A bucolic philosopher. That’s the term used by the Chinese literati to describe author Liu Liangcheng. Born in 1962 in Xinjiang, Liu has written more than 50 books in the past 25 years and even has a literature center named after him that showcases his works such as Bearing Word, Bomba, Drifting Soil, Hollowed Out, In Xinjiang, and A Village of One’s Own. Many of his essays have also been included in the Chinese middle school textbooks and university courses.
Bearing Word, for instance, was published in English by Balestier Press in May 2023; rights for the Arabic, Macedonian, and Nepalese editions has been sold. Set in ancient Xinjiang during a turbulent time, this 340-page fable revolves around Ku, a folk messenger and polyglot, and Xie, a donkey that understands what humans are saying and can communicate with every creature out there, including ghosts. Ku, tasked to deliver the donkey to a hostile country thousands of miles away, then embarks on a journey that crosses battlefields and deserts while bearing witness to incredible life and death.
“In Bearing Word, Liu delves deep into the changes—through faith, love, power, and war—in the human soul. He strikes a harmonic balance between human and nature, which essentially boils down to his own writing philosophy and belief that everything has a spirit,” says deputy editor-in-chief Lu Zhizhou of Yilin Press, a subsidiary of Phoenix Publishing and Media Group (PPMG) that specializes in Chinese and translated literary titles.
For Lu, Bearing Word is also about translation. “As Ku notes in the story: ‘All languages from distant places felt like dream talk.’ He further acknowledges the transformative power of translation, pointing out that ‘the difference between languages is so great, translating between them is like herding out a flock of goats in the morning and finding they’d turned into dogs by afternoon.’ Translation is the engine that enables our authors and their works to go global and cross different cultural and language barriers, and so these observations from Ku—and by default, from the author—are particularly illuminating not just for us at Yilin Press but for everybody in the publishing, translation, and rights business,” Lu says.
Then there is Bomba, the novel that won the 11th Mao Dun Literature Award last year. In the Chinese publishing circle, Bomba is lauded as a majestic saga in the same vein as François Rabelais’s Giant accompanied by a quixotic sense of innocence. “Liu’s mastery in turning oral tradition and folk stories into this highly imaginative and philosophical fiction has been frequently compared to that of Calvino’s,” adds Lu.
In Mongolian epic, ‘bomba’—originally means ‘a treasure vase’—refers to the mother’s womb for all human beings and living things. Liu’s Bomba draws on Jangar, Mongolia’s best-known epic poem, which describes the bitter struggle of 12 great warriors and thousands of brave soldiers defending their homeland.
In Liu’s story, ‘bomba’ is the name of the grassland where storyteller Qi and his people live, and where people remain forever at the age of 25, free from aging or death. During the cold nights on the way eastward, they recite the Jangar epic together, telling the story of three children and their games, and lead the tribe out of the harsh conditions, thus changing their destiny.
Bomba traces the lost childhood and innocence of mankind. It tells the world ancient and novel Chinese stories with words full of dreamy and philosophical thoughts. “It seeks to take readers back to the original meaning of the world through dreams, games, and stories, and allow them to see themselves in another time,” says Lu.
Bearing Word and Bomba are among the many bestselling works that Yilin Press had published since its 1988 inception. Its catalog, which has more than 500 new titles every year, includes top authors such as Yu Hua, Ge Fei, Ye Zhaoyan, A Yi, and Lu Min. “Our social science titles—Contemporary Chinese Visual Culture, Daughter of Dunhuang, and The Theory of Moral Capital, for instance— are known domestically and proven influential abroad,” says Lu, adding that Yilin Press has copublishing programs with multinational publishers such as Simon & Schuster, Springer, and Taylor & Francis. “To-date, our imprint has sold rights to over 160 publishers in more than 50 countries.
