Sunday, September 21, 2008

Zhang Ling (author)

Zhang Ling is a senior audiologist and fiction writer in Canada. She was born in Wenzhou, China and came to Canada in 1986 to pursue her MA in English at University of Calgary. She obtained her second MA degree in Communication disorders at the University of Cincinnati. She has published three novels, and two collections of short stories.

Prices


* "Lamb" and A Journey Home ranked among top ten by the Chinese Academy of Fiction Writing
* Winner of the Yuan Prize for Literature
* The People's Literature Award in China

Bibliography


* 《邮购新娘》 北京:作家,2004。
* 《雁过澡溪》 (四川成都:成都时代,2006。
* 《盲约》。广东广州:花城,2005。
* 《尘世》。广西南宁:广西人民,2004。

External websites


* Reading at York University
* Reading at University of Toronto at Scarborough

Xiaowen Zeng

Xiaowen Zeng( 曾晓文) is a Chinese author living in Toronto, Canada. She was born in Heilongjiang, China, and received a Master degree in Literature from Nankai University, and a Master of Science from Syracuse University. She lived in the for 9 years, and immigrated to Canada in 2003. She currently works as an information systems manager. She is the vice- president of Chinese Pen Society of Canada, and a weekly columnist in the newspaper . She has published a few hundred short stories, pieces of prose, poems, and essays. Her works have been included in a number of literature collections.

Awards


* Literature award from Central Daily News in 1996 for short story “The Netter”.
* United Daily Literature Award for short story "The Spinning Coin" in 2004
* “The love and Mystery of Prague” won third place in World Chinese Travelogue Competition in 2008

Bibliography


* Shattered Dream in Texas . Tianjin Bai Hua Publishing House

Sun Bo

Introduction


Sun Bo is a senior editor of newspaper and writer in Toronto, Canada. He is the President of Chinese Pen Society of Canada . He is member of the Toronto Chinese Writers' Association .

Bibliography



Sun Bo was born in Shanghai,had been a lecturer at University before coming to Canada in 1990. He is the President of Chinese Pen Society of Canada from 2003.He has published over 10 books in Chinese, including the novels Reflux, Tears of Camellia, Men in 30’s and Juvenile Visa Students in Tears.


Novels


* Sun Bo ,《男人三十》 。北京:文化艺术,2000。
* Sun Bo ,《茶花泪》(Chahua lei)(Tears of Camellia) 北京:中国青年,2001.
* Sun Bo ,《茶花泪》(Chahua lei)(Tears of Camellia) 台湾:生智,2002
* Sun Bo ,《回流》 北京:中国青年,2002。
* Sun Bo ,《小留学生泪洒异国》(Xiao Liuxuesheng Leisa Yiguo)(Juvenile Visa Students in Tears) 北京:群众,2004。

Collections



* Wu Hua(吴华)、Sun Bo 、Shi Heng(诗恒)主编《西方月亮──加华作家短篇小说精选集》 台湾:水牛,2004。

* Wu Hua(吴华)、Sun Bo 、Shi Heng(诗恒)主编《叛逆玫瑰──加华作家中篇小说精选集》 台湾:水牛, 2004。

* Sun Bo 主编《旋转的硬币──加中笔会作品集》 四川成都: 成都时代,2007。

* Sun Bo 主编《走遍天下──首届世界华人游记征文大赛精选集》 加拿大:多蒙,2008。

* Xu Xueqing(徐学清)、Sun Bo 主编《枫情万种──加华作家散文精选集》 ,繁体字版(Traditional chinese character edition) 台湾:水牛,2005 。

* Xu Xueqing(徐学清)、Sun Bo 主编《枫情万种──加华作家散文精选集》 ,简体字版 北京:作家,2006。

* Sun Bo 、Yu YueYing(余月瑛),纪实文学集《小留学生闯世界》(Reportage Collection of The Interview with Visa Students)上海:少年儿童,2001。

* Sun Bo 、Yu YueYing(余月瑛),纪实文学集《枫叶国里建家园》 台湾:水牛, 1996。

* Sun Bo ,散文集《您好!多伦多》(Essay Collection of Hello Toronto)台湾:水牛,1995。

* Sun Bo , 旅游集《多伦多》(Travel Collection of Toronto)台湾:太雅,first edition 2001,new edition 2006。

* Sun Bo , 旅游集《上海》(Travel Collection of Shanghai)台湾:太雅,first edition 2001, new edition 2007。

Ma Jian (writer)

Ma Jian is a Chinese writer. He was born in Qingdao on the August 18 1953. In 1986, he moved to Hong Kong after a clampdown in which some his works were banned. In 1997, he moved to Germany, and in 1999 he again moved to England. He now lives in London with his partner and translator, Flora Drew.

Ma came to the attention of the English-speaking world with his story collection ''Stick Out Your Tongue'', translated into English in 2006. The stories are set in Tibet. Their most remarked-upon feature is that traditional Tibetan culture is not idealised, but rather depicted as harsh and often inhuman; one reviewer noted that the "stories sketch multi-generational incest, routine sexual abuse and ritual rape". The book was banned in as a "vulgar and obscene book that defames the image of our Tibetan compatriots."

His ''Beijing Coma'' tells the story of the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 from the point of view of the fictional Dai Wei, a participant in the events left in a coma by the violent end of the protests. The comatose narrator functions as a metaphor for the ability to remember and the inability to act.

Works


*''Stick Out Your Tongue'' with 2006 English translation. Banned in China.
*''''
*''The Noodle Maker''
*''Beijing Coma''

Iasyr Shivaza

Iasyr Shivaza or Shiwaza was a Soviet Dungan poet, writer, editor, and scholar.

Name spelling


The writer's name was spelled ''Jas?l S?vaz?'' in the Latin-based alphabet that was in use in 1932-53, and Ясыр Шывазы in the modern Cyrillic Dungan alphabet. According to Rimsky-Korsakoff , his family name, Shivazy , has the meaning 'the tenth child'; the expression could be written in Chinese as 十娃子 . This kind of three-syllable family name is common among the Dungan people of the former Soviet Union.

Life


Iasyr Shivaza was born on May 18, 1906 in the village of Sokuluk some 30 km west of Bishkek, in what today is the Chuy Province of Kyrgyzstan. His parents and grandparents were born in China's Shaanxi province, and came to Kyrgyzstan from the in the early 1880s, after the defeat of the and the .

In 1916, when he was 10 years old, he was sent to study at the village's , and, as he mentioned later, it was only by luck that he has not become a mullah, like the other three students who reached the graduation.

After the October Revolution of 1917, Shivaza's father, Dzhudzhuza Shivaza participated in establishing Soviet power in the region, joining the in 1919, and later becoming the chairman of the .

Seventeen-year old Iasir Shivaza was chosen, by drawing lots , to go study at the Tatar Institute for Education of the Minority Group in Tashkent.
During the six years that he spent there, Shivaza, together with other Dungan students started working on designing a suitable alphabet for the Dungan language, and writing poetry in Dungan.

After graduation, he spent two month in the fall of 1930 teaching at a Dungan school in , participating in the creation of the first Dungan spelling books and readers. He was then transferred to an editing job at Kirgizgosizdat , where he worked until 1938, and then again in 1954-57. He continued both to work on textbooks for his people and to write poetry. At least three of his textbooks were published in 1933, and at 1934 he was admitted to the prestigious Union of Soviet Writers. He started translating Russian classics into the Dungan language as well, his translation of several Pushkin's poems being published in Frunze in 1937.

He worked for the Union of Kyrgyz Writers in 1938-1941, and then again in 1946-54. When the Nazi Germany , he started to do war work, in Moscow and sometimes on the front lines, primarily writing and translating materials for the news-sheets published for the 100,000 or so Kyrgyz soldiers in the Red Army.

The after-war period was a productive one in Shivaza's writing career. He also participated in the committees designing the new, Cyrillic-based Dungan alphabet, which was eventually introduced in 1953. In the 1950s he was finally able to meet Chinese writers from China, who would visit the Soviet Union at the time, and he made a trip to China himself in 1957 with a Soviet Dungan delegation.

As the Soviet Dungan newspaper resumed publication in 1957, Shivaza was appointed its editor-in-chief, holding that post until his retirement in 1965. The newspaper appeared for a while as "С?лян хуэйз? бо" , and was renamed "Шый?эди чи" .

Iasir Shivaza died on June 18, 1988.

Original works


Shivaza's literary production was ample and versatile. Along with politically loaded poems and stories, expected from any author who was to survive in Stalin's era, he wrote love poetry, poems out the past and present of his people and his land, about China, children's literature. Some of his poetry addressed to China, the land of his ancestors, welcoming the Communist revolution that was happening, or had just happened there.

Soviet Dungans being largely separated from China's written culture, the language of Shivaza's poetry and prose - and the Dungan literary language in general - is closer to the colloquial, sometimes dialectal Chinese than to the traditional written Chinese.
He was, however, familiar with some of the modern Chinese literature, such as works of Lu Xun, but, since he never had opportunity to learn Chinese characters, he read them in Russian translation.

Poem sample: "White Butterfly"


Following is Shivaza's short poem, "White Butterfly", originally published in 1974, along with its morpheme-by-morpheme "transcription" into the Chinese characters and the English translation by Rimsky-Korsakoff , p. 188-189.









The poet writes of a butterfly, who is happy in the here-and-now of the spring, but who is not going to see the fall with its golden leaves. He appears to make a botanical error, however, mentioning a variety of chrysanthemum ( among spring flowers, even though in reality they bloom in the fall.

Translations


Having participated in the creation of the Dungan alphabet and bringing literacy to the Dungan people, Shivaza also did a large amount of work in making literary works from other languages available in Dungan. He rendered a number of classical and modern works of Russian poetry into the Dungan language. He has translated a number of works by Pushkin, Lermontov, Nekrasov, Mayakovsky. He translated song lyrics by Lebedev-Kumach and prose works by Leo Tolstoy, Chekhov, and Maxim Gorky.

He also translated into Dungan some poems of the Ukrainian classic , of the Kyrgyz poets Sashylganov and Tokombaev, and even of the Belarusian Yanka Kupala.

Being fluent in Kyrgyz, Shivaza also translated some of his works into Kyrgyz.

Translation sample


Following are the first two stanzas of Shivaza's translation of Pushkin's The Tale of the Priest and of His Workman Balda, its morpheme-by-morpheme "transcription" into the Chinese characters, and an English translation.:









Scholarly work


Main source


*Svetlana Rimsky-Korsakoff Dyer, "Iasyr Shivaza: The Life and Works of a Soviet Dungan Poet". Verlag Peter Lang GmbH, 1991. ISBN 3-631-43963-6. .

Other literature


* Сушанло Мухамед, Имазов Мухаме. "Совет хуэйз? вынщ??". Фрунзе, "Мектеп" чубанш?, 1988. . ISBN 5-658-00068-8.