Book Launch with Author & Translator: Yan Ge (顏歌)’s The Chilli Bean Paste Clan, translated by Nicky Harman

https://www.facebook.com/events/605485149803274/

2018/May/07 Monday 5-7PM Ho Tim Seminar Room, China Centre, St Hugh’s College, Oxford

Open and free of charge for all

Supported by: Oxford Chinese Studies Society

To welcome everyone back to Oxford in this Trinity Term, we have invited one of the most important writers of China’s post-1980 generation, Yan Ge, to share with us her experiences as a young writer in China and abroad. She will bring her seminal work, The Chilli Bean Paste Clan (《我們家》in Chinese, published in 2013), and discuss issues of family, language, morality, capitalism and more, with the novel’s English translator Nicky Harman. The Chilli Bean Paste Clan the English translation will be published by Balestier Press and available on the market from the 1st of May, 2018, adding a fresh voice in the growing field of literature in translation.

Synopsis of The Chilli Bean Paste Clan:

Set in a fictional town in West China, this is the story of the Duan-Xue family, owners of the lucrative chilli bean paste factory, and their formidable matriarch. As Gran’s eightieth birthday approaches, her middle-aged children get together to make preparations. Family secrets are revealed and long-time sibling rivalries flare up with renewed vigour. As Shengqiang struggles unsuccessfully to juggle the demands of his mistress and his wife, the biggest surprises of all come from Gran herself……

Professor David Der-wei Wang 王德威 of Harvard University has commented on Yan Ge and her work and hinted that she might signal a generational shift in the Chinese literary scene:
“She writes about her hometown. The stories in a small Sichuanese town are greatly done. She has her own worldviews, and frankly speaking, she is of a very fortunate generation. What she may have encountered as she grew up is not as tumultuous or adventurous as the writers that came before her, and therefore the factor of imagination has gradually come to matter more than experiences in reality.
她写她的故乡，四川一个小城的故事，写得很好。她有她的世界观，但坦白地讲，他们都是有幸的一代，在她成长的过程里面，她所遭遇的不如过去那辈作家有那么多的坎坷或者冒险性，所以，想象的成分已经逐渐地凌驾了现实经验的体会。”

This event will be of interest to those of you who work on contemporary China, Chinese literature, translation studies, and publishing. The conversation between Yan Ge and Nicky Harman will last around 30 minutes and we will leave plenty of time for critical dialogues, Q & A and discussions.

Books available for purchase at a discounted rate.

Speaker biography:

Yan Ge was born in Sichuan Province, China in 1984. She is a writer as well as a Ph.D. candidate in Comparative Literature. Publishing since 1994, she is the author of eleven books in Chinese. Her works have been translated into English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, and Hungarian. She was a visiting scholar at Duke University from 2011 to 2012 and a residency writer at the Cross Border Festival in Netherlands in November 2012. Named by People’s Literature magazine as one of twenty future literature masters in China, she is now the chairperson of China Young Writers’ Association and a contract writer of Sichuan Writers’ Association. She recently started writing in English. Her English stories could be seen on Irish Times and Stand Magazine. She lives in Dublin with her husband and son.

Nicky Harman is a British translator of Chinese literature, and one of the most influential figures in the field. She is co-Chair of the Translators Association (Society of Authors) and co-founded Paper Republic 纸托邦, one of the most important online forums for Chinese literatures in translation. She taught on the MSc in Translation at Imperial College until 2011 and now translates full-time from Chinese. The authors she has translated include Jia Pingwa贾平凹，Yan Geling 严歌苓，Chan Koon-chung 陈冠中，Annibaobei 安妮宝贝，Chen Xiwo陈希我，Yan Ge颜歌，and Han Dong韩东, to name just a few. She has won several awards with her translations.

How do we define a sound or a taste for which our language does not have a dedicated word?

Typically, we borrow words from another sensory modality. Wines, for example, are often described by words that belong to other sensory perceptions: a “soft flavour” borrows the adjective soft from the domain of touch, and a “round taste” borrows the adjective round from the domain of sight.

It remains an interesting open issue to what extent these cross-sensory metaphors are universal across languages, and to what extent they are language-specific.

Dr Francesca Strik Lievers will address these questions and provide an overview of the latest scientific discoveries in the field, using examples taken from different languages. Her talk will be followed by an opportunity for questions.

The event is organised and hosted by Creative Multilingualism in collaboration with TORCH. Creative Multilingualism is a research programme led by the University of Oxford and funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council as part of the Open World Research Initiative.

Participation is free and open to the public. We provide FREE LUNCH to all participants.

12.30-13.00 – lunch and mingling

13.00-14.00 – talk and discussion

Helen Jukes, author of A Honeybee Heart Five Openings, and Caspar Henderson, author of A New Map of Wonders talk about honeybees and nature. All are welcome. 7.30pm on 16 July in the library in the Oxford Hub. More details here https://www.facebook.com/events/222901301824557/

Chief Philologist of the Oxford English Dictionary Edmund Weiner will be presenting his talk, “Thew Grew out of their Name” to the Oxford Tolkien Society

Entry free for members, £2 for non-members

“Many words and names in Tolkien’s words seem to have had a complex inner history in his own mind. This talk will look at how Tolkien’s creative philological mind worked. It will be an unhasty ramble around Ent country, looking at names and topics of language construction and language theory, with even a quick visit to Humpty Dumpty!”

Organised by Oxford Civic Society @oxcivicsoc. Wildlife today faces many serious threats and is in general decline. Estelle Bailey, Chief Executive of the largest local wildlife conservation charity in our area, the Berkshire, Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire Wildlife Trust (BBOWT) will talk about what needs to be done to reverse the trends.. https://www.oxcivicsoc.org.uk/programme/

Chief Arts Correspondent Will Gompertz: “The importance of Art and Museums”

The Global Politics, Economy and Society (GPES) Research Centre at Oxford Brookes will be hosting its first annual lecture, given by the writer and activist George Monbiot. All welcome, but please book via the registration link.

The high seas are under severe pressure from both direct and indirect human impacts, including the effects of over-fishing, plastic debris and climate change. In this talk, Prof Alex Rogers will present what a network of marine protected areas in the high seas might look like, protecting 30% of known conservation features and taking into account climate change impacts. We will also hear from Dr Gwilym Rowlands, who will consider how such a network of marine protected areas could be enforced and the potential benefits to the ocean.

For this event, 12 artists from all over the country will be presenting work that they have been making as part of the Sound Diaries open call.

The presenting artists are:

Richard Bentley, Hannah Dargavel-Leafe, Aisling Davis, Atilio Doreste, Marlo De Lara, Beth Shearsby, Kathryn Tovey, Jacek Smolicki, James Green, Lucia Hinojosa, Sena Karahan, Fi.Ona

Sound Diaries expands awareness of the roles of sound and listening in daily life. The project explores the cultural and communal significance of sounds and forms a research base for projects executed both locally and Internationally, in Beijing, Brussels, Tallinn, Cumbria and rural Oxfordshire.

Badger expert Tanesha Allen, with some help from local school children, has been studying our badgers to understand more about how smell affects their behaviour. Join Tanesha to learn more about her research and have a go at the ‘smelly shirt test’ to see how you measure up against a badger. She is currently collaborating with the Abingdon Science Partnership and Science Oxford on a badger-based citizen science project being funded by the Royal Society.

The badger is one of the UK’s iconic species and our largest land predator. It is just as common as the fox but much more elusive – we have only ever seen our resident population at Stansfeld Park on camera traps! Badgers live in large family groups and have a highly developed sense of smell. With just a sniff, they can recognise each other as well as knowing the sex, age and social group membership. However, little is known about how they react to the scents of other species – including humans.

Tanesha Allen is a third year PhD student at the University of Oxford. As part of the Wildlife Conservation Research Unit’s (WildCRU) ongoing European badger project, her research focuses on olfactory mate choice via specialised glandular secretions and metabolic by-products. She previously studied Animal Sciences at Washington State University (BSc.) and Zoology at the University of Cambridge (MPhil).

Join us for the next event in our Science on Your Doorstep series, where we shine a spotlight on fascinating people living and working in Headington. The event is free to attend, but you are invited to make a donation towards a special fund we’re setting up to support disadvantaged schools across the region. The fund will help these schools with their travel costs, to enable them to come and enjoy the new Science Oxford Centre.

Alongside our conference on 19th October, Greene’s Institute will be hosting our first public event: a special interactive keynote with Professor Henrike Lähnemann (University of Oxford). This event promises to be a fantastic exploration of one of the most important acts of translation in European history. All are welcome.

Bernard Tucker Memorial Lecture – Joint with Oxford Ornithological Society

Join Oxford University Press for a special science-themed “speed dating” event. Mingle with a range of topics, including reptiles, psychopathy, environmental law, synaesthesia and circadian rhythms with expert authors from the Very Short Introductions series. Make an impression and get your questions in before the bell rings!

IF Oxford is operating a Pay What You Decide (PWYD) ticketing system. This works by enabling you to pre-book events without paying for a ticket beforehand. Afterwards, you have the opportunity to pay what you decide you want to, or can afford. If you prefer, you can make a donation to IF Oxford when you book. All funds raised go towards next year’s Festival.

Chris Powles will describe the extraordinary behaviour of elephants in Kenya’s Mount Elgon National Park, where they excavate 150m into the mountain to mine for salt.
Almost equally remarkable is the crucial role that Chris and his family have played in ensuring the survival of this unique population.

In this lecture, in honour of Edward Greene, Donald Meek will describe the fascinating process of Gaelic Bible translation in Scotland and Ireland. Beginning with the standard Gaelic Bible, translated between 1767 and 1804, Donald will explain its creation, and its debts to the work of earlier translators and revisers, including the Rev. Robert Kirk of Aberfoyle (who produced ‘Kirk’s Bible in 1690), but pre-eminently to the foundational labours of the translators of the Bible into Classical Gaelic in Ireland in the earlier seventeenth century. Both the principal translators of that period – Bishop William Ó Dómhnaill and Bishop William Bedell – studied at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, where they were trained in biblical languages by the first Master of Emmanuel, Lawrence Chadderton. By way of comparison and contrast, brief reference will be made to the somewhat different histories of Bible translation into Manx and Welsh. The lecture will conclude with some discussion of the profound influence of the Gaelic Bible on the development of modern Scottish Gaelic literature, and its enduring legacy

We are entering the fourth revolution of healthcare.

The first revolution was Public Health with sanitation, cleaner air and better housing. The second is medical healthcare with the advancement of diagnostics and treatment with a focus on disease cure. The third is personalised health, through individual knowledge, technology, behaviour change and precision medicine.

However, these revolutions have left three major problems unresolved; unsustainable healthcare, rising health inequalities and climate change driven by unsustainable living.

So, we enter the fourth revolution in healthcare which builds on the previous three. This is based on communities rather than individuals, supporting a sustainable active lifestyle, eating local produce and using culture, art and contact with nature to create purpose and connections to each other, leading to greater resilience and wellbeing. It is a revolution when Smart Cities become central to the delivery of health and when advanced technology becomes almost invisible encouraging a lifestyle closer rather than further from nature.

In this talk Dr Bird will explain how we are already delivering this future and how biological changes such as chronic inflammation, epigenetics, mitochondrial dysfunction and telomere shortening can provide the scientific link between wellbeing and disease.

Tara Pirie recalls her three years living in a tent, while tracking and gathering data on these elusive, but beautiful big cats. She is now one of the world’s leading experts on Leopard ecology and conservation.

Organised by Oxford Civic Society @oxcivicsoc. Ellie Mayhew from the Freshwater Habitats Trust will explain why our area has such rich biodiversity and what the charity has been doing to improve and monitor these valuable freshwater areas to protect the species they support.. https://www.oxcivicsoc.org.uk/programme/

The failure to stem the tide of biodiversity loss, or to address the deeply related issue of climate change, demands we quickly find more ambitious and more coherent approaches to tackling these challenges.

Nature-based Solutions (NbS) are one such family of approaches that has recently gained prominence in international policy and business discourse. Broadly defined as actions that involve working with nature to address societal goals, NbS are being widely hailed as a win-win for addressing biodiversity loss and climate change. However, this win-win scenario is not guaranteed.

Some NbS – particularly those involving planting trees in naturally treeless habitats – can have negative outcomes for climate change mitigation, biodiversity and local peoples’ livelihoods. There are also critical questions around the timeframes over which NbS can help tackle the biodiversity and climate crises given the negative impacts of warming on the health of the biosphere.

In the second discussion in the Oxford Net Zero Series, hosted by the Oxford Martin School, Professor Nathalie Seddon, will bring together interdisciplinary researchers and practitioners to explore the value and limits of working with nature to address climate change and why NbS must both support biodiversity and be implemented with, by and for people, if they are to provide benefits over the longterm.

To register and watch this talk live: www.crowdcast.io/e/nature-climate-change

The talk will also be streamed via YouTube here: https://youtu.be/Ka7Sc5d1v3k, but please note you will not be able to take part in the interactive Q&A session unless you join the talk on CrowdCast.