October 28, a book launch on Queen's Case -- Collection of Contemporary Jamaican Short Stories was held at Yanjiyou Bookstore at Zhongguan. Professor Chen Yongguo, associate dean of the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures in Tsinghua University, Shen Xinyue, a student of Institute for World Literatures and Cultures, Cherett Campbell, the Counselor of Embassy of Jamaica to China and Alecia McKenzie, the winner of the Commonwealth Literature Prize in Jamaica. The hostess of the activity is Yu Haibing, the editor in charge of Peking University Press.
The question-answering of Chen Yongguo, McKenzie and Shen Xinyue
Caribbean, commented by Campbell, is the cooperative area of China's maritime silk road, and this book provides Chinese readers with an excellent opportunity to understand the spiritual world of Jamaica and Caribbean people, enabling them to have an immersive experience of Jamaican society and culture. She highly praised that Chen Yongguo and McKenzie had made outstanding contributions to the promotion of cultural exchanges between Jamaica and China and expressed her wishes that there would be more and better translations of Jamaican literature into China and more Chinese would travel to Jamaica and have a golden memory there.
Chen Yongguo briefly introduced the process of translating the book and from the perspective of a professional researcher with Ms. McKenzie probed into the position of Jamaica literature in Caribbean area, its characteristics of mixed language, its African elements, its influence from English literature, the post-colonial experience and historical consciousness of Jamaica writers and so on.
McKenzie stressed that the major reason why she choose the publication of Chinese version is that there is a strong connection of history and culture between China and Jamaica. She continued that Latin American literature has always occupied an important position in the world for its exotic imagination, and Jamaican literature is an important branch of Caribbean literature. In recent years, its writers have gained more and more international recognition and attention.
Shen xinyue is another translator. In the participation of selecting ten works of famous writers in contemporary Jamaica, she showed her acute appreciation for contemporary English writers, including the laureate of Commonwealth Prize winner, American Casard Award and the Caribbean Literature and also her deep concern for immigration, social changes and people's daily life. These short stories, such as "marima", "the end of the road", "the man who could not be found guilty", "the business of the qin family" and "the man like a father", translated by her, are beautifully written and delicately expressed, providing a good window for Chinese readers to understand Jamaica's post-colonial culture and society. Shiwen class is the only liberal arts experimental class in the "school plan" of Tsinghua University, which is committed to cultivating a new generation with excellent abilities of multi-language, cross-cultural communication and cognition, and familiarity with Chinese and foreign humanities classics.
