Parte Farmacológica

through collaborative projects and initiatives

40 Commercial 41

since reciprocity is at the heart of literary translation – both as an individual art and as an enduring joint effort between organisations and countries. It was on this basis that we organised a symposium on literary translation at the Hughenden hotel in Sydney in October 2010, featuring keynote speakers Esther Allen, Marcelo Cohen and Olivia Sears, as well as Australian translators from Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, Italian, Vietnamese and French. In the absence of infrastructure, you bring people together and trust that their encounters will bear fruit. Of course, there is a necessary and inevitable delay between that first gesture and the echoes that answer it.

Our relationship with China offers another example of this process and the attenuations it often suffers.

Here the dream of capital investment touches the ground, for Australian iron ore and coal are much in demand for the building of Chinese cities.

With funding from government agencies, where there is a trade incentive, a cultural programme is likely to follow. But you have to remain wary of the agency’s priorities. Last year, on the back of earlier initiatives in Shanghai and Beijing, our group applied for funding for a Chinese-Australian literary symposium to be held in Chengdu. The application was made to the Australia International Cultural Council, which operates under the auspices of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade – and was rejected by them, on the grounds that the symposium offered only limited public diplomacy benefits. It’s true that a gathering of 30 writers, translators, editors, critics and publishers around a table, discussing the ins and outs of Chinese and Australian literature and the role that might be played by translation, isn’t going to have any immediate diplomatic impact. You’d notice a difference though, in 20 years time.

Those earlier initiatives might, with hindsight, be dated back more than 20 years, to Nicholas Jose’s term as cultural counsellor at the Australian Embassy in Beijing from 1987 to 1990. The relationships he established then with the younger generation of Chinese writers and artists has had an enduring effect on Australian culture and continues to provide the basis for literary exchange between our two countries. But the immediate stimulus for our present activities was the invitation to Gail Jones to take up a residency with the Shanghai Writers’ Association, in 2008, as part of an international programme the Association was then inaugurating. During her residency two of Gail Jones’s novels, Sixty Lights and Sorry, were published in Chinese translation by the Shanghai Literature and Art Publishing House, and the period in Shanghai also provided material for her new novel Five Bells.

In return, in May 2009 we invited the Vice-President of the Shanghai Writers’ Association, Ye Xin, a prominent novelist with a strong following among

Chinese readers in Australia, to Sydney. In March 2009, the Group had been one of the sponsors of the Chinese-English Literary Translation Course, organised by Jo Lusby of Penguin China, and held in Suzhou, on a model provided by the British Centre for Literary Translation at the University of East Anglia. The line-up of sponsors for this week-long training workshop gives an idea of the complexity – and the cost – of collaborative projects designed to build supporting infrastructure for literary translation:

on our side the University of Western Sydney and the Literature Board of the Australia Council; on the British side Penguin, the University of East Anglia, and the Arts Council of England; on the Chinese side the General Administration of Press and Publications. The project allowed us to bring four Australian literary translators (including Bonnie McDougall and Jane Pan), as well as the Australian novelist Julia Leigh, on to the course.

Julia Leigh’s novels The Hunter and Disquiet were subsequently taken up for translation into Chinese by Shanghai 99 Readers’ Culture, a Shanghai-based publisher which specialises in the publication of contemporary fiction from the US, the UK and Europe.

Peng Lun, who was responsible for the acquisition of foreign titles for Shanghai 99, had been invited to Australia in 2008 as part of the Visiting International Publishers programme funded by the Australia Council for the Arts, and was therefore already familiar with Australian literature. He also agreed to the publication in Chinese translation of Carpentaria, the novel by the Indigenous author Alexis Wright, which had been published in 2006 by Giramondo. Carpentaria won almost every major Australian literary award in the year following its publication, including the prestigious Miles Franklin Award. Alexis Wright has a Chinese ancestor; but in addition, the Indigenous sense of the land portrayed in Carpentaria held a particular appeal for her translator Li Yao, who found resonances with the landscapes of Inner Mongolia.

The publication of both Julia Leigh and Alexis Wright in Chinese was subsidised by the Literature Board of the Australia Council.

I visited Beijing with Alexis Wright in March 2010 – we were both guests of the Australian Embassy’s annual Australian Writers’ and Publishers Week, during which the Embassy organises public events, visits to Australian Studies centres in Chinese universities and literary festivals, and a roundtable discussion between Chinese and Australian publishers. The sponsors for these events were the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, the Copyright Agency Limited, the Bookworm bookshops, Michelle Garnaut (whose M on the Bund restaurant provides the venue for the Shanghai Literary Festival and a legendary gathering point for English-speaking expatriates) and the Literature Board of the Australia Council. It was during this visit that I met up with Patrizia van Daalen, the foreign rights acquisition

42 Commercial 44

officer at Shanghai 99, whom we subsequently invited to Sydney on a publishing visit funded by the Australia China Council. There is a high degree of interest in the Chinese market from Australian publishers, and some trade in the other direction, usually of Chinese bestsellers which have aroused international interest.

That was the status quo when, late in 2010, the Chinese consulate in Sydney suggested to the Literature Board of the Australia Council that a Chinese literary delegation visit Sydney late in 2011. The approach was made on behalf of the Chinese Writers’ Association and the Chinese Ministry for Culture. Ironically, their proposal for a three-day symposium of Chinese and Australian writers, editors, translators and publishers, echoed the one we had put up to the Australia International Cultural Council some months before, and which the AICC had rejected as having insufficient public diplomacy benefits.

The Chinese proposal also resonated with a project I had been party to in 2003 when ten Australian poets were paired with ten German poets in Berlin and spent three days in different cultural locations translating each other’s poems. This was a big-ticket item, and involved funding from UNESCO, the German lottery, the Australia Council and the Department of Foreign Affairs. It had been organised by Europe’s poetry translation maestro, Thomas Wohlfahrt, whose Literaturwerkstatt Berlin counts among its achievements not just the translation workshops between poets from widely different language groups which form part of their annual

‘poesiefestival’, but the Literature Express, which for six weeks in 2000 travelled across Europe from Portugal to Russia, with over 100 writers joining the train in different cities along the route to read their work in its original language, and have it read, in turn, in translation. We can’t do that sort of thing from Australia; we’d need a boat to travel around our region. Naturally we grabbed the Chinese opportunity when it was offered to us.

The reason I have been conscientious in mentioning sponsors while detailing the threads of association which underpin these collaborations in the field of translation, is to stress just how much money they require. Most of the sponsors are government agencies or government-funded institutions. It is hard to see how it can be any other way, given the scale of the undertaking and the fact that literary translation is, properly speaking, a matter between cultures and countries, however much it depends on individuals.

Ivor Indyk

42 Commercial 44Commercial 43

Name

Destination of Choice

Other Activities of Interest Occupation

Languages English, Turkish

Anywhere and everywhere

Professor at the University of Warwick Novelist;

translator;

journalist

Maureen Freely

Maureen Freely, translator of Orhan Pamuk,