected by the writer’s or speaker’s ideological background.

Q : It has been said that the Nobel Prize was awarded to Mo Yan since his novels meet the aesthetic criteria of Western literature.
A : I am afraid that I fail to grasp the meaning of “aesthetic criteria of Western literature”. If such a concept really existed the eighteen members of the Swedish Academy need not engage in long and sometimes rather tense discussions on the literary quality of works by writers nominated for the Nobel Prize. I very strongly feel that literary appreciation is, and must be, highly subjective. The statement “X is a very good writer” is totally meaningless. But the statement “I consider X a very good writer” is quite clear and unambiguous. Some objective demands can of course be expressed when you appreciate a piece of literature. The language mustn’t be faulty or sloppy (unless the writer intends it to appear so, for some reason); I am also sure that it would be possible to establish rules according to which you may determine whether the prosody of the piece pleases your ear or not.

Q : In what respect has Mo Yan’s writing enriched world literature?
A : Mo Yan is a born narrator. The ability to narrate, to my mind, is a craft and not an art. And that craft has been nourished and refined through a great many centuries of Chinese literature. Mo Yan is well acquainted with the works of China’s traditional story tellers. Some were even found among the elders of his own clan. When he realized that a Western master such as Faulkner also could indulge in telling such tales, he fully understood that a well told story may be part of true literature. To my mind, one of the achievements of Mo Yan is that he has made Gaomi county in the province of Shandong into a kingdom of his own, where he reigns supreme, in the same way as Faulkner controls his own creation Yoknapathawpa. As I see it, Mo Yan’s tales are products of his skill as a narrator (his achievements as a craftsman). What make his literary works into true literature are the empathy and the sincerity which are so clearly manifested in all his writings.

Q : The award of the Nobel Prize to Mo Yan created quite a stir in media. It seems that commentators were more interested in the man Mo Yan than in his writings. Could you comment on the reaction to Mo Yans work by the common reader?
A : When it was announced that the Nobel Prize had been awarded to Mo Yan, Swedish media (and German media) were quickly on the alert. Critics who had not read a single line of his works pointed out that he was a member of the Communist Party, Vice–Chairman of the Writers’ Union and that he had received the Mao Dun Prize, which to them meant that he was a running dog of the regime. Overseas Chinese critics were of course happy to follow lead. I find this highly regrettable. As I have no idea who the “common reader” might be I cannot answer that part of your question.

Q : In several previous interviews you have stressed the importance of translation. It has been said that the Prize to Mo Yan may be considered a Prize to Howard Goldblatt? Do you agree?
A : Someone has said that World Literature is Translation: without translation no world literature! The statement that Howard Goldblatt should be solely responsible for Mo Yan’s Nobel Prize is of course ridiculous. He has indeed drawn his straws to the stack, but so have the French translators who between them have managed to translate twenty of Mo Yan’s major works. All members of the Swedish Academy read English, German and French fluently and some also read Italian, Portuguese and Russian, and therefore have access to a great many different translations of works by candidates to the Nobel Prize.. ---- As a translator I am a purist and insist that a true translator has a double responsibility, toward the writer of the work he translates and toward his readers. A translator who is not prepared to accept this double responsibility should choose another profession. ----Whenever a literary work is read –properly read – a dialogue is established between the author of the work (even though he/she may have been dead a few thousand years!) and the reader. The task of the translator is to do his very best to establish a similar kind of dialogue between his translation and the reader.

Q : The web site of the Chinese Writers’ Union promotes work by contemporary writers, some of whom are awarded prizes such as the Lu Xun Prize or the Mao Dun Prize. To what extent are you influenced by these awards when you choose works to translate?
A : It was not until Mo Yan received the Mao Dun Prize in 2011 that I was made aware of the existence of that prize. I would never allow myself to be in the least influenced by that or any other prize given to an author.

Q : Literary circles in China are worried over the fact that Chinese literature is so marginalized in the Western world. Does this mean that Chinese literature has not as yet become part of World Literature?
A : I have often been asked the question when Chinese literature will reach the standard of World Literature。In my answer to that question I remind the interviewer that the 305 poems of the Shijing (The Book of Songs), composed in the first half of the second millennium before our era, perhaps is the oldest literary anthology in the world, and that it was written in a language that was the ancestor of Modern Chinese. At a time when the inhabitants of northern Europe had not as yet developed a language of their own, the author of the text Wenxin diaolong (The literature of the mind and the carving of dragons), of the 5th century A.D., discussed genre theory in a highly sophisticated way. At the time when the Tang dynasty capital Chang’an was Cosmopolis, probably the greatest and most highly developed city in the world, where poetry, music and drama flourished, the forebears of the members of the Swedish Academy lived in poor huts in the forest. At the time when no European had any notion of what an essay was, Xun Zi (3rd century B.C.) wrote his essays entitled Quan xue (The Encouragement of Learning”) and Zhengming (The Correction of Names). Before the word ”novel” was invented in any European language, Chinese writers had produced magnificent novels.