Category Archives: Ruminations

Nicholas Reid on Jacob Edmond’s A Common Strangeness

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Nicholas Reid has reviewed Jacob Edmond’s study of world literature & contemporary Chinese, Russian, and American poetry, A Common Strangeness. Here’s how it begins:

In the lives of poets, as in the lives of most other people, there has been a great change of consciousness worldwide over the last three or four decades. We have gone from a contest between capitalist West and communist East (with an ill-defined “third world” bending this way and that in the background); to the apparent dominance of capitalism and the market, even in officially “communist” China (with the rumblings of nationalist particularities in the background, especially in the Muslim world). We are also aware of how different cultural exchanges have become in the age of the internet, high-speed communication and a pervasive and internationally-marketed “pop culture”. With varying degrees of approval and disapproval, and with varying and competing definitions, terms like multiculturalism and globalism are now tossed around.

The debate over the “universality” of literature – including poetry – is not a new one, but it becomes more acute in this new global context. By definition, poetry is language, but languages are not universal. Traditionally, the universal was seen to be best expressed in the particular – hence, a poem “understood” worldwide was nevertheless rooted in a particular language and culture, and much of even the most “universal” poem was always untranslatable for those outside that particular language and culture.

How are poets, especially avant-garde poets, responding when they are now – like nearly everybody else – also wired in to an international ‘global’ culture?
Click on the image above for the full review.

Circumference Podcast: Eliot Weinberger

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Montana Ray of Circumference interviews Eliot Weinberger on his translation of Spanish and Chinese poetry:

In this episode celebrated translator and essayist Eliot Weinberger tells how he came to translate Octavio Paz and Bei Dao and talks about the process of translating their work. He discusses how waves of translation in the US have been spurred by changing political realities, and how those translations have impacted contemporary American poetry. The conversation also includes Weinberger’s thoughts on the deeper role of translation, both as a social function (bringing something new into your own language) and as an act (reaching for the inaccessible, unnamable).

Click the image above or listen here:

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Mark Burnhope Reviews Jade Ladder

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At Magma Poetry Mark Burnhope has posted his review of Jade Ladder, the recent anthology of contemporary Chinese poetry published in the UK. Burnhope is new to Chinese poetry, and he doesn’t know whether family names come first or last in Chinese, but he raises some nice questions about translation in his enthusiastic take on Chinese poetry today. Here’s how it begins:

In his essay concluding Jade Ladder, Brian Holton discusses the trials, tribulations, negotiations and compromises involved in translating Chinese poetry into English. Some of Yang Lian and Qin Xiaoyu’s first choices were shelved, he writes, “because the joke just wasn’t funny in English”, poems “were speaking only to Chinese readers’, or they ultimately “fell flat in translation”. The translators generally avoided footnotes unless they appeared in original poems, or unless they would “transform a poem that otherwise would be closed to the reader into something more accessible and enjoyable”.

Xi Chuan on Political Writing

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As Part of The Guardian‘s reporting on the Edinburgh World Writers’ Conference, Xi Chuan was interviewed on the politics of writing as viewed from China:

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Here‘s how The Guardian introduces the report:

We have carried the opening polemics on the website over the course of the conference, so decided to devote this podcast to finding out what some of the other delegates attending the conference felt, asking them how relevant are the questions posed today, how do the issues differ from country to country, and is it possible to identify a way forward.

Our interviewees hailed from everywhere from Argentina to Pakistan, Boston to Beijing: they include Junot Diaz, Elif Shafak, Kamila Shamsie, Alan Bissett, Patrick Ness, Carlos Gamerro, Denise Mina and Xi Chuan.

Ron Silliman on World Literature

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Ron Silliman doesn’t talk much about world literature or translation (in fact, as he notes, “to this date still no books in a foreign language”), but on the tenth anniversary of the birth of Silliman’s blog, he posted part of his take on “the question of national literatures, the Nation Question,” he says, “as my friends in the Old Left might have phrased it.” This is what he writes:

But the movement of capital, of business – and ultimately of jobs and economic futures – gets carried out in language and through many local cultures, and the transformation of poetry from a series of largely self-contained literary enclaves into a global writing is itself a profoundly complicated phenomenon. There are enormous advantages in 2012 to being an American writing in English, but these do not come about free of complicity with the processes that make these advantages real. Similarly, there are enormous complexities to being a non-American writing in English, as there to being a writer in any other language, especially those that are “minority” languages within a given national context.

See more here.

Foreignizing Translations in the New York Times

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If you are a “China Watcher”–and if you’re reading this blog, you might be–you’re no doubt familiar with the recent trial against Gu Kailai 谷开来, accused murderer and wife of deposed Chongqing party secretary Bo Xilai 薄熙来.

I try to steer clear of politics on this blog, but at some point everything is potentially political, especially translation, which I noticed when reading the New York Times‘s coverage of Gu’s trial. As part of their focus, they highlighted a selection of quotations from her book Winning a Lawsuit in the U.S. 胜诉在美国, reveling in the irony of someone who had lambasted American due process in favor of China’s swift justice coming up against the swiftness of a trial lasting less than seven hours: “In a bitter twist of fate,” the NYT reports, “Ms. Gu, herself a lawyer, once expressed an unshakable faith in her nation’s legal system.”

The clincher on their list of quotations culled from her book reads, in the NYT translation,

China practices law in a different way than America; we don’t play with words. We have a principle called “based on the facts.” You will be arrested, sentenced and executed as long as we know you killed someone.

We don’t play with words, indeed. I’m in favor of a fair trial, and I’m not convinced that Gu Kailai received one in China (even Ai Weiwei 艾未未 doubts whether Gu and her husband can get a fair shake), but with translations like this, it’s evident that the New York Times isn’t letting her pick her own representation, either.

In short, the above quotation is not the only way to translate Gu’s statement–an obvious fact even without seeing her writing in Chinese. I agree that the sentiment is dubious at best, but with their specific choices in vocabulary and phrasing, they set Gu Kailai up as shrill, frightening, and unsophisticated. As they do in most of their reporting on China, the NYT comes short in representing the American principle of innocent until proven guilty. How different it would be if the passage read, “Chinese legal practices are different from those in America. We don’t play with words, but rather are fact-based: when we are certain you are guilty of murder, you will be apprehended, convicted, and executed.”

Some translations scholars such as Lawrence Venuti advocate foreignizing translations as the only ethical way to represent difference as difference. In this instance, however, I think we can see how foreignizing, awkward translations can reinforce prejudices and stand in the way of reaching our ideals about the principles of our judgment.

Short Takes on Long Poems Website

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The website of the Short Takes on Long Poems conference, which I attended at University of Auckland in March, is now live, featuring a video of our “world’s longest poem” and the presentations of Jacob Edmond, Susan Schultz, John Tranter, and Rachel Blau DuPlessis, along with others. My presentation on Xi Chuan and Yang Lian 杨炼 is not up [yet], but if / when it appears, I’ll post to it here.

Susan Howe on Chris Marker

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Forthcoming from the Poetry Pamphlets series by New Directions, American poet Susan Howe on Chris Marker, French filmmaker whose La Jetée was remade by Terry Gilliam as 12 Monkeys:

The French documentary filmmaker, photographer, and traveler, Chris Marker, was a poet first. Marker’s twenty eight minute ‘La Jetée’, written and photographed during the early 1960s, imagines a third world war. A man, marked by an image from his childhood, travels through some intertranslational fragmented mirror memory to the original line of fracture no translation will pacify. Many pilots, men and women, survived, though they didn’t survive, collective military service during World War II. ‘La Jetée’ (1962) and ‘Sans Soleil’ (1982) are haunted by indwelling flames of spirit. In the beginning of each Marker film jet planes escape the eye of the camera. One is overhead roaring murder. We see the other being concealed under the flight deck of an aircraft carrier. ‘La Jetée’ is called a ciné-roman; ‘Sans Soleil’ a documentary.

On Reviewing Translations

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I’ve been thinking about book reviews of translated literature. This is a well-worn topic amongst translators–Words Without Borders has a nine-entry feature of translators discussing the matter, and I’ve been on a panel devoted to discussing the topic–but as I think about how I’d like my translations of Xi Chuan’s poetry in Notes on the Mosquito to be discussed, I notice some of my views changing a bit.

When I review translations I make a point to name the translators and discuss the quality of their work; when I review translations from a language I know, I make a point to compare the source and target texts, and when I don’t know the language in question I do what I can either to find someone who does know both languages or else to situate my comments within larger discussions of translation in general. I think this adheres to most of the points made in the WWB feature and adds some. And when I’m reviewing translations from Chinese literature, which for straightforward reasons is what accounts for most of my reviews, I do what I can do draw on my expertise in the subject and base my judgement on what I think will be useful of what I know of the source subject for the target reader. In other words, I want my review to help readers new to Chinese literature make sense of what they are reading.

That’s not all I want my reviews to do, of course: I also discuss questions of poetics and style in English, and how these not only relate to Chinese but how they interact with what’s available in English writing, as well. Yet as I think about the reviews I know are forthcoming of Notes on the Mosquito–which of course I’m very eager to see!–I notice that so far they are all by writers who know Chinese, who are themselves translators and / or scholars, and whom I expect will write reviews much like I do: they will contextualize Xi Chuan and his poetry within Chinese cultural history, and they will offer their expert judgments on my work as a translator.

I want more reviews of this kind, of course, not only for my work but for translated literature in general. But to some extent, the more reviews of this kind we have, the fewer other kinds of reviews we get: fewer reviews by readers who can judge translations more on the merits of what they do for the target reader than on how they represent the source culture. In addition, the more expert reviews we get, the higher we raise the bar for reviews of translation, which may end up meaning that translations receive even fewer reviews than they now have!

Recently, translation studies has tended to value the foreign, to claim that if translation is to be ethical it must consider the foreign as foreign rather than assimilate it into the dominant logic of mainstream American culture. To some degree this is true, but to some degree, treating the foreign as foreign buffers the foreign from making its inroads into mainstream American culture. These are not complete opposites, of course; when my friends at Montevidayo discuss foreignizing translations, they usually do so with an eye and ear to how foreignization performs within the context of American poetry, rather than in how it represents the source text as such. Nevertheless, the fewer non-expert reviews of translated literature we have, the less time we’re able to spend considering–or enacting–the influence of translation on contemporary literature in English. And imagine where literature in English would be if it had never been influenced by the foreign.

In some ways this relates to a discussion I brought up before on this blog, when I quoted Michele Hutchison on “world literature” and whether Ron Silliman can “get away with [work that is playful and incomprehensible] because he writes in English and refers to the dominant culture?” (speaking of Silliman, when he wrote about Gustaf Sobin’s translations of René Char and called Char an Objectivist, I remember people decrying his imposition of American poetic terms on non-American poetry; perhaps it would have been more accurate to say that Sobin’s translations present Char as an Objectivist, but I would like to see Silliman spend more time considering translation and translations, not less). I have had enough discussions with Chinese poets about contemporary American poetry, full of discussions of how it has influenced and impacted their work, to wonder when conversations with American poets would show the same awareness of Chinese poetry. If we do not allow translation to influence American literature, then we are insisting on the international dominance of American literature, not on the ethical representation of the foreign within English writing.

At any event, I look forward to reviews of Notes on the Mosquito that discuss Xi Chuan’s potential impact on American writing at least as much as I look forward to reviews that discuss the context of China today and how it has produced the poetry I have translated.