Category Archives: Ruminations

Vitaly Chernetsky reviews Jacob Edmond’s A Common Strangeness

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Vitaly Chernetsky has reviewed Jacob Edmond’s A Common Strangeness. It begins:

Jacob Edmond has written a remarkable book—impassioned, theoretically astute, and timely—that deserves to garner significant response across many fields in the humanities. The tasks it sets to accomplish—and succeeds admirably in doing so—are manifold. First, it presents a compelling new vision for the role and relevance of the discipline of comparative literature in our rapidly changing times. Second, it argues for the continuing intellectual and political relevance of contemporary poetry and its aesthetic and cognitive projects in the context of globalization, despite the short shrift this form of writing often gets in grand cultural models and the neglect or condescension towards it from many writing on globalization from the disciplinary standpoint of the social sciences. And last but not least, it triangulates between the literary traditions—Chinese, Russian, and American—that to my knowledge have never been considered together at such extent in a book project, with the traditional locus of much comparatist writing, West European literatures, only serving as a foil in the argument the author builds. At best, these national literatures usually appear in comparative models, if at all, in binary structures, juxtaposed with the dominant West European center. A Common Strangeness therefore takes an original and unexpected spin on the call to “provincialize Europe” that has been pronounced by a number of scholars of literature and culture of non-(West) European background.

Click the image for the full review.

Chinese Literature Dissertation Reviews: Nathaniel Isaacson’s Colonial Modernities & Chinese Science Fiction

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Chinese Science Fiction & Colonial Modernities Dissertation Reviews has posted Paola Iovene‘s review of Nathaniel Isaacson‘s Colonial Modernities and Chinese Science Fiction. Here’s how it begins:

Nathaniel Isaacson’s study of Chinese science-related literature and popular culture from 1903 to 1934 asserts the centrality of science fiction to efforts at cultural renewal in the early twentieth century and beyond. The main claim of the dissertation is that science, fiction, and science fiction played a crucial role in facilitating empire building, and that Chinese sf writers were deeply anxious about co-opting Western means for their pedagogical goals. Based on the premise that in the West the genre is inspired by the imagination of the colonial Other, the dissertation investigates how imagination and knowledge of the Other shapes Chinese sf. Hence, it argues that orientalism, and more broadly, the material and ideological consequences of the encounter with the West, are the most salient elements defining Chinese sf.

Birgit Linder on Shi Zhi’s Winter Sun

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200Modern Chinese Literature & Culture has published Birgit Linder’s review of Winter Sun: Poems, translated by Jonathan Stalling. Here’s how Linder begins her review:

Winter Sun is a bilingual collection of poetry by one of China’s most widely known contemporary poets. Translated by Jonathan Stalling, it marks the first collection of Shi Zhi’s 食指 poetry in English, and it is an important addition to Chinese literary history and the study of contemporary Chinese poetry in translation. The roughly eighty poems in the book span the years from 1965 to 2005 and give a comprehensive overview of the work and life of a Shi Zhi, who first came to fame as an underground poet during the Cultural Revolution (1966-76) and has continued with his work until now. In addition, the chronologically arranged collection offers a twleve-page introduction by literary scholar Zhang Qinghua 张清华, a “Letter to My American Friends” by the poet, and a “Translator’s Afterword” by Jonathan Stalling that explains his choice of free verse translation over a more formal approach.

Shi Zhi (Index finger), whose real name is Guo Lusheng 郭路生, was born in 1948 in Shandong province. During the Cultural Revolution, Shi Zhi was widely admired for his daring and persistent poetry that, with a few exceptions, circumvented prescribed ideological content and conventional revolutionary imagery. Following his premature retirement from the army in 1971, he experienced a prolonged period of silence and suicidal depression and was finally diagnosed with schizophrenia in 1973. He spent many years in a mental hospital, until he was released in 2005. Shi Zhi lives with his second wife in Beijing and continues to write poetry.

Chinese Literature Dissertation Reviews: Jeongsoo Shin’s From Bewitching Beauty to Effete King

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Transgendering of the Peony in East Asia Dissertation Reviews has posted Sixiang Wang‘s review of Jeongsoo Shin‘s From Bewitching Beauty to Effete King: Transgendering of King Peony in Medieval Chinese and Korean Literature. Here’s how it begins:

The peony has come to have a variety of associations in the East Asian literary tradition. Its luxurious petals have signaled wealth and beauty while its peculiar, seedless manner of reproduction has come to symbolize sterility and empty luxury. It has even come to represent political power as a symbol of China as a nation, arguably one of its dominant associations today. In his fascinating account of the peony’s literary history, From Bewitching Beauty to Effete King, Jeongsoo Shin seeks to understand the evolving connotations of this one flower. Shin not only examines the literary traditions associated with the peony in medieval China, but traces the flower’s cultivation and literary symbolism as it traveled to Silla Korea (57 BCE–935 CE). As the peony’s gender was transformed in this process of transmission, it also acquired a separate set of symbolic resonances.

Xi Chuan cameo in Michael Palmer Poem

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Last October Brooklyn Rail published a new poem by Michael Palmer titled “His Artificial Lover Sings a Wordless Song,” which mentions Xi Chuan. Here’s an excerpt:

Will the despoilers have it all
to themselves? Even the textured sky?

Xi Chuan, we often ask the same
questions it seems, or is it simply

that together we studied the stars
in Mechanicsville? Orion’s Belt shown,

the Sisters and the Drinking Gourd.
Words formed

their own
seamless patterns

one moment,
sundered the next.

Read the whole poem here.

Chinese Literature Dissertation Reviews: Esther Sunkyung Klein’s History of a Historian

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Sima Qian & the Author-Function Dissertation Reviews has posted Vincent Leung‘s review of Esther Sunkyung Klein‘s The History of a Historian: Perspectives on the Authorial Roles of Sima Qian. Here’s how it begins:

Sima Qian 司馬遷 (ca. 145 or 135 BCE-86 BCE) once famously declared that his monumental Shiji 史 記 (ca. 91 BCE) is intended not for readers in his own time but for those in posterity. The reason for such an authorial gesture, unusual in the early Chinese corpus, is unclear, but in any event he would not have been disappointed had he been able to witness the tremendous reception of the Shiji in the last two millennia. It is fair to say that the Shiji is one of the most widely read texts in the entire Chinese literary tradition. This is easily attested by the staggering amount of commentaries on it throughout the imperial period as well as the numerous articles and monographs devoted to its study over the last century. This voluminous scholarship represents an expectedly diverse range of readings of the Shiji, with the nevertheless common goal of articulating the significance of the Shiji as intended by its compiler Sima Qian by reconstructing an accurate and relevant context for its composition. Readings that disagree on the significance of the Shiji are essentially disagreements over how it should be properly contextualized in relation to its author and/or the supposed historical condition of the early Han, and over the last two millennia as many contexts motivating Sima Qian have been imagined as there have been readers of the Shiji.

SCMP on Bai Hua’s Wind Says

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The South China Morning Post has published a review of Wind Says 风在说 (Zephyr Press), by Bai Hua 柏桦 and translated by Fiona Sze-Lorrain.

It’s a positive review, but it’s a horribly written one: full of cliches about Chinese essences (“Messages are conveyed in sharp but poignant images, paying homage to Chinese and Western writers of the past, as well as to the philosophical tradition in which Chinese writing is steeped.”), the untranslatability of translated poetry (“one must question how much is lost to the non-Chinese reader in translation”), and literary historical nonsense (“realism is, after all, a defining characteristic of Misty poetry, a reaction against restrictions on art during the Cultural Revolution”). By the time we reach the end line (“In Bai’s poetic voice, one can almost feel the winds of change blowing through the pages”), I feel queasy and am embarrassed to say I like the translations in a book that could inspire such homely homilies.

Oh, and there’s a picture of Chinese mountains enshrouded in mist–you know, because Bai Hua is post-“Misty,” get it?

Notes on the Mosquito on New Books on East Asian Studies

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Carla Nappi of New Books in East Asian Studies spoke with me (yes, me!) about my translation of Xi Chuan’s Notes on the Mosquito: Selected Poems. Here’s her flattering write-up:

First things first: this is a book of amazing, beautiful poetry, and you should read it.

In translating Xi Chuan’s Notes on the Mosquito: Selected Poems (New Directions, 2012), Lucas Klein has given readers access to a bilingual journey through more than two decades of Xi Chuan’s evolution as a writer, a person, and a historian. The poems collected and rendered in Notes on the Mosquito range from evocative lyric verse about shepherds and loneliness to historical essays that consider the “New Qing History.” (It is a striking range, and one that was quite unexpected for this reader and historian.) In our conversation, Lucas was generous enough to explain many aspects of his process and approach as a translator, and to read a number of the translated poems collected in the volume. We talked about several aspects of his work, including both practical issues and more conceptual questions about the linking of history and poetry in the writing of a poet and a reader’s approach to the resulting work. It was a pleasure, and I hope you enjoy listening.

Click the image above or listen here:

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Chinese Literature Dissertation Reviews: Richard Jean So’s Coolie Democracy

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“Coolie Democracy”, US-China Exchanges 1925-1955 Dissertation Reviews has posted Nan Z. Da‘s review of Richard Jean So‘s Coolie Democracy: US–China Political and Literary Exchange, 1925–1955. Here’s how it begins:

Literary-critical study of China-US relations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is experiencing an exciting emergence, and Richard Jean So’s dissertation, Coolie Democracy, finds itself at the vanguard of this development in the field. This project combines language expertise with transnational methodologies that emerged from Americanists’ de-centering of the United States to forward a self-consciously comparative study of alternative forms of the democratic discourse from the 1920s to the 1950s. At the macro-level, Richard So makes a literary-historical argument and a political-theoretical argument. He looks at an “in-between” time in American literary history and the history of US-China relations from 1900-1950, a period that current scholarship strings along a series of flashpoints: anti-Chinese sentiments and policies in the late 1800s; the repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Acts in 1943; the concurrent formation of Chinese-American immigrant communities and identities; and the official “break” between China and the United States over Communism and political allegiances on the eve of World War II. So recovers a forgotten segment in this period. So reconstructs, through meticulous and creative research, a series of unlikely Chinese-American exchanges and intellectual circles. These exchanges and collaborations coincided with the rise of the Leftist cultural front in the US, a movement So investigates for its transnational figures and their complicated translingual activities in China. This was a moment during which American and Chinese authors actively and directly engaged with each other to think out in literature the possibility of a politically united “Chinese America.” This by-and-large discursive “Chinese America” would be built upon a shared concept of “natural democracy” that comes organically of the texts of both nations, a concept that called upon the figure of the coolie to serve as an example of such democratic principles in praxis and as a cipher of mutual resistance against capitalism.

Lucas Klein on Daniel Dooghan’s Literary Cartographies: Lu Xun and the Production of World Literature

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Lu Xun and World LiteratureDissertation Reviews has posted my review of Daniel Dooghan’s Literary Cartographies: Lu Xun and the Production of World Literature. Here’s how it begins:

In his entry in the 2004 report on the state of the discipline, Comparative Literature in an Age of Globalization, David Damrosch, doyen of world literature studies, reproduces a table showing the MLA citation index of Lu Xun 鲁迅 (1881 – 1936) over the previous four decades. According this bibliography, Lu Xun was referred to in 3 articles between 1964 and 1973, in 12 articles from 1974 to 1983, in 19 articles from 1984 to 1993, and in 22 articles between 1994 and 2003 (David Damrosch, “World Literature in a Postcanonical, Hypercanonical Age,” in Comparative Literature in an Age of Globalization. Haun Saussy (ed.). Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006, p. 49). Without question, in what may be the disciplinary “age of world literature” even more than “an age of globalization,” Lu Xun has entered into a certain kind of canonicity. Investigating and interrogating the specifics of that canonicity, and the ways in which Lu Xun is framed, understood, translated, and transformed via such canonicity, is the subject of Daniel Dooghan’s fascinating, revealing, and provocative dissertation, Literary Cartographies: Lu Xun and the Production of World Literature (University of Minnesota, 2011).