Category Archives: Ruminations

Yunte Huang’s SHI: A Radical Reading of Chinese Poetry

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On his blog at Jacket2 Charles Bernstein has posted Yunte Huang’s 黃運特introduction to his 1997 book SHI: A Radical Reading of Chinese Poetry. Huang has since become one of the foremost figures in Chinese – American literary studies, translating Ezra Pound and Michael Palmer into Chinese, and writing the scholarly books Transpacific Imaginations and Transpacific Displacement, as well as the recent Charlie Chan: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and His Rendezvous with American History. Here’s how Huang’s intro to SHI begins:

This book is not an attempt to grasp the “essence” of Chinese poetry, nor is it an endeavor to produce an over-polished version of English that claims aesthetic superiority over other works in the same field. It grapples rather with the nature of translation and poetry, and explores poetic issues from the perspective of translation and translation issues from the perspective of poetry. Looking from such a vantage point, translation is no longer able to hide itself in our blind spot; instead, the often-invisible face of translation is being brought to the foreground of poetic texture and the traces of translation’s needle work are being exposed to the reader’s view. With its agenda hidden, translation is too often a handyman for the metaphysical, mystical, or universal notion of poetry. When emerging from obscurity, translation becomes an ally with poetic material and enacts the wordness of the words. And this book strives to strengthen the alliance between translation and poetry through various textual and conceptual means that I will discuss now.

Poetry International Interview with Mindy Zhang

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In April Poetry International published their interview with Mindy Zhang 明迪 about translating poetry between English and Chinese. Here’s how the interview begins:

PI: What is the most challenging aspect of translating poetry?

MZ: The hardest part of translation is to go inside the mind of the poet and find out what he did NOT want to say. I like ambiguities and multiple readings but I think we should avoid misleading. If the poet hated rhythm and musicality in poetry, making the translation musical would mean cheating.  These are, of course, extreme cases. Usually I try to figure out what’s in a poem rather than what’s not in a poem. There are always several choices to translate a line, I would focus on which one represents the closest meaning and brings out the implied, the suggested, the hidden meaning and which one best presents the tone and the mood.  Very often I look at the translation, hmmmm, this doesn’t sound right— I make changes; I stare at the original poem, stare at it literally, until I hear the voice of it.  In other words, a translated poem should be as good as it was originally with its linguistic and emotional subtleties. Whatever drives the poem forward, the motif and echoes, the rhythm and variations, the passion or reasoning, the word play, the visual shifting, whatever, should be reflected in the translation.

Her responses include mentions of lots of poets & writers from around the world, as well as translators Jonathan Stalling, Christopher Lupke, Denis Mair, and Nick Admussen.

Fiona Sze-Lorrain on Jeffrey Yang’s translatoin of Liu Xiaobo’s June Fourth Elegies

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Image of Liu Xiaobo’s “June Fourth Elegies” Fiona Sze-Lorrain‘s review of Jeffrey Yang‘s translation of June Fourth Elegies 念念六四 by Liu Xiaobo 刘晓波 is now up on Words Without Borders. Strangely, her review doesn’t mention Yang by name, but she does discuss the translation, calling it “a stylistic rendering of Liu Xiaobo’s plainspoken language, which at times can be physical—gnawing and piercing in its implications.”

Here’s how she begins her review:

Poetry charts a circular path to freedom for Chinese political activist and writer Liu Xiaobo. “I am merely / a discarded wooden plank / powerless to resist the crushing of steel / still, I want to save you no matter if you’re / dead or still barely breathing, breathing,” the poet writes in “Memories of a Wooden Plank,” on the twelfth anniversary of the 1989 Tian’anmen Massacre.  Powerless to narrate history as a public intellectual in his own country, Liu finds in poetry a force of resistance and an unlikely promise of solace.  “I’m still alive / with a name of some disrepute / I possess neither courage nor qualifications,” he confesses in the second elegy, “For 17.”  A year after writing those lines, Liu still believes poetry has a singular power to disarm.  As he concludes in the third elegy, “Suffocating City Square:”

This death-cast girl
has become a line of pure poetry
that surrenders all ideograms

Chad Post on Creative Constraints

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Australians in Italy coverAt the 3% blog Chad Post writes his take on some of the issues discussed in Creative Constraints: Translation and Authorship, the collection of academic essays on the topic edited by Rita Wilson and Leah Gerber. Like most translators, I find this topic endlessly fascinating (I may end up writing a book on it at some point), and related to what I wrote in my introduction to Xi Chuan’s Notes on the Mosquito: “I am motivated by a belief that the reader not only wants to know but can know both what Xi Chuan says and how he says it.”

Chad focuses on the issue of translations being edited for style. He writes:

At some level, this isn’t just about eliminating terms that American readers aren’t familiar with, but working from the assumption that readers are stupid and have to have everything explained to them. For example, there’s a lot of offensive stuff in the edits of Mima Simic’s story but the thing that bothers me is the sort of flattening out of the prose to make sure that everyone understands. For example, this:

original:
She can tell the time by the smell of the stuff in the pan.

edit:
She can tell how long something’s been frying by the way it smells.

As far as that goes I agree, and I don’t endorse dumbing-down challenging writing for the sake of an underestimated American audience. Still, I’m less compelled by the following example, from volume contributor Peter Bush:

libradas de sus mazmorras y grillos, las palabras al fin, las traidoras, esquivas palabras, vibren, dancen, copulen, se encueren y cobren cuerpo (Juan Goytisolo original)

released from their chains and dungeons, words, treacherous elusive words, at last quiver dance copulate strip off and flesh out (Peter Bush)

released from their chains, their dungeons, those words, those treacherous elusive words, quiver at last and dance and copulate, removing their rags and clothing themselves in flesh (edited version)

I don’t know Spanish, but I’m not convinced that either Bush’s version or the edit is better at reproducing and representing Goytisolo’s style: to me, the repeated commas in the Spanish convey something neither version quite captures in English. That said, I don’t see anything so wrong with Bush’s first version that the edit definitely fixes.

Chad’s piece–one of the longer 3% blog posts I’ve read in a while–is well worth reading, and I look forward to seeing Creative Constraints. I should mention, though, that I was very happy with my editing process with New Directions: they made very helpful suggestions, and I had the freedom to accept or make counter-edits as I saw fit.

Liu Qian reviews Jonathan Stalling’s Yingelishi

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YingelishiFollowing up on her interview with Jonathan Stalling, World Literature Today has published Liu Qian’s 刘倩 review of Yingelishi. Here’s how it begins:

Our appreciation of poetry almost always takes place within a single language. Although poems written in one language can be translated into other languages, often-translated poems lose their unique prosody, images, and culturally specific significance. From this perspective, Jonathan Stalling’s new book, Yingelishi, can be regarded as a crucial breakthrough. This book of poetry wanders freely between Chinese and English, leaping over the gap between sound and meaning, providing its readers with an experience virtually unprecedented as the same sounds enact poetic references in both languages simultaneously.

Click on the image to read the full review. And here’s my review again, for good measure.

The War On in American Poetry

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Poet / lawyer / blogger Seth Abramson has been blogging, as part of his preparation for his PhD preliminary exams, about the Creative Writing MFA and its place in the polysystem of American literature, especially poetry. His overall point is to overturn the standard narrative of the Creative Writing MFA, which is that it “institutionalizes.” Abramson argues pretty convincingly that the “institutionalization” reading comes from an ideologically-based analysis of the current economy of poetic production that conspicuously overlooks both the history and the present reality of the MFA as an institution. As a poet with an MFA, Abramson clearly has a dog in this fight.

But he’s also getting a PhD, which puts him in an interesting position in what he describes as the “125-year-long battle between two opposing forces in American poetry, ‘creative writing’ and ‘the Academy.’” I take it Abramson is motivated against what he sees as the predominant model of an embattled American poetry scene (as Abramson says, “the Combatants Aren’t Who You’d Suspect“), defined by Ron Silliman as the “post-avant” vs. the “School of Quietude,” and enshrined in places like Cole Swensen’s anthology American Hybrid (a hybrid can only emerge from forces in opposition to each other). Rather than the opposing forces being two different ways of writing poetry, Abramson says, it’s two different ways of conceiving poetry. My tendency in the decade or so that I’ve been following Ron Silliman’s blog has been to see the shifting battle lines historically, that is, what used to be a split between Academic Study of poetry vs. Creative Writing poetry had shifted to be a split between poetry inspired by & engaged with the continued relevance of Pound and / or Stein vs. poetry that would rather imagine that moment had never existed. Abramson is asking that we take another look at the fundamental division; if nothing else, it’s fair to say there are many fronts in this fight, as well as some unexpected allegiances.

I can relate to Abramson’s approach because I think one of the reasons I got so interested in translation during college was my frustration with many of the approaches to poetry I’d witnessed in both the creative writing classes I took and the academic courses for my major. In short, I turned to translation for something that could provide both the rigor I came to expect from academic coursework and the freedom I looked for in the Creative Writing workshop. And yet since then I have also become only more and more of an academic. In many ways this tension within me still exists, as I define the translations I don’t like (mine or by others) as being either too “academic” or too much defined by a “poetic voice” I recognize from the workshop atmosphere but don’t recognize in the poet being translated. But as an academic–albeit not of the English dept., which I think is where the brunt of Abramson’s analysis falls–I have seen a lot of how my colleagues and I and the institutions around us tend to treat the things we treat. And this is where I think Abramson’s reading of the battle between Creative Writing and the Academy falls short: basically, I don’t recognize the academy in his description of “the academy.”

Abramson makes some interesting points about the university–such as how it is “pro-multiculturalism in discourse, anti-multiculturalism in community“–but more often I find myself lost in unexplained statements like “Consistent with their academic affiliations, the forces of the Academy are anti-aesthetics and pro-poetics” and “The Academy equates aesthetics and politics.” Does that mean the Academy is anti-political? I’m confused. If I could recommend a quick corrective to Abramson’s view of the Academy, it would be that he treat it with the same care with which he treats the MFA. Be more clear on its history the recent developments within literature departments, sure (for instance, have discursive appeals to multiculturalism been followed up by increased multiculturalism amongst and within academic communities?), but specifically in terms of the relationship between the Academy as an institution–a university with a bureaucracy, endowment, and workplace regulations–and the Academy as a literature dept. in which people talk about writing. Then I’d be more interested in what he’s got to say about it, and less prone to believe that his appeals for peace between “creative writing” and “the Academy” weren’t disingenuous attempts to ensure his side more respect from the other.

Still, I do agree with his conclusions. He writes, in the last paragraph:

if we could get all these folks together we could probably remake the presence of the literary arts in the academy in a generative way that would take us to the next stage in the development of American poetry. It’s time for those dissatisfied with 125 years of fruitless propaganda-laden battles to put down their swords and seek a better way forward for all.

For me, that would have to include–and even be based on–translation.

Sean O’Brien reviews Jade Ladder

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The Guardian has published Sean O’Brien’s review of Jade Ladder: Contemporary Chinese Poetry, edited by Yang Lian 杨炼, W N Herbert, Brian Holton, and Qin Xiaoyu 秦晓宇. It’s a fine and enthusiastic take written by an obviously engaged reader conversant with the current goings-on of poetry worldwide. Here’s how it begins:

The diversity and richness of contemporary Chinese poetry defy description. As Zang Di understatedly puts it in “Cosmo-Sceneriology”, “We seem / to have come to a new place”, but the place itself is multiple. In “100 Years of Solitude for the New Poetry”, the same poet suggests that poetry “has dismissed language” and finds that “yes, for an instant, it was almost not written by you”. To the reader coming newly to the subject, or with the competing translatorial templates of Ezra Pound and Arthur Waley in mind, these are exciting declarations, even as, or maybe because, they resist confident analysis.

O’Brien also singles out Xi Chuan for mention, with an interesting observation that dovetails with some of what he writes about Chinese and Eastern European literature in the afterword to Notes on the Mosquito, “The Tradition This Instant” 传统在此时此刻:

A western reader is likely to be reminded here of Mandelstam’s ill-fated “Stalin Epigram“. Although Mao is seen posthumously by a poet born in 1960, subsequent Chinese administrations have proved just as interested in the ideological demeanour of the arts as were Kruschev and his successors in Russia. Xi Chuan’s “Commandments” could be a poem from the eastern bloc of the 1950s (in this translation it recalls Zbigniew Herbert): “you shall not covet / so it’s not a bad idea to crown yourself king in a dark room / and why not cut a skeleton key and carry it in your hand? / walk, stop, turn: in that capital city under the light of your sun / you will disdain to open each rusted lock”.

The version of “Commandments” 戒律 quoted here is Holton’s from Jade Ladder. My version is included in Notes on the Mosquito.

Jennifer Feeley on Flash Fiction from Contemporary China

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200Modern Chinese Literature & Culture has just published Jennifer Feeley’s review of The Pearl Jacket and Other Stories: Flash Fiction From Contemporary China, edited by Shouhua Qi 祁寿华. While there’s a discussion to be had about the relationship, or difference, between flash fiction and prose poetry, Qi’s anthology doesn’t seem to engage in that point (and for what it’s worth, I’d say that Xi Chuan’s prose poems are closer to “flash nonfiction,” anyway). Here’s how Feeley begins her review:

In an age of diminishing attention spans, stories that can be read in the few minutes it takes to wait for the bus, stand in line, or smoke a cigarette are valued for their ability to entertain on demand. Mobile technologies such as text messaging and micro-blogging on cell phones and tablets spur both the production and consumption of this economic genre—the shortest of these works can be contained within a single computer screen or a few text messages. Flash fiction (微型小说), or short-short fiction, is by no means a recent phenomenon, however. Shouhua Qi, editor and translator of The Pearl Jacket and Other Stories: Flash Fiction From Contemporary China, traces its multiple origins thousands of years back to Aesop’s fables from ancient Greece and the Chinese creation myths of Nüwa, Fuxi, and Pangu.

Xi Chuan in Scotland in August

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According to the bewilderingly titled “Edinburgh to start festive season with Chinese elements” posted on Xinhua Net’s English site, Xi Chuan will be in Scotland in August for the Edinburgh International Book Festival. The article reports:

Another cultural event is the Edinburgh International Book Festival, scheduled for August 11-27, which will invite 800 authors from 43 countries and regions, including China, said Frances Sutton, press manager of the festival.

“They include Guo Xiaolu, Li Yiyun and Xi Chuan,” she said.

Aside from Xi Chuan, I find this a strange list with which to promote Chinese literature. Both Li Yiyun 李翊雲 and Guo Xiaolu 郭小橹 write in English.

How “International” is Poetry?

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At the English Pen site, Michele Hutchison has posted an article titled “How international is poetry?” that looks at the kind of poetry included in international literary festivals like Rotterdam. Here’s a bit of what she says:

If international is taken to mean universal and accessible to all, there are a few stumbling blocks. A haiku is not the same as a sonnet is not the same as badi, but cultural context is just as complex as form. […] The reader/listener’s knowledge or ignorance of a foreign culture is just as limiting to the transmission of literature as a translator’s inability to pick up and carry across all of the layers of meaning, without footnotes.

During the course of the symposium, I learn that K. Satchidanandan has translated his own work into beautiful English and in doing so, he has opted to cut out cultural references which might disturb the Western reading process, for example, ‘rain from the Hindu Treta Yuga period’ has become ‘rain from a bygone age’. Is this globalisation that Tim Parks keeps writing about on the NYR blog at work? Have the poets been invited precisely because they write the kind of neutral, non-culturally specific poetry that translates and travels easily?

In addition to what Tim Parks has written w/r/t fiction, this is also close to what Stephen Owen wrote in a review of Bei Dao‘s 北岛 poetry in 1990: a certain kind of “international” or “world poetry” crops up that translates well, but which gives undue weight to the cultural expectations of readers in Europe and North America at the expense of literary traditions in other parts of the world. Hutchison takes this even further, noting that poetry from other parts of the world may still come up short when judged against writing from the center of the current world system, which will find ways of reiterating its own centrality:

Headliner Ron Silliman, one of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets, reads work that is playful and incomprehensible. Does he get away with this because he writes in English and refers to the dominant culture? […] Are the most complex and impenetrable poets here the ones who write in English?

While this is an interesting argument to pursue, and important for understanding what’s been happening, and what continues to happen, in literary history around the world, the way the argument slides over too easily into value judgment bothers me. Certainly it’s a problem that local traditions are being sacrificed at the altar of international exchange, but a poem is not necessarily good or bad because it embodies or rejects cultural specificity (to be fair, this is the point Hutchison makes at the conclusion of her post).

Moreover, just as translation can be a vehicle for the global propagation of an American Standard poetry (and we should remember that American Standard usually refers to a toilet), translation can also work against that standardization and remind readers in a new language that writing from around the world can be at least as complex and rewarding as what they’re used to. Hutchison quotes Poetry International magazine’s Correen Dekker, who explains that “translators are more willing to work on texts which allow for a successful end product”; this is true, but for me translating Xi Chuan, I do not judge the success of the end product based on how much it adheres to an ethnocentric vision of poetry cleansed of foreign reference points, but rather on how it expresses an aesthetic experience that can include the complex fullness of what both poetry and Chinese culture can entail.