Goran Malmqvist's (
The Swedish Academy, which awards the prestigious Nobel Prize for Literature every year, has only one member who can read Chinese and that person is Malmqvist.
His literary taste took on national importance in Taiwan in 1978, when news coverage of the Nobel Prize for Literature caused some problems for two newspapers: the United Daily News and the China Times. In the ensuing years, the literary editors of both papers would start a "Nobel countdown" -- two weeks before the annual announcement -- by running full-page profiles of the hopefuls, accompanied by a choice selection of their works. Thanks to this annual ritual of rounding up the usual suspects, Taiwanese readers were exposed -- for the first time -- to the works of such writers as Graham Greene, Mario Vargas Llosa, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Joyce Carol Oates, Doris Lessing and Milan Kundera. When, news of the Nobel winner came out -- always in the evening in Taiwan -- translators would be set to work, couriers would be dispatched to fetch books from libraries and international telephone calls would be made. If they couldn't get the Nobel laureate himself on the phone, his colleagues or neighbors would do. Of course, Malmqvist would also have to be called and asked for his opinion for the umpteenth time about "why it wasn't a Chinese writer this year."
When the inevitable question was asked, " Who is the most likely Chinese to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in the future?" Malmqvist would be obliged to drop one or two names.
The Nobel countdown craze peaked in 1991, when the China Times flew a group of writers, critics and literary editors to Stockholm on the eve of announcement. And with taxpayers' money, too. Many people around the world have made tourist attractions out of Hollywood's Academy Awards ceremony and the Olympic Games, but Taiwan is probably the only country that has ever tried to turn the Nobel announcement into a travel destination!
The Nobel Prize for Literature's biggest impact on book publishing here came in 1980, when three publishing houses announced a luxury set of the Nobel winners' works. In those piracy-happy days, all three firms published translations of the literary gems -- without bothering to pay royalties to the author.
And all three paid dearly for it. The rivalry turned into a bloodbath, driving two of the three out of business. Even today, the remaining firm, Vistas (遠景), has yet to recover from "the Nobel Curse."
No one would mistake literature as Taiwan's national pastime. Serious literature is still an underpublished field here. A master storyteller like Cheng Ching-wen (The Three-foot Horse) has to clerk in a bank and keep writing fiction as a hobby.
This year's winner was announced on Thursday: Guenter Grass, from Germany. Once again, the winner was not a Chinese.
The story was covered in full by Taiwan's Chinese-language newspapers again, but by now the literary editors are weary of asking the same old "Chinese question."
Disappointment still lingers here, among intellectuals and publishers and writers and editors. It is not easy for a people who boast the longest continuous literary tradition in the world to swallow their concerns over why their modern literature has not produced a Marquez or a Grass or a Llosa or a Fuentes.
Joyce Yen (
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus whip Fu Kun-chi (傅?萁) has caused havoc with his attempts to overturn the democratic and constitutional order in the legislature. If we look at this devolution from the context of a transition to democracy from authoritarianism in a culturally Chinese sense — that of zhonghua (中華) — then we are playing witness to a servile spirit from a millennia-old form of totalitarianism that is intent on damaging the nation’s hard-won democracy. This servile spirit is ingrained in Chinese culture. About a century ago, Chinese satirist and author Lu Xun (魯迅) saw through the servile nature of
Monday was the 37th anniversary of former president Chiang Ching-kuo’s (蔣經國) death. Chiang — a son of former president Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石), who had implemented party-state rule and martial law in Taiwan — has a complicated legacy. Whether one looks at his time in power in a positive or negative light depends very much on who they are, and what their relationship with the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) is. Although toward the end of his life Chiang Ching-kuo lifted martial law and steered Taiwan onto the path of democratization, these changes were forced upon him by internal and external pressures,
In their New York Times bestseller How Democracies Die, Harvard political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt said that democracies today “may die at the hands not of generals but of elected leaders. Many government efforts to subvert democracy are ‘legal,’ in the sense that they are approved by the legislature or accepted by the courts. They may even be portrayed as efforts to improve democracy — making the judiciary more efficient, combating corruption, or cleaning up the electoral process.” Moreover, the two authors observe that those who denounce such legal threats to democracy are often “dismissed as exaggerating or
The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus in the Legislative Yuan has made an internal decision to freeze NT$1.8 billion (US$54.7 million) of the indigenous submarine project’s NT$2 billion budget. This means that up to 90 percent of the budget cannot be utilized. It would only be accessible if the legislature agrees to lift the freeze sometime in the future. However, for Taiwan to construct its own submarines, it must rely on foreign support for several key pieces of equipment and technology. These foreign supporters would also be forced to endure significant pressure, infiltration and influence from Beijing. In other words,
RSS