Antipodean China workshop

The Antipodean China workshop, held at the University of Adelaide 23-24 November 2017, was an occasion for writers, translators and scholars from China, Australia and elsewhere to reflect together on questions that are central to the research project, namely what presence does China, or Chinese literature, have in the work or imagination of writers in Australia, including Indigenous writers?


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

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 (http://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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