Category Archives: Publications

Yu Xuanji in Poetry Magazine

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https://media.poetryfoundation.org/uploads/media/cache/default/0001/25/ed97b7e3cd93ec1eee6fed0dca83d85a3b1a63f4.jpg/dc865dd92ad6d8e96accefa9655559aa

After posting about my Yu Xuanji translations of Yu Xuanji 魚玄機 (840–868) in the new issue of Ancient Exchanges, I realized that I had neglected to announce my Yu Xuanji translation in the “Make it Old” issue of Poetry Magazine, last May (2022)!

Chewing ice and eating bark, wishes unfulfilled,
Jin River and Hu Pass in my dreams,
I want to crack this Qin mirror in half. Sorrow is a fallen magpie.
Let Shun play his zither. I grieve at the flight of geese …

飲冰食檗志無功
晉水壺關在夢中
秦鏡欲分愁墮鵲
舜琴將弄怨飛鴻

And my bio of Yu, as well, here.

Click on the image for the poem in full.

Three Poems by Yu Xuanji in Ancient Exchanges

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The new issue of Ancient Exchanges, “Threads,” is now live, and with it three translations of mine of poetry by Yu Xuanji 魚玄機 (840–868).

The shape of water conforms to its container: we know it is indeterminate.
Clouds drift with no intent. Will they ever come back?
Despondent spring winds over the Chu river tonight,
one mandarin duck flies away from its flock.

水柔逐器知難定
雲出無心肯再歸
惆悵春風楚江暮
鴛鴦一隻失群飛

And a shot across the bow in my “Translator’s Note,” too:

In my eyes, contemporary English translations of classical Chinese poetry tend to fall between two extremes—with scholarly translators prizing philological accuracy and sometimes even taking a perverse pride in not letting their writing be informed by conventions of contemporary Anglophone poetry, while more creative attempts at experimentation often fall short of that goal … Scholarly and literary audiences do not have to be at odds: both are looking for precision of image together with compelling, and compellingly fresh, phrasing.

Follow the links to read the pieces.

Liu Waitong poems on HK Protesting

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Klein’s translations of four poems by Liu Waitong on Hong Kong Protesting

The new site Hong Kong Protesting has published four poems by Liu Waitong 廖偉棠 in my translation. The whole site–an offshoot of Tammy Ho Lai-ming’s literary journal Cha–is very much worth digging into, but here are the poem translations as one way in.

From “Two Million and One” 二百萬零一:

After white snow is black snow
after two million is two million and one.
The numbers that come after will always add onto him
tattoos coming after will always seep blood
you cannot remove his raincoat.

After yellow is a golden torrent
to replace the mud of shopping malls and the central government complex.
You cannot pluck his star rays
one after two million is always just one
pens pierce the armor of the arrogant.

白雪之後是黑雪
二百萬之後是二百萬零一。
以後的數字永遠要加上他一個
以後的刺青永遠滲血
脫不去他的雨衣。

黃色之後是金色洪流
取代商場與政總的泥污。
拔不掉他的星芒
一之後的二百萬永遠是一
筆尖穿刺傲慢者的裝甲。

Click on the link above to read all four poems in full.

Four Duo Duo Poems in new Paris Review

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The Paris Review
Four poems by Duo Duo 多多 in the Paris Review

Paris Review No. 233, Summer 2020 is now available, featuring four poems by Duo Duo 多多 in my translation: “If No Echo, No Monologue” 没有应和就没有独白, “Where Phrase Blooms” 在词语的开花之地, “See the Smoke in the Bottle, the Sail in the Bottle” 看瓶子里的烟， 瓶子里的帆, and “No Home in Words” 词内无家.

Follow the links to read excerpts of them them online, or the link above to order the issue.

Announcing publication of Chinese Poetry and Translation: Rights and Wrongs

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Chinese Poetry and Translation: Rights and Wrongs

We are pleased to announce publication of Chinese Poetry and Translation: Rights and Wrongs (Amsterdam University Press, 2019).

Open access download here. Order print copies here.

CHINESE POETRY AND TRANSLATION: RIGHTS AND WRONGS
    edited by Maghiel van Crevel and Lucas Klein

Introduction: The Weird Third Thing
    Maghiel van Crevel and Lucas Klein

Part One: The Translator’s Take

(1) Sitting with Discomfort: A Queer-Feminist Approach to Translating Yu Xiuhua
     Jenn Marie Nunes

(2) Working with Words: Poetry, Translation, and Labor
     Eleanor Goodman

(3) Translating Great Distances: The Case of the Shijing
     Joseph R. Allen

(4) Purpose and Form: On the Translation of Classical Chinese Poetry
     Wilt L. Idema

Part Two: Theoretics

(5) Embodiment in the Translation of Chinese Poetry
     Nick Admussen

(6) Translating Theory: Bei Dao, Pasternak, and Russian Formalism
    Jacob Edmond

(7) Narrativity in Lyric Translation: English Translations of Chinese Ci Poetry
    Zhou Min

(8) Sublimating Sorrow: How to Embrace Contradiction in Translating the “Li Sao”
    Nicholas Morrow Williams

(9) Mediation Is Our Authenticity: Dagong Poetry and the Shijing in Translation
    Lucas Klein

Part Three: Impact

(10) Ecofeminism avant la lettre: Chen Jingrong and Baudelaire
    Liansu Meng

(11) Ronald Mar and the Trope of Life: The Translation of Western Modernist Poetry in Hong Kong
    Chris Song

(12) Ya Xian’s Lyrical Montage: Modernist Poetry in Taiwan through the Lens of Translation
    Tara Coleman

(13) Celan’s “Deathfugue” in Chinese: A Polemic about Translation and Everything Else
    Joanna Krenz

(14) Trauma in Translation: Liao Yiwu’s “Massacre” in English and German
    Rui Kunze

(15) A Noble Art, and a Tricky Business: Translation Anthologies of Chinese Poetry
    Maghiel van Crevel

October Dedications by Mang Ke

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Announcing October Dedications, the selected poems of Mang Ke 芒克, edited and translated by Lucas Klein, with further translations by Huang Yibing and Jonathan Stalling—part of the Jintian series jointly published by Zephyr and The Chinese University Press.

Mang Ke (b. 1950, penname of Jiang Shiwei 姜世伟) began writing poetry as a sent-down youth in Baiyangdian, rural Hebei province, during the Cultural Revolution. As co-founder of the PRC’s first unofficial literary journal Jintian (Today) in 1978, he is one of the progenitors of what would later be called Obscure or “Misty” Poetry, with spare, impressionistic poems that were among the first to break free of the imposed discourse of Maoism towards an image-based literary style that left space for both expression and interpretation. He currently makes his living as an abstract painter and lives in Songzhuang, an artists’ colony on the outskirts of Beijing.

“Mang Ke’s poems are radical in their immediacy, exploring the vexed space between public world and private experience, honing in on the gap between with sometimes uncanny directness … I don’t think I have ever read anything quite like it.”
—Rae Armantrout

“Mang Ke is a genius amongst contemporary Chinese poets. In a dark age, his early lyric poems were unparalleled–translucent, profound, and enchanting.”
—Bei Dao

For further information, including how to order, see the pages at Chinese University Press or Zephyr.

Klein’s Ouyang Jianghe in Asymptote

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The new issue of Asymptote is now live, featuring sections of my translation of “Taj Mahal Tears” 泰姬陵之泪 by Ouyang Jianghe 欧阳江河.

Tears about to fly. Do they have eagle wings
or take a Boeing 767, taking off on
an economic miracle? Three thousand km of old tears, from Beijing
to New Delhi skies
just like that. After time flies, can the double exposed
red and white of our minds’ oriental archaeologies
match the supersonic, withstand
the miracle’s
sudden turbulence? Can we borrow eagle eyes to watch the sunset
dissolve inside a jellyfish like mica?

泪水就要飞起来。是给它鹰的翅膀呢，
还是让它搭乘波音767，和经济奇迹
一道起飞？三千公里旧泪，就这么从北京
             登上了
新德里的天空。时间起飞之后，我们头脑里
红白两个东方的考古学重影，
能否跟得上超音速，能否经受得起
             神迹的
突然抖动？我们能否借鹰的目力，看着落日
以云母的样子溶解在一朵水母里？

This publication also includes my translator’s note:

The poem is, of course, about the tears that fill relationships between men and women, but it is also about the relationship between god or gods and man as well as the relationship between India and China—not to mention both countries’ relationships to their histories. Parts of the poem take place in, and take advantage of, the vocabulary of fungibility and modernity; other parts excavate an archaeology of historical lexicons, including Buddhist terminology and a broad scope of literary and cultural allusion. As a translator, I had in mind the English of a handful of poets known as practitioners of ethnopoetics, investigating the deep recesses of the self at the same time as the wide resources of the planet. As Ouyang writes, “the mirror image glances back.”

Click on the image for the full excerpt

Moore & Moore’s Chinese Literature Podcast on forthcoming Mang Ke

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Chinese Literature PodcastI posted this some days ago, but in case you’d rather not listen to it on iTunes…

Rob and Lee Moore (no relation) of the Chinese Literature Podcast talked to me about my forthcoming translation of October Dedications by Mang Ke 芒克 (Zephyr).

They write:

Back in action after a brief hiatus, Lee and Rob interview translator and professor Lucas Klein, whose most recent work, October Dedications, is a book of translations of the poet Mang Ke. Prof. Klein is best-known for his work with Xi Chuan, but gives a nice guided tour of historical trends in poetry translation, the differences between classical and modern poetry, and why exactly it’s nice to know the person you’re translating.

Click the image to link to the podcast page.