Category Archives: Ruminations

Traductions de Xi Chuan

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Some time ago this blog received a comment from Agnès Dupuis, a PhD candidate in Montréal writing her dissertation on Xi Chuan and translation into French. We started a brief but illuminating (for me, anyhow) correspondence, with her explaining the background of her argument to me via email.

Recently I came across some of her published translations of Xi Chuan’s early work, including three poems I’ve translated for Notes on the Mosquito–“Écho” 回声, my “Echo”; “Il a vieilli” 一个人老了, my “A Man Ages”; and “Mener un troupeau à la mer” 把羊群赶下大海, my “Send Your Flock to the Sea” (her first translation, “L’automne, en Quatorze Lignes,” is from Xi Chuan’s 秋天十四行, which we decided not to include). Here’s how she begins “Écho“:

Tout être est comme une ville

Il est un écho

 

Les briques et les pierres entassées repoussent l’océan vers le lointain

Le brouillard, aux petites heures du matin, se confine

 

Et toutes ces forteresses qui nous protègent de l’horizon

Mais qui donc autrefois allait faire paître le troupeau ?

NYRblog on Red Pine

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Ian Johnson at the New York Review of Books’ bloghas a nice piece on Chinese poetry translator Bill Porter (a/k/a Red Pine 赤松) and his second life as a writer for a Chinese audience, in Finding Zen and Book Contracts in Beijing. Here’s a key paragraph, which explains the importance of cross-cultural currents that have allowed non-Chinese scholars of pre-modern China to end up explaining Chinese culture to Chinese people:

In the travel writing that has made him so popular in China, Porter’s tone is not reverential but explanatory, and filled with humorous asides (such as the traveler’s need for a good laxative, or his twenty-year pursuit of a Guggenheim fellowship). His goal is to tell interested foreigners about revealing byways of Chinese culture. Unexpectedly, this approach also works for Chinese, many of whom are about as removed from their culture as Porter’s target audience is in the West. But this means that what is a niche market in western countries—the Chinese culture enthusiast—is a mass market in China. It also helps that Porter is a foreigner. Many wonder how foreigners see this complex culture, which during the 20th century Chinese writers, thinkers, and politicians blamed for their country’s demise.

The article also mentions the plight of the translator, economically speaking: “For most of the past decade, he says, his annual income has hovered around $15,000. Several of his books humorously thank the US Department of Agriculture—for providing food stamps that have kept him and his family going.” And as a Facebook friend of mine, a poet and former publisher who lives near Red Pine in WA, wrote: “Bill Porter spends 20 years in a Taiwanese Zendo studying Chinese classics while Stephen Mitchell spends 20 hours in a library studying what other translators have done with Tao Te Ching. Guess who gets rich in America and who gets by on food stamps.” I should add, though, that if it weren’t for Mitchell’s twenty-some hours, I may not have ended up studying Chinese in the first place.

For some of Red Pine’s thoughts on translating Chinese poetry, here’s a piece I published on CipherJournal, back in the day: Dancing with the Dead: Language, Poetry, and the Art of Translation.

Michelle Yeh on Dan Murphy’s translation of Over Autumn Rooftops: Poems by Hai Zi

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200At Modern Chinese Literature & Culture, esteemed scholar Michelle Yeh 溪密 has a review of Dan Murphy‘s translations of Hai Zi 海子 (an early friend of Xi Chuan’s) in the collection Over Autumn Rooftops. A fan of the translations overall, Yeh’s enthusiasm emerges most when she discusses the poetry, as follows:

What readers will find–and enjoy–in Over Autumn Rooftops is a poetry of considerable complexity. Hai Zi draws on a wide range of literary sources: from the Book of Odes and Qu Yuan to Homer and Greek mythology, from canonical works to folk literature. His early poetry suggests influences by his older contemporaries, such as Shu Ting and Duo Duo. His images exhibit a tendency toward the primal (water, fire, sky, earth, fish, bird, seasons) and the sublime (“the king,” God), and he often identifies with village, sun, prairie, and wheat (“beautiful, wounded wheat” [237], “wheat in despair”). His language is simple yet tinged with mysticism, effortlessly crossing the boundary between the inner and the external world.

Click here or the image above for the review.

Jade Ladder’s Poets

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I’ve compiled a list of the poets whose work appears in English translation in Jade Ladder, the new anthology of contemporary Chinese poetry edited by Yang Lian 杨炼, W N Herbert, Brian Holton, and Qin Xiaoyu 秦晓宇. The anthology presents the work of poets by birth year, but the work is separated into sections–lyric poems, narrative poems, neo-classical poems, sequences, experimental poems, and long poems–so I’ve put together this alphabetical list of the poets represented. Poets in bold (23, by my count) are those not included in the recent Copper Canyon anthology, Push Open the Window (of whom 19 of the 49 are not included in JL; click here for that anthology’s table of contents). Also, since Jade Ladder is English-only, I’m not sure of every poet’s name in Chinese, and consequently have left some blank. If you know, or spot any other errors, let me know.

  1. Bai Hua 柏桦
  2. Bei Dao 北岛
  3. Chen Dongdong 陈东东
  4. Chen Xianfa 陈先发
  5. Duo Duo 多多
  6. Ge Mai 戈麦
  7. Gu Cheng 顾城
  8. Hai Zi 海子
  9. Han Bo韩博
  10. Hu Dong
  11. Hu Xudong 胡续冬
  12. Huang Canran 黄灿然
  13. Jiang Hao 蒋浩
  14. Jiang He 江河
  15. Jiang Tao 姜涛
  16. Liao Yiwu 廖亦武
  17. Lü De’an 吕德安
  18. Ma Hua 马骅
  19. Mai Cheng
  20. Mang Ke 芒克
  21. Meng Lang 孟浪
  22. Ouyang Jianghe 欧阳江河
  23. Pan Wei
  24. Qin Xiaoyu 秦晓宇
  25. Qing Ping 清平
  26. Senzi 森子
  27. Shui Yin
  28. Song Lin 宋琳
  29. Song Wei
  30. Sun Lei
  31. Sun Wenbo 孙文波
  32. Wang Ao 王敖
  33. Wang Xiaoni 王小妮
  34. Xi Chuan 西川
  35. Xiao Kaiyu 肖开愚
  36. Ya Shi
  37. Yan Li
  38. Yang Lian 杨炼
  39. Yang Xiaobin 杨小滨
  40. Yang Zheng
  41. Yi Sha 伊沙
  42. Yu Jian 于坚
  43. Yu Nu 余怒
  44. Zang Di 臧棣
  45. Zhai Yongming 翟永明
  46. Zhang Danyi
  47. Zhang Dian
  48. Zhang Shuguang 张曙光
  49. Zhang Zao 张枣
  50. Zhong Ming
  51. Zhou Lunyou
  52. Zhu Zhu 朱朱
  53. Zou Jingzhi

Metre Maids on Xi Chuan at the Bookworm

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Sarah Stanton Translator & poet Sarah Stanton of the Metre Maids blog has posted a write-up of my event with Xi Chuan at the Beijing Bookworm last Thursday night. Comprehensive and enthusiastic, her coverage not only chronicles the event, but some of Xi Chuan’s background as well. Here’s my favorite moment of her piece:

This question came up again during the discussion after the reading, with translator Canaan Morse asking Xi Chuan how he feels when people expect him, as a Chinese writer, to be writing the same sorts of things the Tang poets were writing a thousand years ago. His answer was short and to the point: “I hate it!” Another memorable moment came when he was asked if he thought one had to get angry or upset to write good poetry: he replied to the effect that it’s hard work that creates good poetry, not emotion, and at that point I’m sure I heard millions of emo voices cry out in terror, and be suddenly silenced.

Lucas also discussed at some length the processes that went into creating the book, his own attitudes to translation, and translating Xi Chuan in particular. Once again I was struck by the sheer amount of time and love which had gone into these poems, both in their original language and in their English form. The role of the translator is so often relegated to that of mouthpiece, a faceless channel for the poet’s vision, but in good translation–and in good literature–there is always a sense of partnership. After the talk, I asked both poet and translator to sign my book, and Lucas’ signature sitting neatly below  Xi Chuan’s on the title page seems to me a perfect symbol of everything they’re doing right.

Jade Ladder Arrival

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I received my copy of Jade Ladder: Contemporary Chinese Poetry from Bloodaxe Books yesterday. Edited by Yang Lian 杨炼, W N Herbert, Brian Holton, and Qin Xiaoyu 秦晓宇, it’s brimming with Chinese poetry from the last thirty-five years, mostly translated by Holton with Lee Man-Kay 李漫琪 and / or Herbert. Jade Ladder includes five Xi Chuan poems–one, “Exercises in Thought” 思想练习, in my translation (which Herbert calls “marvellous work”!), one in Holton’s translation, and two done by Xi Chuan with Bill Herbert. This allows for readers to get a sense of how different translators work, and of course to see different aspects of Xi Chuan’s poetry as they find different expressions in English.

Also of interest, both to scholars and general readers, are the preface by Herbert, the introduction by Yang Lian, the essays by Qin Xiaoyu, and the afterword by Holton.

#XiChuan

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Scrounging through the series of tubes that make up the internet the other day I came across someone’s Twitter feed from January, posting live updates from my event with Xi Chuan and Chris Lupke at the MLA. After the event I posted Rachel Blau DuPlessis‘s excellent response to “Hearing Xi Chuan for the First Time,” but these tweets took me back in a different way. eetempleton seemed particularly impressed with Xi Chuan’s aversion to “good poems”–something I explained in my Poetry Society of America write-up as poems “both acceptable to more conservative aesthetic standards as well as simply poems that are too ‘well-behaved.'” Ultimately, however, I think these tweets capture something important about Xi Chuan as a writer, quoting: “I’m not trying to be a poet. I’m trying to be a person writing texts.”

Lucas Klein on The Fat Years

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My review of The Fat Years 盛世：中國 2013年, by Chan Koonchung 陳冠中 and translated by Michael Duke, is now online at Rain Taxi. Be forewarned: I was unimpressed by the novel and the translation. Here’s how the review begins:

The cover screams “The Book No One in China Dares to Publish,” the Financial Times and The Observer have offered ad-like reviews, and copies have spilled off bookstore displays in Hong Kong and London for months; The Fat Years is the new must-have for the politically righteous book consumer in the English-speaking world. Consumer, that is, not reader, since most reports mention little about the story other than its premise. Probably better this way, since aesthetics too often fail when put up against political righteousness.

May / Day

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May Day–International Workers’ Day–is an interesting holiday. It began as a demonstration in the US (half a mile from where I grew up) but was shunned by the American government; it was an anarchist rally but got taken up by states, often repressive, around the world. And while I rarely get too political on this blog, I think the lack of translations in the English-language book market and an American fear of foreigners are not unrelated.

This article struck me as a good overview of the history.