Category Archives: Anthologies

‘Lights Have Entered Us’: Jeffrey Yang on Time of Grief

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New Directions editor Jeffrey Yang has a piece at The Atlantic about George Oppen & Time of Grief: Mourning Poems, an assemblage of international poetry he recently edited. Here’s how Atlantic writer Joe Fassler describes the book:

The new poetry anthology Time of Grief: Mourning Poems is an unusual, inventive take on a familiar subject: It explores grief in its various shades and incarnations. Structured like a calendar over a span of 49 days—a traditional mourning period in some Buddhist and Judaic traditions—the book includes a diverse sequence of poems written in more than 20 countries. With authors ranging from an 11th-century Chinese poet to Tomas Tranströmer, the Swedish winner of the 2011 Nobel Prize for Literature, Time of Grief presents human bereavement in unprecedented scale and scope.

Xi Chuan’s poem “Twilight” 暮色 is included in the anthology. Click here or on the image above to read the piece.

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DJS Translation Award for 2012

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from Poetry East West 诗东西:

DJS Translation Award for 2012

News Release December 26, 2012

DJS Translation Award for 2012 will be given to the following individuals whose new translations of Chinese poetry have formed a significant part of “New Cathay: Contemporary Chinese Poetry 1990-2012” (to be published by Tupelo Press in 2013):

Nick Admussen (for translation of Ya Shi)

Christopher Lupke (for translation of Xiao Kaiyu)

Jonathan Stalling (for translation of Zheng Xiaoqiong)

Katie Farris (for co-translation of Duo Duo, Liao Yiwu, Zhang Shuguang, Feng Yan, and Hu Xudong)

Afaa Weaver (for co-translation of Sun Wenbo and Jiang Hao)

Tony Barnstone (for co-translation of Jiang Tao, Hu Xudong and Li Shumin)

Kerry Shawn Keys (for co-translation of Song Lin)

Eleanor Goodman (for co-translation of Bai Hua)

Jennifer Kronovet (for co-translation of Wang Xiaoni and Lan Lan)

Elizabeth Reitzell (for co-translation of Sun Wenbo)

Cody Reese (for co-translation of Hu Xudong)

The above translators will share the DJS Translation Award for 2012.

 

The 2011 DJS Translation Award recipient was Neil Aitken for his co-translations of poetry by Chinese poets Lü De’an, Sun Wenbo, Jiang Tao, Qin Xiaoyu, Yang Xiaobin, Zhang Zhihao, Liu Jiemin, Yu Xiang, Lü Yue, and Jiang Li.

DJS Translation Award was established by DJS Art Foundation, a private entity, to promote literary exchange between China and other countries and to encourage quality translation of poetry. DJS has supported several projects such as the multi-lingual journal Poetry East West. For more information, please visit the DJS pages on the website of Poetry East West: http://poetryeastwest.com/djs-translation-award/

 

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Renditions Special Issue: Chinese Science Fiction: Late Qing and the Contemporary

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The next issue of Renditions, no. 77/78 (Spring and Autumn of 2012), a special issue on late Qing and contemporary science fiction, is now available for order, guest edited by Mingwei Song 宋明煒. He writes:

As a popular genre, science fiction has energized modern Chinese literature by evoking an array of sensations ranging from the grotesque to the sublime, from the utopian to the apocalyptic, and from the human to the post-human. It mingles nationalism with fantasy, sharpens social criticism with an acute awareness of China’s potential for further reform as well as its limitations, and envelops political consciousness in scientific discourses on the power of technology or the technology of power. Science fiction today both echoes and complicates the late Qing writers’ vision of China’s future and the transformation of human society.

Juxtaposing writings from the first two decades of successive centuries has proven to be a meaningful project. Both epochs are characterized by heightened aspiration for change as well as by deep anxieties about China’s future. A comparative reading of the stories from the late Qing and the contemporary sheds light on their common themes. Yet recapitulations of the earlier age’s literary motifs also lead to self-reflexive variations that point to the latter period’s uniqueness.

The history of Chinese science fiction has never been continuous. Only three short booms can be identified: the last decade of the Qing dynasty (1902-1911); the first four years of the New Era (1978-1982); and the beginning of the twenty-first century. These booms alternated with long dormant periods. This Renditions special issue showcases representative works of Chinese science fiction from its first and latest booms, focusing on the late Qing and the contemporary. An earlier anthology Science Fiction from China (New York: Praeger, 1989), edited by Wu Dingbo and Patrick D. Murphy, introduced English readers to the second generation of Chinese science fiction writers.

The works selected have all been translated into English for the first time. This special issue is also the first English-language collection of Chinese science fiction since the publication of Wu and Murphy’s anthology in 1989. The thirteen pieces included are divided into two groups: the first four are stories and novel excerpts from the first decade of Chinese science fiction’s development; the other nine pieces are recent works by contemporary authors. I will welcome any comments and criticism.

Here’s the Table of Contents:

Preface: Mingwei Song

Part One: The Early Twentieth Century

Xu Nianci, “New Tales of Mr. Braggadocio” (Translated by Nathaniel Isaacson) 徐念慈: 新法螺先生譚

Wu Jianren, New Story of the Stone: excerpts (Translated by Sterling Swallow) 吳趼人:新石頭記（節選）

Louise Strong, “The Art of Creating Humanity” (Translated by Suozi [Lu Xun]; Re-translated by Carlos Rojas) 索子[魯迅]: 造人朮

Xu Zhuodai, “The Secret Room” (Translated by Christopher Rea) 徐卓呆: 秘密室

Part Two: The Early Twenty First Century

Liu Cixin, “The Poetry Cloud” (Translated by Chi-yin Ip and Cheuk Wong) 劉慈欣: 詩雲

Liu Cixin, “The Village Schoolteacher” (Translated by Christopher Elford and Jiang Chenxin) 劉慈欣: 鄉村教師

Han Song, “The Passengers and the Creator” (Translated by Nathaniel Isaacson) 韓松: 乘客與創造者

Wang Jinkang, “The Reincarnated Giant” (Translated by Carlos Rojas) 王晉康:轉生的巨人

La La, “The Radio Waves That Never Die” (Translated by Petula Parris-Huang) 拉拉: 永不消逝的電波

Zhao Haihong, “1923-a Fantasy” (Translated by Nicky Narman and Pang Zhaoxia) 趙海虹: 一九二三年科幻故事

Chi Hui, “The Rainforest” (Translated by Jie Li) 遲卉: 雨林

Fei Dao, “The Demon’s Head” (Translated by David Hull) 飛氘: 魔鬼的頭顱

Xia Jia, “The Demon-Enslaving Flask” (Translated by Linda Rui Feng) 夏笳: 関妖精的瓶子

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300 Modern & Contemporary Chinese Poems

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Collections of the “three hundred best poems” have been popular in China ever since the Three Hundred Tang Poems 唐詩三百首, compiled in 1763 by Sun Zhu 孫洙 (a/k/a Hengtang Tuishi 衡塘退士, “the Retiree from Hengtang”), and that anthology was probably riffing off the Shijing 詩經 (The Classic of Poetry), whose “three hundred poems” were supposed to have been culled by Confucius.

Now, as reported on Martin Winter’s blog some time ago, poet Zhao Siyun 赵思运 has put together his list of the best poems of the twentieth century (or, from 1917 – 2011), the Three Hundred Chinese New Poems 中国新诗 300 首. In its breadth it’s not a bad representation of the most significant modern and contemporary Chinese poets; it’s mainland-heavy, at the expense of Hongkong, Macau, and Taiwanese poets, but that’s no surprise. Still, with 236 poets by my count, it’s easy to be broadly representative, but of course it’s limited to only a few poems by each poet, leaving a lot to be desired by way of depth (as a point of comparison, I count 77 in the Three Hundred Tang Poems, with some poets having as many as thirty pieces). Here’s the entry, for instance, for Xi Chuan, who at three poems is about as broadly represented as it gets, though only with early poems:

  • 西川 （1963— ）/ 在哈尔盖仰望星空 / 停电 / 虚构的家谱

For a sense of whether these poems are representative of Xi Chuan’s work, know that he and I decided to include only one, “Power Outage,” in Notes on the Mosquito.

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Mark Burnhope Reviews Jade Ladder

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At Magma Poetry Mark Burnhope has posted his review of Jade Ladder, the recent anthology of contemporary Chinese poetry published in the UK. Burnhope is new to Chinese poetry, and he doesn’t know whether family names come first or last in Chinese, but he raises some nice questions about translation in his enthusiastic take on Chinese poetry today. Here’s how it begins:

In his essay concluding Jade Ladder, Brian Holton discusses the trials, tribulations, negotiations and compromises involved in translating Chinese poetry into English. Some of Yang Lian and Qin Xiaoyu’s first choices were shelved, he writes, “because the joke just wasn’t funny in English”, poems “were speaking only to Chinese readers’, or they ultimately “fell flat in translation”. The translators generally avoided footnotes unless they appeared in original poems, or unless they would “transform a poem that otherwise would be closed to the reader into something more accessible and enjoyable”.

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Contemporary Poetry from China: A Reading and Discussion with Xi Chuan and Zhou Zan

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Poetry reading and discussion with Xi Chuan and Zhou Zan 周瓒 at the Library of Congress last October in promotion of Push Open the Window. Xi Chuan read his poems in Chinese and English in my translation; Zhou Zan read her poems in Chinese, with English translations read by Carolyn Forché. A discussion follows.

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Eliot Weinberger’s “What Makes a Poet a Tick?”

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New Eliot Weinberger essay - What Makes a Poet a Tick?from the New Directions blog:

This year, essayist and literary critic Eliot Weinberger published Wildlife––a collection of his essays on animals––with Australian publisher Giramondo. While many of these pieces are republished from our editions, there are four previously unpublished works that make their debut in Wildlife. One of these, “What Makes a Poet a Tick?” (written in response to the question “What Makes a Poet Tick?” Mr. Weinberger has graciously allowed us to reproduce here.

“What makes a poet [a] tick?” I think someday soon Weinberger and Xi Chuan should co-edit a New Directions anthology of writers on insects.

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Sky Lanterns: Poetry from China, Formosa, and Beyond

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Sky Lanterns: Poetry from China, Formosa, and BeyondThe new issue of Mānoa is available, edited by Frank Stewart with Fiona Sze-Lorrain:

Sky Lanterns brings together innovative work by authors—primarily poets—in mainland China, Taiwan, the United States, and beyond who are engaged in truth-seeking, resistance, and renewal. Appearing in new translations, many of the works are published alongside the original Chinese text. A number of the poets are women, whose work is relatively unknown to English-language readers. Contributors include Amang, Bai Hua, Bei Dao, Chen Yuhong, Duo Yu, Hai Zi, Lan Lan, Karen An-hwei Lee, Li Shangyin, Ling Yu, Pang Pei, Sun Lei, Arthur Sze, Fiona Sze-Lorrain, Wei An, Woeser, Yang Lian, Yang Zi, Yi Lu, Barbara Yien, Yinni, Yu Xiang, and Zhang Zao.
Sky Lanterns also features images from the Simple Song series by photographer Luo Dan. Traveling with a portable darkroom in remote, mountainous regions of southern China’s Yunnan Province, Luo Dan uses the laborious nineteenth-century, wet plate collodion process of exposure and development. In exquisite detail, he captures a rural life that has remained intact for centuries.

Click the image for ordering information.

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Sean O’Brien reviews Jade Ladder

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The Guardian has published Sean O’Brien’s review of Jade Ladder: Contemporary Chinese Poetry, edited by Yang Lian 杨炼, W N Herbert, Brian Holton, and Qin Xiaoyu 秦晓宇. It’s a fine and enthusiastic take written by an obviously engaged reader conversant with the current goings-on of poetry worldwide. Here’s how it begins:

The diversity and richness of contemporary Chinese poetry defy description. As Zang Di understatedly puts it in “Cosmo-Sceneriology”, “We seem / to have come to a new place”, but the place itself is multiple. In “100 Years of Solitude for the New Poetry”, the same poet suggests that poetry “has dismissed language” and finds that “yes, for an instant, it was almost not written by you”. To the reader coming newly to the subject, or with the competing translatorial templates of Ezra Pound and Arthur Waley in mind, these are exciting declarations, even as, or maybe because, they resist confident analysis.

O’Brien also singles out Xi Chuan for mention, with an interesting observation that dovetails with some of what he writes about Chinese and Eastern European literature in the afterword to Notes on the Mosquito, “The Tradition This Instant” 传统在此时此刻:

A western reader is likely to be reminded here of Mandelstam’s ill-fated “Stalin Epigram“. Although Mao is seen posthumously by a poet born in 1960, subsequent Chinese administrations have proved just as interested in the ideological demeanour of the arts as were Kruschev and his successors in Russia. Xi Chuan’s “Commandments” could be a poem from the eastern bloc of the 1950s (in this translation it recalls Zbigniew Herbert): “you shall not covet / so it’s not a bad idea to crown yourself king in a dark room / and why not cut a skeleton key and carry it in your hand? / walk, stop, turn: in that capital city under the light of your sun / you will disdain to open each rusted lock”.

The version of “Commandments” 戒律 quoted here is Holton’s from Jade Ladder. My version is included in Notes on the Mosquito.

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