Tag Archives: Wang Wei

NYTimes Interviews Willis Barnstone on Chinese Poetry

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The New York Times features an interview with poet and translator Willis Barnstone about his translations of Chinese poetry and his time in China. Here’s an excerpt:

I’ve always been interested in poetry, and I make no distinction of language or time. I’ve translated Sappho and, with the help of a professor at Yale, Sumerian poetry. But I was equally interested in Chinese poetry … I asked people who were the great contemporary poets, and they said none. It turns out that Mao was the only poet. The only permitted poet!
… So I translated it with the help of a colleague. I sent it in and received a letter saying, “We’re glad to have it and will get back to you.” It sat there for nine months until word came out that Nixon was going to China. In 11 pre-computer days, Harper & Row put it out in a magnificent edition. It became Book-of-the-Month, a New York Times feature review, the whole works.
Then Nixon did fly to Beijing for a summit with Mao, Zhou and Henry Kissinger. Nixon recited two of Mao’s poems in my translation.

He also talks about Wang Wei 王維 and meeting young poets (including Xi Chuan) with his son Tony at the Friendship Hotel in 1984.

Click on the image above for the full transcript.

Translation, Chineseness, & World Literature in Chinese Poetry

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May 8, 2015 (Friday), 4:00-5:30 pm
Room 730, Run Run Shaw Tower, Centennial Campus, HKU
Foreign Echoes & Discerning the Soil:
Translation, Chineseness, & World Literature in Chinese Poetry
Presenter: Lucas Klein; Commentator: Xiaofei Tian 田曉菲
What constitutes the relationship between world literature and Chineseness? How has translation shaped Chinese poetry, and can translation be understood as at the foundation not only of world literature, but of Chineseness, as well? This talk will begin to answer these questions by demonstrating how Chineseness as an aspect of the Chinese poetic tradition is itself a result of translation. Looking at Chinese poetry’s negotiation with concepts central to translation—nativization and foreignization, or the work’s engagement with the Chinese historical heritage or foreign literary texts and contexts, respectively—I argue not only that Chinese poetry can be understood as translation, but for an understanding of the role of such translation in the constitution of both Chineseness and world literature. After contextualizing recent debates in the field of Sinology and translation studies, I will examine the work of Bian Zhilin 卞之琳 (1910 – 2000) and his implicit vision for a world literature able to merge the Chinese literary heritage with Western influence. Since debates around world literature, especially in Chinese literary studies, focus on the modern era, however, I shift focus with a discussion of the Tang dynasty (618 – 907), when China had earlier become highly international, even cosmopolitan, in a detailed look at the history of regulated verse (lüshi 律詩), describing not only its origins in Sanskrit but how it maintained associations with Buddhism. Following this, I consider the work of Du Fu 杜甫 (712 – 770) to understand how the canonization of his work nativized regulated verse through its historiography. I conclude with a reconsideration of the ethics of world literature and translation in determining our understanding of the local.
Click the image above for more information.

Jonathan Stalling’s translingual synesthesia of Rimbaud’s Bateau Ivre

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I raced, stained by the moon’s electric
爱  日北四大， 四大北那大 八爱  浊舌呀 么  马乌乌那’四   弟拉也吃丝卡 
fragments, timbers crazed, black sea-
发日言言哥马么那台四， 台丝丝马八么儿四   卡日北浊四  大， 八拉言卡   四弟
horses as my escort, July’s battering me—
哈够日四么浊四    言浊四   马爱   也四卡啊日台，扎乌乌拉爱’ 浊四    八言台么儿冰   马弟—

So begins Jonathan Stalling’s version of Arthur Rimbaud’s Le Bateau ivre for the twentieth anniversary of Drunken Boat, which he explains,

In this reworking of Rimbaud’s “The Drunken Boat,” I wanted to set the poem adrift through a disordering of the senses corresponding to systems of writing (alphabets, syllabaries, or logographies) which create the conceptual foundation for imagining languages as irrevocably separate from one another. I believe that we can access forms of linguistic synesthesia that will free us to see different writing systems not as walls between but bridges into other languages … Unlike the system I used in my book Yingelishi, the script below sequences English speech sounds at the level of phonemes (individual sounds) rather than morphemes (in the case of Chinese full syllables). In short, this poem is English, just not through the same Romanized senses.

And read Anna Rosenwong‘s excellent essay, which starts with Eliot Weinberger and Octavio Paz on Wang Wei 王維, and goes on to explain the feature:

The project’s irreverence—anthropophagism— is made possible by this journal’s sense of “Le bateau ivre,” of Rimbaud, of French symbolist poetry, even of the French language, as too well-respected, too established to tarnish or appropriate in a problematic way. Working with classic texts, one feels she is at liberty to be a punk. Framing is likewise an enabler: in an envelope-pushing journal and section such as this, introduced by this hedging editorial note, the boats are clearly marked as a kind of risky play, their transgression a testament to the aura of the original.

Follow the links for the sites in question.

Omniglot Seminar: Cosmologies of the Classical with Chloe Garcia Roberts & David Hinton

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headshotDavid Hinton, author of Mountain Home and translator of Chinese poets including Wang Wei 王維, Hsieh Ling-Yün 謝靈運, and Bei Dao 北島, joins Chloe Garcia Roberts, translator of Derangements of My Contemporariesheadshot by Li Shangyin 李商隱. They will discuss their individual approaches to classical poetries and cosmologies, while exploring the influence of classical Chinese poetry on American modernism.

When: Wednesday, September 24, 6:00 p.m.
Where: Woodberry Poetry Room, Lamont Library, Room 330.
Harvard University, Cambridge MA

Chinese Literature Dissertation Reviews: Foreign Echoes & Discerning the Soil

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Dual Translation, World Literature, Chinese Poetry  Dissertation Reviews has posted Brian Skerratt‘s review of my dissertation, Foreign Echoes and Discerning the Soil: Dual Translation, Historiography, and World Literature in Chinese Poetry. Here’s how it begins:

Lucas Klein’s dissertation, Foreign Echoes and Discerning the Soil: Dual Translation, Historiography, and World Literature in Chinese Poetry, is notable both for its ambition and its erudition. In seeking to answer how the “Chineseness” of Chinese poetry, its quality of being or seeming natively Chinese, is produced in and through acts of translation, Klein not only tackles Modernist-inspired poetry from the twentieth century, where “Chineseness” is a salient issue, but also the monolith of the Chinese literary tradition itself, including such ultra-canonical figures as Wang Wei 王維 (692-761) and Du Fu 杜甫 (712-770). In practical terms, this impressive breadth of scope results in a dissertation in two parts: the first featuring studies of modern poet Bian Zhilin 卞之琳 (1910-2000) and contemporary poet Yang Lian 楊煉 (b. 1955), and the second reaching back to Tang Dynasty masters Wang Wei, Du Fu, and Li Shangyin 李商隱 (813-858). By avoiding the urge to arrange his chapters chronologically ― or, at least, by putting the modern before the pre-modern ― Klein refuses to allow “traditional China” or its poetic stand-in, Tang regulated verse, their place as the seat of pure Chineseness, untarnished by contact with the modern West; in fact, one of his goals is to situate the Tang Dynasty back into a global network of cultural interaction and exchange. The arrangement of chapters further serves to illustrate Klein’s methodology, which is to allow the insights of deconstruction, Marxist thought, translation studies, and contemporary avant-garde poetics to illuminate the distant past ― and vice-versa. Klein’s dissertation serves the larger goal of deconstructing the binaries tradition/modernity, native/foreign, textual analysis/high theory, and, most centrally, original/translation.

Miroslav Kirin’s Xi Chuan translations on Croatian Radio 3

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Last week Miroslav Kirin read his Croatian translations of Xi Chuan–done from my English versions–on Croatian Radio 3. Click here to listen to the show. (I don’t know Croatian, but I can make out a few names and terms–my name, Xi Chuan, New Directions, Du Fu 杜甫, Wang Wei 王維, and oxymoron!)