Category Archives: Publications

Lucas Klein on Zhai Yongming’s Changing Room

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My review of the first book-length collection to appear in English of contemporary Chinese poet Zhai Yongming 翟永明, Changing Room (Zephyr Press) translated by Andrea Lingenfelter, is now online at Rain Taxi.

Here’s how I begin the review:

Some poets write about the problems of language and indeterminacy; some write about society and culture; some write about gender. Zhai Yongming, China’s pre-eminent contemporary woman poet whose work has finally been published in book form in English, is unique in her ability to combine all three dimensions—the interpretive function, social change, and being a woman—into one relentlessly strong poetic expression.

Back Cover Blurbs

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As one who has had the good fortune to see and hear Xi Chuan for some years, publication of Notes on the Mosquito affords the long-anticipated pleasure of reading him. And what a pleasure: this book, with translator Lucas Klein’s introduction, Xi Chuan’s own Afterword, and its bilingual presentation of the poems, is a literary highlight of the year. The sensibility in these poems is unlike anything else in my reading–unique in its knowing, range, humor, smartness–and yet with a humility, an awareness of things larger and older. It will be fun putting this in other readers’ hands.

–Rick Simonson, Elliott Bay Book Company

CBC Radio Interview with Xi Chuan

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An excellent interview with Xi Chuan done a couple years ago by Eleanor Wachtel of the Canadian Broadcasting Company has just been released online, in advance of tomorrow’s release of Notes on the Mosquito.

Click the icon above to listen to Xi Chuan explain the complexities of China today, his thoughts on China’s future–and the future of its past–and his country’s propensity, as he sees it, for oxymoron. His interview starts at the 30:55-minute mark.

Poem Flow: The Other Side of the River

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I still want to give updates on my trips to New Zealand and India (including my brief visit in Delhi with Xi Chuan’s friend and mine, poet Vivek Narayanan), but first, there’s this amazing bit of poetic application, from Poem Flow and the American Academy of Poets, my translation of Xi Chuan’s “The Other Side of the River” 在河的那一边 (click the image to see the poem in action):

Issue 16 of Cha

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The new issue of Cha is now online. Take a look for poetry by Ricky Garni (“the citizen is in a box, / his body parts fall / from his body. / he watches the / others who are free.”), nonfiction by Chelsea Bainbridge-Donner (“I don’t remember my first train, but my mother does, and she loves to tell the story.”), Mani Rao’s review of new translations of Rabindranath Tagore (“When so much contemporary literature generated in Indian languages goes untranslated, the Tagore phenomenon seems disproportionate. One cannot hold that against a translator, however.”), and more.

I’ll be guest-editing Cha‘s “Ancient Asia Issue,” scheduled to launch August 2013. See also their earlier publication of my translation of five sections from Xi Chuan’s “Thirty Historical Reflections” 鉴史三十章 from their China Issue.

New Issue of Cerise Press

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Cerise Press Vol. 3 Issue 9 Cover

The Spring 2012 issue of Cerise Press is now online, with new work by Cole Swensen, interviews with Chinese translator Nicky Harman and Tibetan-Chinese writer Woeser ཚེ་རིང་འོད་ཟེར་ / 唯色, and an essay by Chloe Garcia Roberts on her translations of the poetry of late Tang poet Li Shangyin 李商隱.

Also see my feature “Xi Chuan: Poetry of the Anti-lyric” from an earlier issue, with translations of “Power Outage” 停电, “Re-reading Borges’s Poetry” 重读博尔赫斯诗歌, and “Three Chapters on Dusk” 黄昏三章. (And my earlier co-translations of poems by Bei Dao 北岛 with Clayton Eshleman).