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Distant Sunflower Fields Kindle Edition

by Li Juan (Author), Christopher Payne (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

10

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“A memorable book that you will live through as much as you read.” - Rónán Hession / The Irish Times

The earth’s most powerful force is not its quake,
but rather its ability to be home for myriad creatures to grow’

An iron-willed mother, an ageing grandmother, a pair of mismatched dogs and 90 mu of less-than-ideal farmland: these are Li Juan’s companions on the steppes of the Gobi Desert.

Writing out of a yurt under Xinjiang’s endless horizons, she documents her family’s quest to extract a bounty of sunflowers amid the harsh beauty and barren expanses of China’s northwest frontier. Success must be eked out in the face of life’s unnegotiable realities: sandstorms, locusts and death.

While this small tribe is held at the mercy of these headwinds, they discover the cheer and dignity hidden in each other. But will their ceaseless labours deliver blooming fields of green and yellow? Or will their dreams prove as distant as they are fragile?

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B08SCBYJSL
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Sinoist Books (February 12, 2021)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ February 12, 2021
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 6933 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 337 pages

Best Sellers Rank: #1,937,357 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #299 in Chinese Travel
- #890 in General China Travel Guides
- #4,736 in Biographies & Memoirs of Authors

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10

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KKL

A Journey to the Heart of Time and Earth

Reviewed in the United States on March 7, 2021

Maybe because I'm reading this book during the northern hemisphere planting season, while sorting seeds, turning beds, transplanting seedlings, I feel surrounded by the most nourishing prose in Li Juan's DISTANT SUNFLOWER FIELDS. At times meditative like journal passages, yet crafted with a poet's sensory images, each chapter in this memoir pulls my heart deeper into a place of balance with nature, family, and the passages of time. Li Juan spent several years with her mother tending a 90-acre plot of sunflowers. This book- Li Juan's first available in English--is about much more than a farmer's challenges.

Li Juan invites readers into an extremely isolated and fragile habitat, Xinjiang, a remote region of the PRC bordering current-day India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Mongolia, Russia and the Tibetan Autonomous Region. The territory is both desolate and rich with history, traversed by ancient Silk Road traders, a landscape where nomadic herders and farmers coexist with limited water and intense weather. And they've done so for centuries and centuries.

In short chapters of gorgeous language (translated by Christopher Payne) , Li Juan traces sacred pathways of water, known and imagined paths of her ancestors, and places in-between. The author ponders life's big questions and invites pandemic-thwarted travelers to explore a remarkable place while contemplating cycles of life, death, and being.

Enduring powers of nature, story, and indigenous life wisdom from DISTANT SUNFLOWER FIELDS resonate long and strong in my mind and heart. Offers sustenance to fans of BRAIDING SWEETGRASS by Native American Robin Wall Kimmerer, BLUE SKY KINGDOM by Bruce Kirkby, and LANDS OF LOST BORDERS by Kate Harris. I was also reminded more than once of Steinbeck's GRAPES OF WRATH. Gratitude to NetGalley for an ARC of this new translation.

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alias

Great book, not so great translation

Reviewed in the United States on February 5, 2022

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Five stars for the book, three stars for the translation.

I'm only on page 2 and have already spotted several translation problems. There is at least one mistake (where the original says 电台 or "radio," it becomes "television" in the translation). There are also borderline problems. For example, 罕有的旱年 "a rarely-seen draught year" becomes "this year has been strangely dry--a rare occurrence." Moreover, the translator consistently inserts his own phrases, perhaps to make the English flow better. Sometimes the insert is an explanation that the readers do not really need. Sometimes the explanation creates more problems. For example, 然而，正是这一年，我妈独自...种了九十亩葵花地, which can be directly translated as "Yet, precisely in such a year, my mother singlehandedly...planted 90 mus of sunflowers," is rendered as "Yet this was the year my mum, mostly by herself, set out... to plant sunflowers... She'd rented 90 mu...a rather small amount." 1 mu= 0.165 acres or 666.7 square meters. Is 15 acres a small amount? Is it a small amount for a person to plant singlehandedly? Why not let the readers decide? I understand the translator's desire to make the English more readable. Li Juan's prose is spare and her sentences tend to be short. Translated into English they might sound a bit choppy. But that is no reason to "fill it out," just as one would not, for example, want to make Marguerite Duras sound smooth.

Here is an example to illustrate my point. On page 5, 这片大地广阔无物，其实，与浓密的森林一样擅于隐瞒 which can be directly translated as "this land seems vast and empty; in truth, it is just as good at concealing things as a thick forest," is rendered as "On the surface, the steppe seemed to stretch for as far as the eye could see, but in truth there were knotted and somewhat luxuriant forests nestled here and there, groves of trees that were adept at concealing myriad things..." Adding "forests" and "trees" changes the meaning. The original is thought-provoking and paradoxical--Li Juan's prose, like the land, is also hiding things in plain sight. The translation fails to catch up with the speed of her thought.

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Distant Sunflower Fields Kindle Edition

“A memorable book that you will live through as much as you read.” - Rónán Hession / The Irish Times

The earth’s most powerful force is not its quake,
but rather its ability to be home for myriad creatures to grow’

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Distant Sunflower Fields Kindle Edition

“A memorable book that you will live through as much as you read.” - Rónán Hession / The Irish TimesThe earth’s most powerful force is not its quake, but rather its ability to be home for myriad creatures to grow’

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Product details

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Top reviews from the United States

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“A memorable book that you will live through as much as you read.” - Rónán Hession / The Irish Times

The earth’s most powerful force is not its quake,
but rather its ability to be home for myriad creatures to grow’