Tag Archives: Michael Day

Chinese Literature Today free for Women in Translation Month

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Chinese Literature Today, free for Women in Translation month

The current issue of Chinese Literature Today is free throughout August for Women in Translation month.

The main feature of the issue is of Newman Prize Laureate, the Hong Kong writer Xi Xi 西西, with introductions, appreciations, interviews, and new translations by Jennifer Feeley, Tammy Ho, Ho Fuk Yan 何福仁, Steve Bradbury, Wei Yang Menkus, and others.

The issue also features an appreciation of scholar Maghiel van Crevel, of Leiden University, with an interview with Jonathan Stalling and an appreciation by Nick Admussen, as well as an article by van Crevel about migrant worker poetry in China.

There is also a suite of contemporary Chinese poetry, by Wang Jiaxin 王家新 (translated by Diana Shi & George O’Connell), Che Qianzi 车前子 (translated by Yang Liping & Jeffrey Twitchell-Waas), Li Dewu 李德武 (translated by Jenny Chen & Jeffrey Twitchell-Waas), Hu Jiujiu 胡赳赳 (translated by Matt Turner & Haiying Weng), Mi Jialu 米家路 (with translations by Lucas Klein, Michael Day, and Matt Turner & Haiying Weng), Huang Chunming 黃春明 (translated by Tze-lan Sang), and Chen Li 陳黎(translated by Elaine Wong).

Click here to read for free!

AAWW Interview with Liao Yiwu

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Jiayang Fan interviews Liao Yiwu 廖亦武, author of For a Song and a Hundred Songs, for the Asian American Writers’ Workshop. Interview translated into English by Liz Carter. Here’s an excerpt:

Do you think that you, as a Chinese writer, must take a stance on China’s government? Or do you think, as someone who writes literature, you do not necessarily need to have anything to do with politics?

The difference between myself and the dictatorship is a difference of aesthetics. I am a person who writes stories. The further removed from politics and power I am, the better. Unfortunately, they feel that a person who tells stories is guilty of subversion of state power. Furthermore, I didn’t want to express any political ideas in my writing. Like I just mentioned, political views can show up in a different way. Political correctness, in a book, is like standing on the side of reason, but one of the most basic things about being an intellectual is this: you must have doubt and you must ask questions, even for your own writing, yourself, your weaknesses. You have to keep that skepticism. Many writers, while describing politics or the Chinese Communist Party, stop asking questions of and being skeptical toward themselves. I think this is far removed from that sort of thing.

…

In the beginning of the book, you wrote that in a talk with Michael Day, a Canadian friend and one of the first foreigners you became close to in China, he really wanted you to participate in the protests at Tiananmen.

Yes

And then you asked, “Do you think you love China more than me?” That line really stayed with me.

That guy is more Chinese than I am.

Click the image above for the full interview.

P T Smith on Liao Yiwu’s For a Song and a Hundred Songs

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At 3% P. T. Smith reviews For a Song and a Hundred Songs: A Poet’s Journey through a Chinese Prison by Liao Yiwu 廖亦武 and translated by Wenguang Huang. Smith doesn’t know family names from given names in Chinese, but that doesn’t keep him from writing a compelling review. Here’s a passage that focuses on the poetry:

The poem that lands [Liao Yiwu] in jail (“The Massacre,” published at the end of the book in an English translation by one of Yiwu’s most driven counterrevolutionary friends, Michael Day), comes as the memoir itself does: not from political or cultural goals, but from a consistent attempt to recognize humanity in both compassion and cruelty. He is unflinching in showing that compassion and cruelty are a package deal of being human. Before his arrest, he portrays himself as a selfish, distant husband, capable of violence against his wife and others. In prison, at times he plays himself the monkish hero, at other times a brute, other times simply casually mean; guards can be kind and reasonable, they also torture prisoners for fun; prisoners protect, care for, and even love each other, they also humiliate, beat, and rape each other (of all the seemingly never-ending stomach-churning difficult passages to read, the “menu” of torture and humiliation options that inmates serve each other is one of the most difficult, emphasized by its bare-bones telling). Early on, Yiwu tells us that he “never intended to be a hero, but in a country where insanity ruled, I had to take a stand. ‘Massacre’ was my art and my art was my protest.” Notably, this, one of his strongest statements on the poem, comes after showing not the insanity of those in power, but the cruelty and insanity the average, “brave and fearless” small-town Chinese are capable of.

Click on the image above for the full review.

Xi Chuan’s “Books”

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Looking at the tumblr posts in which Xi Chuan has been mentioned, I noticed an often-repeated, and re-tweeted, quote:

The lofty bookshelves sag
Under thousands of sleeping souls
Silence, hopeful—
Every time I open a book, a soul is awakened.

(It even shows up in Spanish, as well as German, above). It’s beautiful, and takes on a special weight in age of e-books–perhaps, ironically, why it has been spread so readily on the internet–and yet, interestingly, I could not place the quote. I knew it was not my translation (despite the fact that Goodreads thinks that it comes from my Tinfish chapbook Yours Truly & Other Poems), which means that Xi Chuan and I had not selected it for inclusion in Notes on the Mosquito, and I couln’t find it in Michael Day’s translations on the DACHS archive… so where did it come from, and how was it phrased in Xi Chuan’s Chinese?

 A bit more googling turned up the quote again as an epigraph to a chapter in Inkspell, by German  children’s author Cornelia Funke, which attributed the quote to “New Generation“–more than a hint that it might be from the Wang Ping-edited anthology, New Generation: Poems from China Today (Hanging Loose Press, 1999). And indeed, on pp. 145 – 146, in the poem “Books” 书籍, I found the source, as translated by Wang with Murat Nemet-Nejat.

And yet the quote as it’s been disseminated is not completely accurate–between lines two and three of the section another couplet is missing, which to my mind separate two moments of high lyricism and rescue the poem from overstated melodrama. At any rate, here is the poem in full as it appears in New Generation (click here for the poem in Chinese):

Books

Books should be illuminated by torches,
just as the Incas illuminated their city.

Torches shone on its
woven fabric, pears, gold and silver utensils–

objects that time uses to express itself
from opposition to unity, revealing the secret of fate,

like Hercules and Plato
attracted by the same spring bee.

“All books are the same book,”
pale Mallarmé said with confidence.

All mistakes are the same mistake,
like Ptolemy’s research into earth and stars,

his precise calculations
that only led him to absurd conclusions.

Books create a space larger than books.
The life of fire ends in its own flame.

Emperor Qin Shi haunted the library hallway
and Aldous Huxley,

robbed of the past by a fire,
clarified the rest of his life in a single lecture.

I see a rose
covered with dust; what else can death do?

The lofty bookshelves sag
under thousands of sleeping souls.

We live together,
hiding beneath the spirit’s torch.

Silence, hopeful–
every time I open a book, a soul is awakened.

A strange woman walks
in a city I’ve never seen.

A funeral is taking place
in a dusk I’ve never entered.

Othello’s anger, Hamlet’s conscience,
Truth spoken at will, muffled bells.

I read a family prophecy.
The pains I’ve seen are no more than the pains themselves.

History records only a few people’s deeds:
The rest is silence.

Mycal Ford’s Video Adaptation of a Xi Chuan Poem

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The above piece is a video shot & directed by Mycal Ford, a student at Pacific Lutheran University (the actress is Mikela Moore, and the voice-over work is by David Chen, both also of PLU). I find it a pretty fascinating take on one of Xi Chuan’s poems, “Sunset on the Square” 广场上的落日; while the poem read in Chinese in the video will not be included in Notes on the Mosquito, follow the link above to read Michael Day‘s translation, along with Ford’s discussion of the piece.