M rquez relinquishes China '100 years''ban'
- Source: Global Times
- [22:32 April 21 2011]
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By Zhang Lei
The first authorized Chinese edition of the classic magic-realism novel 100 years of Solitude by Gabriel Garc a M rquez will be published this summer. The work, written in 1967, won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982.
Thinkingdom House, publisher of 1Q84, won the copyright bidding war early last year; paying over a million dollars for the rights.
Unauthorized editions were widely available in markets as early as the 1980s, which infuriated the author, who vowed that even 150 years after his death, his works would not be authorized in China, when he visited in 1990.
Over 100 publishers have tried to contact M rquez via the Embassy of the Republic of Colombia and the Mexican Embassy over the past 20 years to obtain the copyright, but to no avail.
Editor-in-Chief Chen Mingjun sent a heartfelt letter to M rquez in 2008, saying, "We pay our respects to you across the Pacific Ocean, making every effort, shouting 'great master!' just like you did to your idol Ernest Hemingway across the streets in Paris we believe that you'd also wave your hand and shout back 'Hello friend!' just like Hemingway did."
Their hard work paid off. They finally got an official response from Balcells and began to discuss the details the same year.
Prudent and experienced, Balcells sent a research team in 2008 to Beijing, Shanghai and Nanjing for two months to conduct a thorough investigation and assessment of the Chinese book market and publishers, especially those involved in foreign literature.
Meanwhile, pirated editions will be cracked down upon by Thinkingdom House, to give Marquez and his publishers a satisfactory result and perhaps change his impression of China's poor copyright conditions.
Since China joined the "Universal Copyright Convention" in 1992, the publishing industry has gradually increased awareness of copyright; a recent piracy spat between Baidu and blogger Han Han, representing over 40 authors whose work had been uploaded to the site without permission, ending in an apparent victory for the writers.
