Posted
July 9th, 2010
by
Three Sisters by Bi Feiyu
Translated by Howard Goldblatt and Sylvia Li-Chun Lin
Three Sisters is a vivid picture of life in rural and urban Communist China in the 1970s and 1980s under Mao Zedong. It is also a deeply humanist portrayal of three sisters as they fight to take control of their lives and a timely exploration of the themes of human rights and the place of women in a deeply patriarchal culture. This breathtaking story captures the all-consuming desire for power in a society obsessed with saving face. Whether it’s in the Wang family village, where life is attuned to the rhythm of work in the fields and the slogans of the Cultural Revolution, or in the Beijing of the 1980s, the sisters are not prepared to be just another wave in the ‘infinite ocean of people’.
Published by Telegram Books, June 2010
Bi Feiyu is a Chinese journalist, poet, novelist and screenwriter currently living in Jiangsu Province, Nanjing. He co-wrote the script for Zhang Yimou’s Shanghai Triad. Bi was editor at the literary magazine Yu Hua and journalist at the Nanjing Daily for six years, though he only contributed 6,000 words during his entire time there.
Bi often tells others’ stories rather than his own, creatively weaving his own experiences into their tales. His skilful writing has earned him a number of literary accolades: he has twice been awarded the prestigious Lu Xun Prize, and in 2010 he won the Man Asian Literary Prize for Three Sisters.
Bi Feiyu was due to visit the UK in 2010, to attend an English PEN event promoting Three Sisters, but unfortunately his visa application was lost in red tape and the visit had to be cancelled.
Howard Goldblatt is a prolific translator of Chinese writing, having translated over thirty volumes of Chinese fiction, as well as several memoirs and a poetry anthology. In the 1990s, Goldblatt wrote to Bi Feiyu requesting permission to translate The Ancestor for his anthology of short stories from modern China, Chairman Mao Would Not Be Amused.
Sylvia Li-Chun Lin is Associate Professor at the University of Notre Dame. She teaches modern and contemporary Chinese literature, film, and culture. Her research interests include Western missionaries and Chinese women, women and new culture in early twentieth-century China, language and identity in Taiwan, and narrative theory. A winner of the Liang Shih-chiu Literary Translation Prize, she also co-translated Chu T’ien-wen’s Notes of a Desolate Man, winner of the 1999 ‘Translation of the Year’ award from the American Literary Translators Association.
Originally posted with the url: www.englishpen.org/writersintranslation/recentlysupportedtitles/threesisters/
