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Stick Out Your Tongue

by Ma Jian, translated by Flora  Drew

Chatto & Windus, $160

Cold Literature: Selected Works of Gao Xingjian

by Gao  Xingjian, translated by Gilbert C.F. Fong and Mabel Lee

Chinese University Press, $250

There's  surprisingly little contemporary Chinese literature available in English, which seems  odd, considering the growing importance accorded to China over the past decade or so. When  Gao Xingjian won the Nobel Prize for Literature in  2000,  much of the English-reading world mumbled  a collective 'who?'

The French knew who he  was, as did the Germans and the Swedes. So, it should come as  no surprise that Stick Out Your Tongue,  Ma Jian's first book,  which got him banned in China  in 1987, is only now in English translation. Better late than never, one might suppose.

It's a slim volume of just five stories about the coarseness and brutality of Tibet, its people and  the Chinese occupiers encountered by Ma as he sought to salvage himself from the soul-destroying society emergent in China.

Tibet wasn't something Beijing wanted discussed, and the book was promptly banned, but the portrayal of Ma's writings about incest and sex as 'pornographic', virtually guaranteed him a black-market best-seller.

Ma fled to Hong Kong, then Germany after the handover  in 1997, and then on to London.  But he has since made a number of visits to his homeland because, as a banned writer, he has become 'invisible' - although he says taxi drivers still recall that first book, even if they tend to mangle  the title.

Chinese characters require sensitivity in interpretation  when read, making translation problematic. A 2001 review in  Time (Asia) of Ma's Red Dust read the title of his first book as Show the Coating on Your Tongue.

Flora Drew's translation (she's Ma's partner) is consistently fine, letting the writer stand on his own before the judgment of the reader. By far the best story in this volume is The Final Initiation, about  the reincarnation of the Living Buddha, Tenzin Wangdu, in the form of a girl, Sangsang Tashi,  and her final preparations at the age of 15 for manifestation of her Buddha nature.

'In Tibet, religion permeates every grain of earth,' Ma writes. 'Man and God are inseparable, myth and legend are intertwined. People there have endured sufferings that are beyond the comprehension of the modern world. I am writing this story in hope that I can start to forget.'

It's a simply told story, but  one that succeeds in evoking the mythic mysticism of Tibet, while revealing the brutality of the monastic culture that China claimed was so abhorrent, and  its  ruthless response.

The quote most often attached to Ma - 'one of the most important and courageous voices in Chinese literature' - is from  Gao, whose  voice is  more widely heard in English, thanks to the impressive translations of  Mabel Lee, a former lecturer at the University of Sydney.

In Cold Literature: Selected Works of Gao Xingjian, selected chapters of Lee's translations from the novels  Soul Mountain and   One Man's Bible, and the short-story  Buying a Fishing Rod for  My Grandfather are produced page-for-page opposite the original Chinese.

The collection, which Chinese University Press says is the first  in a series of planned bilingual publications, also showcases the essays, poems, plays and ink paintings for which Gao is held in high repute (he survived the early years of his Paris exile by painting).

There's little doubt that this volume will garner wide academic interest. And it will, hopefully, introduce Gao to a more general audience interested in discovering for themselves what the Swedish Academy called his 'oeuvre of universal validity, bitter insights and linguistic ingenuity, which has opened new paths for the Chinese novel and drama'.

Now that the English-language publishers have woken to the  fact that there's a market for translations of China's writers - Lee's Gao, Drew's Ma,  Howard Goldblatt's work on  Su Tong  (My Life as Emperor) and  Mo Yan  (Red Sorghum et al) and  Dai Sijie  (Mr Muo's Travelling Couch), who comes via the French - literary agents have been scouring the country in search of the voice that most effectively captures China at this crucial juncture.

Given the restrictions imposed on writers who reject the idea  of self-exile, it will be a brave  writer indeed who's prepared  to talk about the deep scars  of the Cultural Revolution, the simmering resentment that persists after the crackdown by a frightened regime at Tiananmen, and the lust for consumption that is propelling China's economy and ravaging its environment.



Chinese literature