Nobel Prize Goes to Mo Yan

The 2012 Nobel Prize for Literature has been awarded to Mo Yan. Michael Orthofer has his usual useful roundup of links, of which this one I found the most interesting.

The biography on the Nobel site is also helpful, particularly for the bibliography of books in English. There are quite a few, and credit to the plucky translation publisher Seagull books for being the most recent English-language publisher to publish Yan (in 2010, with another coming out in 2013). They did Change in 2010, which, as I write, is currently ranked in the millions at Amazon, but hopefully that will change and a worthy independent publisher will get a little Nobel bump. Seagull is also doing Pow! for 2013.

Arcade did the plurality of the rest that have been translated, with Life and Death are Wearing Me Out being the most recent. As with Change, there’s no notable sales bump as of this writing.

Yan sounds like a potentially interesting author. Here’s what prize chair Peter Englund and Yan’s translator Howard Goldblatt had to say (with Goldblatt’s remarks sounding much more intriguing than Englund’s)

“He writes about the peasantry, about life in the countryside, about people struggling to survive, struggling for their dignity, sometimes winning but most of the time losing,” said Englund. “The basis for his books was laid when as a child he listened to folktales. The description magical realism has been used about him, but I think that is belittling him – this isn’t something he’s picked up from Gabriel García Márquez, but something which is very much his own. With the supernatural going in to the ordinary, he’s an extremely original narrator.”

The eminent professor of Chinese literature Howard Goldblatt, who has translated many of Mo Yan’s works into English, compared the author’s writing to Dickens in a recent interview with China Daily, saying that both write “big, bold works with florid, imagistic, powerful writing and a strong moral core”.

“I see parallels with works like William Vollmann’s Europe Central, with its historical sweep (Red Sorghum) and trenchant criticism of monstrous behavior by those in power (The Garlic Ballads),” said Goldblatt. “And, of course, there are writers Mo seems to prefer, the modernist Faulkner, the magic-realist Garcia Marquez, and the Japanese Oe Kenzaburo. And don’t forget another “oldie”: Rabelais, with his bawdy humour and scatological exuberances.”

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