Review of Cha’s “China Issue”

Rare are reviews of literary journals, but over at Lantern Review‘s “Panax Ginseng” Henry W. Leung has a write-up of Cha‘s “China issue”–where five of my translations from Xi Chuan’s “Thirty Historical Reflections” 鉴史三十章 appeared–in which he looks at poetic representations of China in English and in Chinese as translated into English. I don’t know if he didn’t read the Xi Chuan or just has nothing to say about his work, but I was impressed by the opening:

The China Issue” of Cha: An Asian Literary Journal presents itself with an ambiguous title. It is the journal’s literary issue on China, but it might just as well be ‘the issue of China,’ i.e. the problem of it, a claim to authority and singularity; or simply ‘the issue of representing China,’ the question of it, the difficulty. ‘China’ as a thematic boundary is naturally complex for a journal based in Hong Kong—but virtually, over the internet—and presented in English. Most of this issue’s poems are translations from the Chinese, with the originals preserved; of these, few refer explicitly to or narrow themselves by locality… Some of the poems written in English, however, announce their ‘Chineseness’ with archetypal localities, such as romanticized pastorals of farmland China, or romance recalled as manufacture…