In early September, 2018, members of the Other Worlds team (Alexis Wright, Anthony Uhlmann, Ben Etherington), as well as Writing & Society Research Centre technician Ben Denham, and cameraman Andre Sawenko, travelled to Burketown and Doomadgee in the Carpentaria area of Queensland. There they captured film and audio recordings of Clarence in discussion with Alexis Wright for the ABC RAdio National program AWAYE! The stories Clarence told were extraordinary, at times extremely confronting, at times inspiring.

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In his readings and conversations with writers and academics in Australia, visiting writer Mairal focused on the intersection of creative subjects and life, from literary prizes to bus accidents and fatherhood, and engaged with the dark corners of the creative mind to present his own writing as a method of survival.

Pedro Mairal is an Argentinian novelist, travel writer, poet, screenwriter and television presenter whose work has been translated and published across five continents. He has authored a collection of short fiction, three volumes of poetry, a collection of newspaper columns and five novels, including El gran surubi, which is composed entirely of sonnets, and The Missing Year of Juan Salvatierra, which was named a 2013 book of the year by The New Republic, along with work by Julian Barnes and George Saunders. In 2007, Bogata39 named him one of the finest Latin American writers of his generation. He is a writer whose work, in the words of American art editor Jed Perl, “moves from the ordinary to the opulent and back again without skipping a beat.”

Mairal’s position as writer in residence and visiting research fellow was sponsored by the ARC Discovery Project “Other Worlds: Forms of World Literature”, a partnership between Western Sydney University and the University of Adelaide.

Copy of readings read at Adelaide event 17 October 2017

Short Story read in Sydney 20 October 2017

Images of Pedro Mairal in Australia

Pedro – River Man

Pedro with kangaroos

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Professor Nicholas Jose introduces the Antipodean China Workshop. Read the full transcription of interview with Nicholas Jose after the ‘Antipodean China’ Workshop

How does this differ from other Anglophone writers, or writers in other European languages, or other ‘southern’ or Antipodean writers? What presence does Australia, for example, or Australian literature, or Aboriginal Australian storytelling, have in the Chinese world? And reciprocally, is it possible to speak of influences from ‘southern’ or Antipodean writers on Chinese literature? The investigators and invited research collaborators were asked to read or present on the topic, followed by discussion and dialogue. Invited guests included poet Xi Chuan, translators John Minford, Annie Ren and Eric Abrahamsen, writer Brian Castro and scholar Giuseppa Tamburello (University of Palermo).

The theme Antipodean China considers the relationship between Chinese literature and world literature, initially from the perspective of writers in English, mainly Antipodean, and reciprocally, inquiring into the relationship between Chinese literature and world literature from a Chinese perspective. View all the events and content related to this theme.

Day One – The Writers

Speaker One – Alexis Wright – ‘Aboriginal Cosmopolitanism and China’

Speaker Two – Brian Castro – ‘Space, Time, Literature and China’

Speaker Three – Xi Chuan – ‘Poetry and the Relationship between China and the West’ 

Speaker Four – Gail Jones – ‘The Four Dreams of Lu Xun’ (literary reading)

Speaker Five – J.M. Coetzee – ‘Outstanding Work in an Ideal Direction’ (Criteria for the Nobel Prize)

Day One – The Translators

Speaker One – John Minford – ‘Chinese Literature, The I Ching, Conflict and Resonance’ 

Speaker Two – Annie Ren – ‘Historical Translations of Classic Chinese Poetry’ 

Speaker Three – Giusi Tamburello – ‘Translation as Transcreation’ 

Speaker Four – Eric Abrahamsen – ‘The Challenges of Translating and Publishing Chinese Literature’ 

Day Two – Writers, Scholars and Critics

Speaker One – Samantha Trayhurn – ‘Reflections in Collage’

Speaker Two – Ben Etherington – ‘Literary Meridians’

Speaker Three – Anthony Uhlmann – ‘Universality of Crisis: Language, Intuition and Understanding’ 

Antipodean China Flyer

Antipodean China Program

Click here for other Antipodean China theme events. 

Guest Profiles

Eric Abrahamsen comes from Seattle, USA, and has been living in China since 2001. During that time he has worked as a reporter, editor, translator and publishing consultant. In 2007, together with a group of Chinese-English literary translators, he founded Paper Republic (//paper-republic.org/), a website introducing Chinese literature to English-speaking audiences.

Brian Castro is Chair of Creative Writing at the University of Adelaide, and is a member of the management committee of the J.M. Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice. He is the author of ten novels and a volume of essays on writing and culture. His novels have won a number of state and national prizes including four Victorian Premier’s awards, two NSW Premier’s awards and the Queensland Premier’s Award for Fiction.

Xi Chuan is a Chinese poet, essayist and translator. He is currently a professor of Beijing Normal University. Xi Chuan has published nine collections of poems, including Depth and Shallowness (2006) and A Dream’s Worth (2013), two books of essays and two books of critical writings, in addition to a play and numerous translations of Ezra Pound, Jorge Luis Borges, Czeslaw Milosz, Gary Snyder and others. He has won numerous awards including the Lu Xun Literary Award (2001), Cultural China: Person of the Decade (2001-2011), and the 1999 Weimar International Essay Prize Contest, Germany.

John Minford 閔福德 is Emeritus Professor of Chinese at the ANU, Sin Wai Kin Distinguished Professor of Chinese Culture and Translation at the Hang Seng Management College, Hong Kong, and Honorary Professor at the Beijing Normal University. In the 1970s and 1980s he, along with Professor David Hawkes霍克思, translated a 5-volume edition of the great 18th-century novel The Story of the Stone 石頭記, otherwise known as The Dream of the Red Chamber紅樓夢. In 2016 he was awarded the Australian Academy of Humanities Inaugural Award for Excellence in Translation, for his translation of the Chinese classic, the I Ching.

Annie Ren 任路漫 is a PhD scholar at The Australia National University in Canberra. She is currently writing her doctoral thesis on the poetics of the mid-Qing novel Hongloumeng 紅樓夢 (known to English readers as The Story of the Stone or A Dream of Red Mansions). In 2016, she received the Australian Association for Literary Translation (AALITRA) Translation Prize in the poetry section. Annie is the Chinese translator of Brian Castro and John Young’s trilingual book Macau Days published by Arts + Australia. She is also working with John Minford on a reader’s companion to The Story of the Stone.

Giuseppa Tamburello (or Giusi, or 朱西 In Chinese) is a “ricercatrice confermata”, a senior lecturer, at the University of Palermo in Italy. She teaches Chinese language and Chinese literature, and does research on Modern and contemporary Chinese literature. Her interest focuses on short stories and on poetry. She publishes in Italian, English and Chinese, does extensive translation work from Chinese into Italian, and her recent publications include Concepts and Categories of Emotion in East Asia (as editor, Carocci Editore, 2012) and Antologia di racconti postmaoisti (1977-1981) (Aracne Editrice).

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The forum brought together literary critics, editors, reporters, publishers, translators, interpreters, visual artists, critics and writers, including novelists, essayists, poets, short-story writers and songwriters.

Over five days the event included panels, an event dinner, a reading evening at Jinan University and a literary tour of Guangzhou. The panels had the following titles:

• ‘Novel Panel: Literature, Mobility and Place’ – Alexis Wright, Gail Jones, A Lai, Wei Wei, Wang Shiyue (moderator: Nicholas Jose)
• ‘Publishing Panel: The Prospect of Publishing and the Reason for Publishing’ – Ivor Indyk, Liu Fang, Zhu Yanling (moderator: Hu Wenjian)
• ‘Translation Panel: Literature and Translation’ – Jing Han and Li Yao (moderator: Peter Hutchings)
• ‘Critics Panel: The Value of Criticism’ – Anthony Uhlmann, Ben Denham, Xie Youshun and Li Chaoquan (moderator: Yan Jingming)
• ‘Poetry Panel: Poem and Society’ – Kate Fagan, David Musgrave, Yang Ke, Zheng Xiaoqiong (moderator: Xi Chuan)

Here Alexis Wright talks at CALF about Indigenous understandings of law and country

In this video Jing Han talks about problems of translation-

Australian poet David Musgrave’s presentation on Auditory Analysis and Voice in Poetry

Jing Han’s presentation on translating from Chinese into English.

Click here for other Antipodean China theme events.

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Dr Anthony Uhlmann a.uhlmann@westernsydney.edu.au 
(Director, Writing and Society Research Centre, WSU)
Dr Melinda Jewell m.jewell@westernsydney.edu.au 
(Research Assistant ‘Other Worlds’, WSU)

Further information on studying literature and creative writing at WSU:

Postgraduate Study at the Writing & Society Research Centre
Undergraduate Study majoring in Creative Writing and/or English: Bachelor of Arts, Bachelor of Creative Industries

The post Forms of World Literature appeared first on Other Worlds.

The argument of this paper is that world literature is an ideal concept that yet awaits realisation. The actuality of world literature could only be an established fact if, intuitively, the general (world literature) and the particular (literary works) were unified; which is to say that the totality would have achieved an empirical existence only if the literary acts encompassed by the term could be said cumulatively to produce ‘world literature’. The reason this has not come about is that literature is opposed that which presages world literature: the totalisation of exchange value. The opposition to the formation of commerce-led globalised literature, though, is shared by literary communities across the globe. Literary practice cannot help but to enact itself in relation to this notional space of world literature, binding disparate literary actors. This might be the basis for a paradoxical notion of world literature as: ‘that literature which negates globalised literature’ – something which finds expression in acts of the particular, or trenchant localism. The second part of the paper will be devoted to discussing the phenomenon of literary primitivism as an early (perhaps even inaugurating?) instance of world literature thought of in this paradoxical way, ending with a reading of two poems on ‘dwelling’ by the Martiniquan poet Aimé Césaire.

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