Hsu Yu 徐訏 in the 21st Century: a Conversation on Literary Translation

The Chinese Studies Seminar at UNSW and the Australian Society for Asian Humanities invite you to join a conversation with Frederik H. Green (San Francisco State University) and Jon von Kowallis (UNSW) on the life and works of Francophile Chinese author Hsu Yu 徐訏 (1908-1980). Hsu Yu (pinyin: Xu Xu) was one of the most widely read Chinese authors of the twentieth century. Starting his career in pre-war Shanghai, Hsu Yu edited Renjian Shi (This Human World), was mentored by Lin Yutang and Lu Xun, traveled to Europe in 1936 and studied philosophy at the Sorbonne. Returning to China after the outbreak of the War to Resist Japan, he became the most celebrated writer in Free China during the war years, but ended up an exile in Hong Kong in 1950. Fred will read from his recent translations of short stories by Hsu Yu to illustrate how Hsu Yu’s fiction responded in unusual ways to pre-war Shanghai’s urban modernity, the War to Resist Japan, and finally the experience of Chinese exiles in post-war Hong Kong.

About the Speakers:

Frederik H. Green is Associate Professor of Chinese at San Francisco State University. He holds a BA in Chinese Studies from Cambridge University and an MPhil and PhD in Chinese literature from Yale University. He has published widely on the literature and culture of the Qing dynasty and the Republican period, Sino-Japanese cultural relations, post-socialist Chinese cinema, and contemporary Taiwan. His book Bird Talk and Other Stories by Xu Xu: Modern Tales of a Chinese Romantic was published in 2020 by Stone Bridge Press in Berkeley, California.

Jon von Kowallis (BA Columbia, PhD Berkeley) is Professor of Chinese Studies at the University of New South Wales in Sydney. He has published The Lyrical Lu Xun: a Study of his Classical-style Poetry and The Subtle Revolution: Poets of the ‘Old Schools’ during Late Qing and Early Republican China. He is currently completing an ARC Discovery project on the formation of Lu Xun’s early thought during his Lehrjahre in Japan. While working at Foreign Languages Press in Beijing, Jon translated Wit and Humor from Old Cathay, a collection of pre-modern Chinese jokes.

Register for this event via Eventbrite here.

For more information about this event, please contact asah.seminars@sydney.edu.au