On 20 January we had a virtual meeting with translator Indre Balčikonyte-Huang, who was awarded the Dominik Urba Prize in 2024 for her translation of Shuang Xuetao's (双雪涛, b.1983) short story collection "Rouge street" (2023) - one of the first translations of Chinese literature into Lithuanian, and the first translated work of the same title was also included in the lists of the best translated works of the year.
The first part of the meeting focused on the works and the context, the second part on the translation process and its challenges, which we believe was interesting for both sinologists and translators.
"Rouge Street“ is the third translation of fiction from Chinese into Lithuanian, and it is also interesting because it is not only a new work for 2016-2017, but also the author is a young writer of the younger generation. Another interesting fact is that the region of China depicted in the story is somewhat reminiscent of some periods of Lithuanian history.
Shuang Xuetao 双雪涛 is one of the most prominent writers of the younger generation in China, a member of the new Dongbei group of writers. He has so far published 3 novels, 4 collections of short stories and 1 book of essays. His most famous short story is "Moses in the Plains", which is also included in the collection "Rouge Street". He has been compared to H. Murakami, Faulkner and Hemingway.
Red Street takes the reader to the harsh city of Shenyang in north-eastern China, in a region commonly referred to as Dongbei (dongbei 东北 - north-east). In Mao's time, Dongbei, with Shenyang at its heart, was the country's industrial heartland, but with the transition to a market economy, state-owned factories have closed, millions of people have lost their jobs and fallen into poverty. Rouge or Yanfen Street (艳粉街) is a real place in Shenyang, the slum area where the author was born and grew up. Mixing neorealism, magic noir, auto fiction, detective fiction and other genres in his short stories, Shuang Xuetao explores collective traumatic experiences through the stories of unforgettable characters.
Hear more in the recording of the meeting (in Lithuanian) https://youtu.be/Pv9eZE4zCUM
The collection of short stories "Rouge Street" is now available in Lithuanian bookstores.