International Poetry Nights in Hong Kong

26 – 29 November
With readings at the HKICC Lee Shau Kee School of Creativity 香港兆基創意書院, with panel discussions at Chung Chi College 崇基學院, CUHK.

Featuring:

Agi Mishol, Anne Waldman, Chen Li 陳黎, Etienne Lalonde, Fernando Pinto do Amaral, Gemma Gorga, Ghassan Zaqtan, Gleb Shulpyakov, Jean Michel Espitallier, Kim Hyesoon, ko ko thett, Lau Yee-ching 飲江, Les Murray, Mohammed Bennis, Najwan Darwish, Nikola Madzirov, Noriko Mizuta, Peter Cole, Song Lin 宋琳, Wang Xiaoni 王小妮, and Yoko Tawada

2015-11-15_2350Click the images above for further information.

ALTA’s Something Crosses My Mind Blurb for the Stryk Shortlist

The ALTA blog is featuring the shortlisted titles for the Lucien Stryk Prize, and they’ve uploaded the blurb for Eleanor Goodman’s translation of Something Crosses My Mind 有什么在我心里一过 by Wang Xiaoni 王小妮.

“I rush down the stairs,/ pull open the door,/ dash about in the spring sunlight…” So begins this exquisite collection of translations by Eleanor Goodman of poems composed over the past several decades by Wang Xiaoni. In what follows we are taken out into the streets and on cross-country trains, into villages, cities and markets; we peep out through the windows of the poet’s home and sense the nostalgia invoked by a simple potato. Here is a poetry of the everyday, written in delicate yet deceptively simple language, and translated beautifully into its like in this first collection of Wang’s work to appear in English. Something Crosses My Mind offers up the refreshing voice of a poet forging her own path, neither shunning the political nor dwelling in the lyrical but gently and resolutely exploring her world in her writing.

Click the image to link to the page.

Ma Lan in Circumference

The newest issue of Circumference features poems by Ma Lan 马兰, translated by Charles Laughlin. Here’s from “Writing a Love Poem for a Tooth”为牙齿写首情诗:

2. As I am the freshly minted 2003 Poet Laureate of Bent-Neck Village, my dentist is a Yale PhD.
He insisted that I do a deep cleaning.
He stands on the Himalayas teaching Nepalese children to brush their teeth.
Brushing in the sunshine and smiles—modern industrial society takes smiling seriously
The snowy mountains flow downward.

 

2:作为新鲜出炉的2003年歪脖镇桂花诗人,我的牙医是耶鲁大学医学博士。
他坚持要我深度清洗牙齿.
他站在喜马拉牙山教尼泊尔的孩子学刷牙。
刷出阳光,刷出微笑。 现代工业社会讲究微笑。
雪山随流而下。

For the full set of poems, click here.

SCMP Reviews Something Crosses My Mind

Amy Russell at the South China Morning Post has reviewed Something Crosses My Mind 有什么在我心里一过, Eleanor Goodman’s translation of poems by Wang Xiaoni 王小妮. Here’s an excerpt:

The interaction between Wang’s characters and their environment is a crucial aspect of her work, vividly epitomised in Plowman, where “red … comes after punishment” and “after pain has been quietly survived”.

Wang’s gentle but weighty words are built from sharp observation, and deliver an honesty and rawness brilliantly captured in the translation by Harvard research associate Eleanor Goodman. As a northerner writing in the south, Wang has an outsider’s perspective, noticing details that locals might overlook.

Click on the image for the full review.

“Institution, Translation, Nation, Metaphor” at ACLA’s State of the Discipline Report

The American Comparative Literature Association asked me (me? I know!) to contribute to the decennial State of the Discipline Report, and my response–titled “Institution, Translation, Nation, Metaphor“–is now live. Here’s one of my more hyperopic paragraphs:

Institution, Translation, Nation, Metaphor

While translation is too often proposed as a “problem” rather than as a solution, it is indeed a problem to narrow conceptions such as that of the institutionalized nation. David Damrosch explains in his contribution here that what I referred to above as the common language assumed for national literature departments leads too easily to deeply engrained “Herderian assumptions”: “that the essence of a nation is carried by its national language, embodied in its highest form by the masterpieces of its national literature.” Yet many of the paradigmatic forms of national literatures were in fact developed out of translations: blank verse was invented for the translation of the Aeneid by Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (c. 1516 – 1547), who also created the English sonnet by dividing the Italian into rhymed, metered quatrains (does the conceit of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese represent the form’s residual foreignness?). The stakes I see in paying more attention to translation are not, then, limited to comparatists, but to people who think in and about and from institutions of national literature, as well.

Click the link above for the full article.

hile translation is too often proposed as a “problem” rather than as a solution, it is indeed a problem to narrow conceptions such as that of the institutionalized nation. David Damrosch explains in his contribution here that what I referred to above as the common language assumed for national literature departments leads too easily to deeply engrained “Herderian assumptions”: “that the essence of a nation is carried by its national language, embodied in its highest form by the masterpieces of its national literature.”[8] Yet many of the paradigmatic forms of national literatures were in fact developed out of translations: blank verse was invented for the translation of the Aeneid by Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (c. 1516 – 1547), who also created the English sonnet by dividing the Italian into rhymed, metered quatrains (does the conceit of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese represent the form’s residual foreignness?).[9] The stakes I see in paying more attention to translation are not, then, limited to comparatists, but to people who think in and about and from institutions of national literature, as well. – See more at: http://stateofthediscipline.acla.org/entry/institution-translation-nation-metaphor#sthash.RBKrdnSP.dpuf
While translation is too often proposed as a “problem” rather than as a solution, it is indeed a problem to narrow conceptions such as that of the institutionalized nation. David Damrosch explains in his contribution here that what I referred to above as the common language assumed for national literature departments leads too easily to deeply engrained “Herderian assumptions”: “that the essence of a nation is carried by its national language, embodied in its highest form by the masterpieces of its national literature.”[8] Yet many of the paradigmatic forms of national literatures were in fact developed out of translations: blank verse was invented for the translation of the Aeneid by Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (c. 1516 – 1547), who also created the English sonnet by dividing the Italian into rhymed, metered quatrains (does the conceit of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese represent the form’s residual foreignness?).[9] The stakes I see in paying more attention to translation are not, then, limited to comparatists, but to people who think in and about and from institutions of national literature, as well. – See more at: http://stateofthediscipline.acla.org/entry/institution-translation-nation-metaphor#sthash.RBKrdnSP.dpuf
While translation is too often proposed as a “problem” rather than as a solution, it is indeed a problem to narrow conceptions such as that of the institutionalized nation. David Damrosch explains in his contribution here that what I referred to above as the common language assumed for national literature departments leads too easily to deeply engrained “Herderian assumptions”: “that the essence of a nation is carried by its national language, embodied in its highest form by the masterpieces of its national literature.”[8] Yet many of the paradigmatic forms of national literatures were in fact developed out of translations: blank verse was invented for the translation of the Aeneid by Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (c. 1516 – 1547), who also created the English sonnet by dividing the Italian into rhymed, metered quatrains (does the conceit of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese represent the form’s residual foreignness?).[9] The stakes I see in paying more attention to translation are not, then, limited to comparatists, but to people who think in and about and from institutions of national literature, as well. – See more at: http://stateofthediscipline.acla.org/entry/institution-translation-nation-metaphor#sthash.RBKrdnSP.dpuf

Farewell to Chutzpah! Lee Yew Leong interviews Austin Woerner

Ou Ning’s 欧宁 literary journal Chutzpah! 天南 is closing, and to commemorate it, Asymptote‘s Lee Yew Leong interviews its English pullout Peregrine editor Austin Woerner. Austin sez:

What was unique about Chutzpah! was that it didn’t see itself as a journal of Chinese literature per se, but rather as part of a global literary conversation … the magazine’s Chinese editors were very plugged into international literary goings-on, and in addition to translating “hot” Western writers into Chinese—Arundhati Roy, Roberto Bolaño, Jesmyn Ward, and Junot Diaz are a few of the bigger names—we collaborated with n+1 and A Public Space, and published interviews with prominent Western intellectuals. But that’s just one facet of the magazine’s identity. A big part of Ou Ning’s mission was to promote the work of younger Chinese writers and some older ones who hadn’t gotten the attention they deserved, and to create a niche in the Sinophone literary ecosphere for more offbeat, unconventional writing. The issues were themed and carefully curated, and the style was eclectic—we published everything from traditional realism to avant-garde experimentation to scifi, fantasy, and detective fiction—and our Sinophone contributors hailed both from mainland China (including ethnic minorities like Kazakhs, Uyghurs, and Yi), and from Taiwan, Hong Kong, and throughout the Chinese diaspora, from Singapore and Malaysia to the U.S. and the U.K. … As far as the English supplement goes, the notion was to make some of these new Sinophone writers available in English so that their work might eventually find readers outside of China and the exchange might become more bidirectional.

What satisfied me most was to have had a hand in creating a community of Chinese-English literary translators, and to have given a handful of translators, particularly younger ones, a chance to hone their craft and encounter new authors. When I started as English editor, my first priority was to make sure that translating for Chutzpah! was a worthwhile experience for our translators. So even though we often operated on a breakneck schedule, I insisted on having a complete editorial process, giving translators detailed responses and line edits and building in at least a couple days for revision and back and forth. I thought of “Peregrine” as a kind of translation incubator, where Chinese-English translators could cut their teeth on new authors and forms with the benefit of editorial feedback and in a friendly environment.

For the interview in full click the image above.

Eric Hayot on China, From Middlebrow to Highbrow

At Public Books Eric Hayot writes about the presentation of China in literature available to readers of English, by way of a review of Gail Tsukiyama’s A Hundred Flowers, Christopher Buckley’s They Eat Puppies, Don’t They?, Dung Kai-cheung’s 董啟章 Atlas: The Archaeology of an Imaginary City (translated by the author with Bonnie McDougall and Anders Hansson), and Lenin’s Kisses by Yan Lianke 阎连科 (translated by Carlos Rojas). Here’s how Hayot frames his discussion:

… these four novels—two satires, one melodrama, and one modernist pseudo-documentary—might all be grasped as part of the contemporary social call to understand China, to see it clearly, to name or frame it, to place it in relation to local or global politics, or to locate it inside recent or universal world history. In the last decade economic historians like Ban Wang and Kenneth Pomeranz have demonstrated that the Chinese economy dominated the planet from about 500 to 1500 CE, creating the world’s first global economic system. The possibility of China’s return to that position of dominance—and here I ask all readers to call up a mental image of a sleeping dragon awakening—is what has folks on both sides of the Pacific trembling, in fear or glee, for the “Chinese century” to succeed the American one. “China” is thus one of the names of the global future as we imagine it.

China is also, therefore, an intellectual and social problem, for everyone. What is China to us today—assuming the “us” includes (and how could it not?) the wide variety of people who think of themselves as “Chinese”? What kind of place is it? What must we know to comprehend its nature (if it has one)? What would it mean to recognize ourselves (again, the first person plural includes the Chinese) as people who want to know what China is, and who are willing to work hard, as authors and as readers, to understand it? How will such an understanding return us, like fiction, to a new vision of the world we have known until now?

Click on any of the images to link to the essay.

More Mo Yan

The overlapping world of literary critics and cultural commentators is still arguing about Mo Yan 莫言 and his Nobel Prize. Nobel Literature Laureate from 2009, Romanian-raised Herta Müller calls Mo Yan’s win “a catastrophe” because he “celebrates censorship.” And Anna Sun of the Kenyon Review calls Mo Yan’s writing “diseased“; as for the “shimmering poetry and brutal realism” of his writing as advertised? Sun says “only the ‘brutal realism’ is Mo Yan’s; the ‘shimmering poetry’ comes from a brilliant translator’s work.”
As for the translator, Howard Goldblatt’s “Memory, Speak” is online at Chinese Literature Today. Chinese Literature Today co-founder Jonathan Stalling responds to criticism of Mo Yan with “Mo Yan and the Technicians of Culture.” And an audio interview with Mo Yan has been posted at Granta.
Finally, Tim Parks doesn’t mention Mo Yan in “A Game Without Rules,” but he does say:

For all the different styles of play in different countries and continents, football is a game whose rules can be universally applied. North Korea plays Mexico with a Swedish referee and despite one or two contested offside decisions a result is recorded and one team can pass to the next round without too much discussion. But can we feel so certain when the Swedish referee judges poems from those two countries that he will pick the right winner? Or even that there is a “right” winner? Or even a competition? The Mexican did not write his or her poems with the idea of getting a winning decision over the North Korean, or with a Swedish referee in mind. At least we hope not.

Poetry Translation Debated

If you’re a poet outside the Anglophone world, and you manage to win the Nobel Prize, two things are likely to happen. First, your ascendancy will be questioned by fiction critics in a major English-­language news publication. Second, there will be a fair amount of pushing and shoving among your translators (if you have any), as publishers attempt to capitalize on your 15 minutes of free media attention.

So begins David Orr‘s essay “Versions,” about the translations of last year’s Nobel laureate for literature Tomas Tranströmer. Maybe one day in the future Xi Chuan will win the Nobel prize, and we’ll be able to test this hypothesis (or test it with the last two Nobel Prize-winning poets from outside English, Wisława Szymborska [1996] and Octavio Paz [1990]); at any event, the article gives an interesting take on a worthwhile debate. I’ll come down on the side of Robin Fulton in this debate–not just that we share a publisher, but that I believe New Directions to have picked the right translator for the task.

[Fulton has also published a book of translations of the Norwegian poet Olav Hauge, whom Xi Chuan has also co-translated into Chinese; for a discussion of Xi Chuan’s translations, click here.]