Red Sorghum, by Mo Yan

Hat's Off To Mo Yan!

The first thing that struck me in reading this novel was just how well it translated into English. My experience with Japanese and Chinese fiction in translation has never been very satisfactory, and I have generally been left with the feeling that I was missing much of the meaning in the original work. That was not true at all in this translation of Mo Yan's masterpiece, Red Sorghum. The quality of the prose in English is astounding, and of course great credit must be given to the translator, Howard Goldblatt, for this achievement. I suspect though that it is easier to effectively translate a singularly great work of fiction than to translate lesser works, so I think most of the credit probably goes to the author, but whatever the case there is no doubt this translation is a literary classic.

From the very first page one is impelled into this story, and the great cultural gap between America and rural China simply disappears, the reason being that Mo Yan is a brilliant observer of human nature, and human nature is universal. Reading this work I knew these people, which is an amazing thing to communicate across such vast cultural boundaries, and if that had been the works only accomplishment it would been a fine novel, but that is merely the beginning. . .

The narrative has an epic quality (a description bandied about too much by reviewers, but which I think in this case is warranted) that is reminiscent of War and Peace; but in no way does it borrow from that novel. It has a feel quite its own, an intermingling of the rustic and the mythical, of minute observation with panoramic scope, woven together seamlessly and building with inexorable power into something akin to the myths of the heroic age. Yet at no point in this remarkable journey does the story lose its believability!

The setting is a region of rural China dominated by plantations of red sorghum, its great tasseled heads stretching endlessly in the clear country air. This grain is made into wine and distilled liquor, which many of the inhabitants are rather too enamored with, imbuing the atmosphere of the book with a sort of inebreated intensity, a spirit of recklessness, and of passions of all kinds given all too free a reign - which adds to the work's larger than life, quasi-mythical quality.

It is set in the 1930's, a time of two wars waged at once: the Chinese Civil War, and the long brutal war against Japan. As we get to know and even care about these very human, very flawed characters, we also see their gradual rise to greatness through their confrontation with the absolute brutality and unrelenting terror of their times, in a savage and soaring vision of a great people put through the fire of a hellish era. Such is the stuff human nature is made of that we are capable of being debased and heroic, glorious and petty, fragile and indomitable all in the same instant, and it is not just every novelist that captures this, so hats off to Mo Yan, and hats off to Red Sorghum!

Brent Hightower
Copyright 2016 Brent Hightower
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