Tag Archives: George Szirtes
International Poetry Nights in Hong Kong 2017: 22-26 November
Ancient Enmity–International Poetry Nights in Hong Kong
Ancient Enmity 古老的敵意, the multilingual collection of volumes for the 2017 International Poetry Nights in Hong Kong, is now available from Chinese University Press.Edited by Bei Dao 北島, Chris Song 宋子江, and Lucas Klein, Ancient Enmity comprises an anthology plus twenty-four individual booklets:
Maram Al-Masri, from Barefoot Souls; Gabeba Baderoon, Poetry For Beginners
Javier Bello, I Decided to Dissolve
Charles Bernstein, Pinky’s Rule
John Burnside, An Essay on Mourning
Chan Chi Tak 陳滅, Hong Kong Lights 香港韶光
Chen Dongdong 陳東東, The Emperor of Poetry Translated from Conquered Nations 譯自亡國的詩歌皇帝
Chen Xianfa 陳先發 The Question of Raising Cranes 養鶴問題
Lorna Crozier, Angel of Tigers
Julia Fiedorczuk, Orion’s Shoulder
Jérôme Game, Hong Kong is Hong Kong
Hirata Toshiko 平田俊子, The Man Without Arms
Major Jackson, Heritage
Nuno Júdice, Variation on Roses
Agnes S.L. Lam 林舜玲, Poppies by the Motorway 公路旁的紅罌粟
Semezdin Mehmedinović, Functions of the Heart
Moon Chung-Hee, A Letter from the Airport
George Szirtes, Like a Black Bird
Mark Tredinnick, Egret in a Ploughed Field
Anja Utler, Counter Position
Dmitry Vedenyapin, The Faith of a Mushroom
Haris Vlavianos, Pascal’s Will
Cui Jian 崔健, Never Turning Back 死不回頭
Chow Yiu Fai 周耀輝, Androgyny 雌雄同體.
To order click the image above.
For more information on International Poetry Nights in Hong Kong, including the schedule of readings and events, go to http://www.ipnhk.com/
Feeley’s Xi Xi on National Translation Award Longlist
The National Translation Award Longlists for Poetry and Prose have been released–and Chinese poetry is represented in the form of Jennifer Feeley’s translation of Not Written Words 不是文字, by Hong Kong writer Xi Xi 西西. (For some reason the publisher is listed as New Mexico State University, but actually the book is available from Zephyr / mccmcreations).
Carlos Rojas is also longlisted for his translation of The Explosion Chronicles 炸裂志, by Yan Lianke 阎连科. Other notable nominees are Jeffrey Angles, Ottilie Mulzet, Daniel Borzutsky, George Szirtes, and Esther Allen.
Click the image for the full list.
NYTimes on The Storm of Reality
The New York Times has a write-up on the Arts Beijing International Chinese Poetry Prize , headed by Yang Lian 杨炼, and its 50,000 entries for best poem. (In addition to Yang, Arts Beijing includes in its sphere Chinese poets such as Mang Ke 芒克, as well as W. N. Herbert, Adonis, George Szirtes, Breyten Breytenbach, Joachim Sartorius, Rebecca Horn, and Bas Kwakman) The article offers decent coverage of the breadth, if not the depth, of contemporary Chinese poetry. One point by Yang seems not only well-phrased but insightful:
“We used to say poetry was ‘hot’ because society was so ‘cold,’ ” meaning spare and poor, he said. Poets were speaking out against a highly repressive regime. “Today, they say, poetry is ‘cold’ because society is ‘hot.’ It’s economically developed. What I think they are expressing in poetry today has not been the subject of Chinese poetry before.”
Click on the image above for the article in full.
George Szirtes’s Attempt to Categorise Translated Poetry
“Poetry is very hard to translate because no poem means just one thing,” writes George Szirtes, an English poet and translator from the Hungarian.
Or rather, if two of you read a poem you might agree on a lot, but you’d take away some impressions that were different. That might be because your experiences were different – one reader might like spiders and enjoy being reminded of them because of the delicacy of their webs in the sunlight, while another might hate them and prefer not to think of their scuttling on the floor. So one reader thinks about webs, the other about scuttling.
I usually focus on Chinese poetry, of any time period, on this blog, though from time to time that will involve raising questions of translation. Less often will I draw attention to writing on translation per se, regardless of the language it comes from. But this is one of those times.
Part of why I’m linking to George Szirtes’s “attempt to categorise translated poetry” is that Szirtes is translator of László Krasznahorkai, who won the Best Translated Book Award two years in a row (including for Szirtes’s translation of Satantango last year), and I’ve become very curious about Krasznahorkai’s life and works (click here for a 3% podcast about László’s relationship with New Directions). But mostly it’s because Szirtes’s categories–“Translations that look and sound much like their originals,” “Translations that are vigorously reinvented and re-imagined so we see them anew,” “Translations that introduce us to poems from less known languages,” etc.–are so accurate and worth repeating.
And in case you absolutely insist that what I post here have something to do with China, know that Krasznahorkai’s wife is evidently a sinologist, and the time he’s spent in Asia has been very important to his developing work (particularly Seiobo There Below, translate by Ottilie Mulzet, as well as much of his yet untranslated oeuvre). Also, Szirtes mentions Du Fu 杜甫 in “Brian Holton’s translation from Classical Chinese into Scots, re-titled ‘Spring Sun on the Watterside Clachan,’” in his mention of “poems that are not translated into standard English.”