SOURCE: Beyette, Beverly, and Reed Johnson. “Author's Seminal Work Not Yet on U.S. Shelves.” Los Angeles Times (13 October 2000): A17.

In the following essay, Beyette and Johnson discuss the significance of Gao being awarded the Nobel Prize to the international recognition of Chinese literature.

No one was more thrilled on hearing that Gao Xingjian had won the Nobel Prize in literature than Dr. Mabel Lee, the Australian academic who translated his seminal novel, Soul Mountain, into English. “He is an artist, a very elegant writer,” she says.

Lee, who recently retired as a professor of Chinese literature and history at the University of Sydney, worked part time for five years on the novel. “Finding a publisher,” she says, “took two years.”

Lee's agent, Lyn Tranter of Australian Literary Management, took the novel to HarperCollins Australia, which published it in 1999 under its Flamingo imprint. This is the only English-language...