Tales from a Beautiful Island 美麗島的故事

The San Francisco State University Chinese Program is pleased to present Tales from a Beautiful Island — 美麗島的故事, a literary event with renowned author Huang Chunming (黃春明) and distinguished scholar and translator Howard Goldblatt (葛浩文).

The San Francisco State University Chinese Program is pleased to present Tales from a Beautiful Island — 美麗島的故事, a literary event with renowned author Huang Chunming (黃春明) and distinguished scholar and translator Howard Goldblatt (葛浩文). A bilingual reading and discussion will take place on November 8, 2014 at 2:00pm Room 133 of the Humanities Building.

Tales from a Beautiful Island will feature samples of Huang Chunming’s fiction of the past four decades, both in their original Chinese and in Howard Goldblatt’s award-winning translations. The reading will be followed by a discussion of Huang’s literary legacy in Taiwan and Goldblatt’s role as the most important translator of literature from Taiwan and the Chinese-speaking world today.

Since his debut in the 1960’s, Huang Chunming has been considered the most important representative of Taiwan’s "nativist literature" 鄉土文學. Focusing mainly on the lives of rural Taiwanese people, Huang’s work also explores the challenges rapid industrialization and modernization has brought to Taiwan.  Born in Ilan and educated at National Pingtung University, Huang Chunming’s short stories have been translated into multiple languages and made into feature films.  Huang Chunming also writes children’s books and directs a theater group in Ilan.

Howard Goldblatt, who is both an alumnus and a former faculty member of the Chinese Program at San Francisco State University, began studying Chinese in Taiwan after completing a tour of duty at a naval base on the island. He received a Ph.D. from Indiana University and is Professor Emeritus at the Univerity of Notre Dame.  It is thanks to Howard Goldblatt’s many translations of Taiwanese literature that Western readers have gained access to the island’s literature, including the work of Huang Chunming that Goldblatt first translated in 1980 (The Drowning of an Old Cat and Other Stories, reissued in 2001, and The Taste of Apples). Howard Goldblatt is also the translator of the Chinese writer Mo Yan, winner of the 2012 Nobel Prize in Literature.

The San Francisco Chinese Program gratefully acknowledges the University of San Francisco Center for Asia Pacific Studies as a principal co-sponsor of Tales from a Beautiful Island--美麗島的故事. Sponsorship is also provided by the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in San Francisco, The San Francisco State University Chinese Flagship Program, and the San Francisco InterContinental. Additional support was provided by San Francisco State University’s Confucius Institute, College of Liberal and Creative Arts, and Department of Foreign Languages. Media Sponsors: KTSF.  For information about the event, please visit the event website at http://chinese.sfsu.edu/talesfromabeautifulisland or contact Mia Segura at msegura@sfsu.edu.

Register Here