Thomas E. Moran, "Translating China’s Last Romantic: On 'Things on Earth,' '1998: 24 Solar Terms,' and Other Essays by Wei An"

Ohio State University Institute for Chinese Studies presents a talk by Thomas E. Moran on his work translating essays by Wei An.

Institute for Chinese Studies presents the "China and the International Mediasphere" Lecture Series
Translating China’s Last Romantic: On “Things on Earth,” “1998: 24 Solar Terms,” and Other Essays by Wei An

Professor Thomas E. Moran
John D. Berninghausen Professor of Chinese
Department of Chinese
Middlebury College

Abstract: Essayist Wei An (1960-1999) wrote about nature, village life, his travels, people he knew, things he believed in, and writers he respected, including Thoreau. Wei An was an idealist, pacifist, deep ecologist and vegetarian. He grew up near the countryside, and his work is a eulogy for the agricultural way of life and call for a “more complete” future life. In 1998 he came to a wheat field on each day of the twenty-four solar terms of the traditional Chinese calendar, took a picture, recorded the time and weather, and made notes for an essay he was not able to finish before he died. I will discuss my effort to translate Wei An’s unguarded expression of emotion and direct discussion of truth, beauty and goodness in his 1991-1999 “Things on Earth”; my project to finish his essay on the Solar Terms; and my understanding of his philosophy and its application.

Bio: Thomas Moran is the John D. Berninghausen Professor of Chinese and Chair of the Greenberg-Starr Department of Chinese Language and Literature at Middlebury College, where he has taught since earning his Ph.D. in modern Chinese literature from Cornell University in 1994. He has published translations of modern and contemporary Chinese plays, short stories, film scripts, and essays, and is the editor of The Dictionary of Literary Biography: Chinese Fiction Writers, 1900-1949 (ThomsonGale, 2007) and co-editor of  The Dictionary of Literary Biography: Chinese Fiction Writers, 1950-2000 (Thomson, Cenage, 2013). His article “Lost in the Woods: Nature in Soul Mountain” (Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, Fall 2002), was one of the first English-language works of ecocriticism about modern Chinese literature. His translations of select portions of Wei An’s “Life on Earth” have been published by the New England Review (2015), Cerise Press (2013), and Mānoa (2012).

This event is sponsored in part by a U.S. Department of Education Title VI grant for The Ohio State University East Asian Studies Center.