“Going Out” of Chinese Culture: Writers, Copyright Agents and Translators Are Al

As time goes on, the news of Mo Yan winning Nobel prize is gradually initiating people to think deeply about Chinese literature and the old topic of how Chinese culture can really go out becomes a hot issue.

How can Chinese literature win a greater international influence? Some insiders believe, writers, copyright agents and translators are three important forces to promote Chinese literature’s going out. And each part of the “ iron triangle” is indispensable.

After Mo Yan’s awards, people seem to recognize a truth: the bridge of translator is needed for China’s native literature to reach the top of world literature awards. When interviewed by Chinese media, the Swedish sinologist Ma Yueran, a judge of the Nobel prize for literature, said, the global trend of economic and cultural integration was strengthened with developed vehicles and social platforms, but the literature was an exception. A lot of world-level Chinese writers had no readers abroad, because few foreigners could read Chinese characters and Chinese works translated into other languages are even less.

“It is easy to translate each word but difficult to find out the story atmosphere. Chinese literature must pass through the bridge of ‘translator’ to the world. Without Chen Anna and Goran Malmqvist, Mo Yan might not have the success today,” said Yuan Nan, deputy editor of Yilin Press.

Liu Feng, the international development department director of Phoenix Publishing & Media Group, thinks that works should be completed by both writers and translators, from the point of view of world literature. For now, translated by Chinese people, the work still can not be shown its true quality no matter how high their levels may be. Also, there are so few outstanding sinologists. So we might establish a pattern of interaction between Chinese and foreign experts by cooperation to translate good writers’ works together. If we say the problems of translation could be solved through efforts, then whether a writer has a good copyright agent is more like a kind of “fate”.

Liu Feng told to the reporters, “now there are a lot of good works. To make the public know them, the first premise is there should be someone to promote them, and the most important role is copyright agent. It is because their direct connection with their copyright agents that some foreign writers could make a difference in the world. Such as Deborah Owen, agent of Israeli writer Amos Oz, is a mature agent with high literary accomplishment, who knows how to tell a story so that publishers from other countries will have interest to learn more. Furthermore, because of her influence in literary circles, she can even take advantage of the London Book Fair to hold a global publishing seminar of Oz”s works. It is precisely because of her that Oz's works could be translated into 40 languages and sold in more than thirty countries, resulting in a very large influence.”

“Once I chatted with Oz and evaluated his relationship with Debbie as model of relations between writers and agents. But he said they were not writer and agent but married, which shows how important this relationship is,” said Liu Feng. He also thought that, “there are two types of agents internationally, one is purely literary with literature feelings; the other is commercial with the premise of profits. Oz’s agent is the former while the industry is flooded more with the latter. Either way, they are scarce in China. There are so few domestic agents and agencies who could promote a writer internationally that Bi Feiyu and Su Tong employ foreign agents.” As Liu Feng said, “China should have its own literary agent to tell Chinese story to the world publishing industry. Perhaps we will spend a very long time in this but it should be done.”