The next–and perhaps final–installment of news on Xi Chuan in German is the Xi Chuan German Wikipedia page. It’s rather spare, but it’s the only entry in a Western language, and it’s longer than the Chinese listing. For an online encyclopedia entry on Xi Chuan in English, try the Encyclopedia of Contemporary Chinese Culture entry written by Huang Yibing. Unfortunately, it’s a bit out of date. Someone should work on an entry for Xi Chuan in the English Wikipedia. Who might that be?
Category Archives: Ruminations
Chinese Poetry Posters in Germany
Continuing with the theme of Xi Chuan reports in German, here’s an article summarizing some of the concerns and history of contemporary Chinese poetry, springboarding from the Chinese Poetry Poster campaign Xi Chuan organized for German cities a couple years ago.
Again, if you don’t read German, you can find the Google-translated version here. This translation, however, is considerably worse than the machine-translation of Xi Chuan’s interview I posted yesterday, though worse in an at times endearing manner. The “hermetic seal” poetry (German „hermetischen Dichtung“), for instance, is the computerized English version of the German term for menglong shi 朦胧诗, which in English should be Obscure Poetry (often misleadingly translated as “Misty Poetry“), the name of the poetry movement that emerged in China after the Cultural Revolution. And consider how the 我—-不—-相—-信 of Bei Dao 北島 comes out in English via the German: “I tell you, world, / I – think – not!” (for my translation with Clayton Eshleman of this Bei Dao poem, see this or this). I expect Wolfgang Kubin‘s translation sounds better in German: „Ich sage dir, Welt, / ich – glaube – nicht!“
„Zehn Fragen an Xi Chuan“
If you can read German, you might be interested in „Zehn Fragen an Xi Chuan“, a quick interview Xi Chuan did with Deutsch-Chinesisches Kulturnetz some time ago. If you can’t read German, the Google-translate version is bearable. Questions five and ten–about his most unpleasant experiences in Germany, and what he hopes China can learn from Germany–are the most interesting, as are his answers.
“In the Shadow of the Oxymoron”
I have referred a couple of times (here and here) to Xi Chuan’s poetics of the oxymoron, and how it’s related to current Chinese realities, so I thought I would link to an essay where he begins verbalizing such formulations. Xi Chuan wrote “In the Shadow of the Oxymoron” in English for the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program for the Home / Land Symposium on the island of Paros, Greece, in May 2008. Here’s an excerpt:
Some thirty years ago, people in China said “left is right and right is wrong.” Now, to live in the shadow of oxymoron means therefore to live with embarrassment; it means to enjoy a happiness that is absurd.
But to speak in oxymorons means that you are a person who is not going to be understood. I am not using a term like “contradiction” because contradictions are yet to be blended, whereas the social oxymoron is now a reality. Yes I do know concepts such as freedom, justice, love, privacy, equality, democracy, literacy, elite, etc.—but these quasi-saturated concepts are stronger and more popular. The reason why things are going like this is probably the result of an overdone revolution meeting a half-done modernization.
Steve Bradbury report on ALTA
On the 17th I posted a link & video about the American Literary Translators Association’s annual convention in Kansas City. I got a letter from my friend Steve Bradbury, translator of Shang Qin 商琴 and Hsia Yu 夏宇 and editor of Full Tilt, about what I missed:
Hey Lucas
Sorry you couldn’t make the ALTA conference this year. It was a good one. I’d never been to Kansas City before and was pleased to find that it’s quite the tourist-friendly town; the accommodations were affordable and just a short walk from both the Nelson Atkins Museum and more bars and restaurants than you can shake a stick at. Silvia Kofler was the conference organizer this year. Paul Vangelisti and Douglas Hofstadter were the plenary speakers. Lisa Rose Bradford, who flew in from Mar del Plata, was this year’s NTA winner, for her stellar version of Between Words: Juan Gelman’s Public Letter. Lisa also gave readings with sound poet Glenn North at the Jazz Museum and with me at the Writer’s Place, where I read some of my Shang Qin and Hsia Yu translations. The panel she put together on “Re/Creations and ‘Afterpoems,’” with Christian Hawkey, who talked about his Ventrakl volume, and Paul Legault, who gave us a trailer to his forthcoming collected After-Emily Dickenson “translations,” was the most interesting panel I’ve attended in years.
Chinese-language translators were a little thin on the ground this year, but the two besides me who made it did their mothers’ proud. Your old friend and ALTA first-timer Jonathan Stalling, who drove up from Oklahoma U with his family, gave a marvelous recitation of some personal favorites in his recent collection, Winter Sun: The Poetry of Shi Zhi. Charles Egan, who was also a first-timer, flew in from San Fran to accept the Lucien Stryk Prize for his Clouds Thick, Whereabouts Unknown: Poems by Zen Monks of China. Although Charles read his acceptance speech instead of speaking off the cuff per ALTA practice, he won the crowd from pretty much the get-go with the disarming admission that the prize was “a wonderful vindication for all the years I struggled in obscurity—I believe I saw many of you there…”
We talked for hours over martinis at the hotel bar. It was such a pleasure to run into a Chinese translator at ALTA who knows his books down to the ground and works by-and-large in fixed rhyme and meter; most of the ALTA regulars who translate Chinese classical verse are free-verse poets who can barely read a word of the language. That was the subject of my talk on Erica Mena’s “Translating Blind: Working from a Language You Don’t Read” panel. I spoke on Amy Lowell’s and Florence Ayscough’s now largely forgotten 1921 anthology Fir-Flower Tablets, but it was Becka McKay who took the palm, for a fascinating presentation on teaching translation to monolingual students as a way of inspiring interest in literature. Some of the student projects she showed us, which included a video game based on the Inferno and graphic adaptations of Don Quixote and The Tale of Genji, were amazing. If Florida Atlantic U, where she teaches, wasn’t 12,000 miles away, I would sign up for her class.
Good news for those who live in or have ties to the Northeast and Great Lakes region: next year’s ALTA conference will be held in early October in Rochester, New York, “John Ashbery country.” I’m hoping Open Letter editor Chad Post, who will be organizing the conference on behalf of the Translation Studies Program at the University of Rochester and Three Percent, will pursue my suggestion to invite Ashbery to give the keynote address. The poet’s getting on in years, but they say he still has his wits about him and gives a good talk. And he’s certainly got something to talk about: his new version of Rimbaud’s Illuminations is one of those must-read translations that make you want to throw in the towel.
—Steve Bradbury, Taipei
Review of Push Open the Window
Over at The Rumpus, Christopher Honey has a review of Push Open the Window: Contemporary Poetry from China. It’s not a perfect review, in my mind–he doesn’t acknowledge the translators by name–but he does raise some interesting issues and questions. Here are a few I found worth considering (which is not to say agreeing with):
From my own personal experience, I always wonder who I am reading when I read Rexroth’s beautiful collections of Asian poetry in translation. Am I reading Tu Fu or am I actually reading Rexroth?
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The quality and sophistication of the poets seems to go up as the poets get younger and younger. The earliest poets have a sort of untutored enthusiasm – almost like naïve art – touched by the political.
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I do not believe I am going out on a limb by saying that the more recent poets in Push Open the Window are much more fully connected to the larger literary world. As barriers to the rest of the world have dropped, poets have benefitted by cross pollination with other traditions.
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The number of translators also led to another potential issue. A single translator would have enabled a more accurate understanding of the development and changes within Chinese poetry over the last fifty years. With so many different translators, how can one be sure that a perceived, new rhetorical addition to the bag of tricks available to Chinese poets isn’t just a tic of one translator as opposed to another?
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It is hard to escape seeing it a sort of historical or sociological document on the evolution of literary schema rather than as a work of literature. What is more, with the variations in the quality of the poems, I find it hard to believe that historical thinking was not a factor in the selection process – that this book was intended to document the progress of literary evolution and not just to provide the best literary products.
Caging a Monster
Xi Chuan discussed the state of publishing in China and read his co-translations of Norwegian poet Olav H. Hauge with Harald Bøckman during Chinese Literature Week at Norway’s Litteraturehuset–with “around 4,000 attendees at 30-some events,” according to Paper Republic‘s Eric Abrahamsen–but what seems to have been the most newsworthy event was the talk by Murong Xuecun 慕容雪村 titled “Caging a Monster” 把野兽关进笼子 (translated by Jane Weizhen Pan & Martin Merz). In light of Xi Chuan’s notion of his poetics as based on contemporary China’s oxymoronism, I cite the following quotation from Murong’s speech:
My country is capable of launching a satellite into space but not of building a safe bridge across a river. My country is capable of building palatial government offices yet condemns children to substandard schoolhouses. My country provides millions of luxury cars to government official yet few safe school buses for children.
这个国家可以把卫星送入太空，却造不好一座桥。这个国家可以把政府大楼造成金碧辉煌的宫殿，却让孩子们坐在摇摇欲倒的危房之中。这个国家有无数豪华的行政座驾，却没有一辆坚固的校车。
BBC: When borrowing from China makes the US richer
When Xi Chuan and Zhou Zan were on their reading tour of the US promoting the Copper Canyon anthology Push Open the Window, the BBC caught up with them and interviewed them about Chinese poetry. On the 3rd of November they posted the article and video, titled “When borrowing from China makes the US richer.”
While I’m all for contextualizing poetry in terms of international politics and economics–writing, after all, is about something, and it often refers, in its oblique ways, to current global realities–I have to say I found the BBC report pretty lame. The article’s brushstrokes are obstinately broad, saying nothing more nuanced than “China holds trillions of dollars in US debt and the eurozone countries are looking to Beijing for bailout cash, but not all international transactions come at a price. A cultural exchange is also under way between east and west.”
Meanwhile, the accompanying video–which, unfortunately, I cannot embed into this post–hits the only two notes about China the BBC expects will resonate with English-speakers: it starts out talking about censorship, and ends up talking about classical Chinese poetry as calligraphy pans by and a reed flute lulls in the background. To be clear, Xi Chuan’s writing engages with the classics of Chinese poetry in fascinating and unexpected ways, and as a teacher of ancient Chinese literature and former calligrapher, Xi Chuan enjoyed the chance to get a private tour of the Freer Gallery and some of the pieces not normally on display. But rather than exhibit how Xi Chuan draws on the Chinese tradition, the BBC video suggests he’s an Ancient Poet (albeit one who has to deal with Maoist censorship)! When Xi Chuan reads from my translation of “Exercises in Thought” 思想练习 (a poem that opens with a demand that we reevaluate Nietzsche) Chinese chamber music kicks in and the accompanying image is a scroll of calligraphy–as if that were the text of the poem!
ALTA Conference 2011
The annual conference of the American Literary Translators Association is going on now, in Kansas City, MO. Here’s a video from incoming president and translator of Spanish poetry, Gary Racz:
The ALTA conference is reliably one of the best annual conferences there is, and I’m sad that distance and time have conspired to keep me away. This year’s panels, lectures, and readings look as enticing as ever (as I wrote about the ’08 conference in St. Paul, “People actually want to go to panels at ALTA”), so if you’re near KC, I recommend stopping by. And if you’re a literary translator who’s not a member, I recommend joining.
For updates of this year’s conference, keep an eye on Chad Post’s posts on Three Percent, which is also re-running the Making the Translator Visible series of pictures and Q&As from ’09.
Writing Across Languages debrief
The “Writing Across Languages” panel yesterday was, I thought, a grand success. As I mentioned in introducing the panel yesterday, the title itself was an act of what it describes, since the Chinese title of “Writing Across Languages” is 跨語際寫作 (“Translingual Writing”), which is the Chinese title of the monograph by Lydia Liu 劉禾 on how early 20th century Chinese literature crafted a new language out of the translations of other concepts and literatures; the title of her book in English–the language it was first written in–is Translingual Practice, a fine example of which is the transformation of the term “Translingual Practice” to 跨語際寫作 to “Writing Across Languages.” Our panel was also interesting in part because our panelists did not share a common language, and so we embodied not only writing across languages, but speaking across languages as well. Many thanks to our tireless simultaneous interpreters, Pan Jun 潘珺 and Wu Hui 吳惠!
All four participants–Bejan Matur (Turkey), Tomaž Šalamun (Slovenia), Tian Yuan 田原(China / Japan), and Yao Feng 姚風 (China / Macau)–had fascinating stories to tell and analyses to provide about their relationships with several languages, and how these languages and relationships helped create their poetry. Amidst Matur’s and Šalamun’s speeches about politically-motivated silencing–of Kurdish in Matur’s Turkey, and of Serbian in the Trieste of Šalamun’smother’s youth–I couldn’t help but think of Paul Celan, and how his writing in German worked to dismantle the language, and thereby cleanse it of its recent historical associations (some have said something similar about Bei Dao‘s search for a clean Chinese).
I think the role of the moderator is to speak little, a difficult task for me since my inclination is also to be a decidedly immoderate moderator. Nevertheless, I will add here a point I raised in response to Xu Xi‘s mention of the imperialism of English: it’s irresponsible–if not impossible–to talk about the spread of English without talking about the spread of American imperialism and all the changes, for the better and for the worse, that that has brought to the world; but the logic of empire is not to admit translations: much was translated out of Sanskrit, but Sanskrit evidently didn’t have a word for translation; Greek was translated into the “barbarian” languages, but what was kept in those languages was not transmitted into Greek; and Latin was translated into the other languages of Europe and North Africa, not the other way around. This model is mirrored in the obvious imbalance of translations into and out of English–much of translation around the world is from English into other languages, whereas translations only account for a notorious 3% of the American book market. To that end, the more we translate into English, the more we we allow English to be one language amongst others, instead of a hegemonic language imposing its logic and worldview on the rest of the world; in short, the more we translate into English, the more we are working against the imperialism of English and American economic and cultural domination.
Two more readings today for the International Poetry Nights, both at the Lee Shau Kee School of Creativity (Multi-Media Theatre, 135 Junction Road, Kowloon): at 3:30 with Vivek Narayanan (India), Silke Scheuermann (Germany), Wong Leung Wo 王良和 (Hong Kong), and Yao Feng (Macau), and then at 7:00 with María Baranda (Mexico), Chen Ko Hua 陳克華 (Taiwan), Tomaž Šalamun (Slovenia), Yu Jian 于堅 (China).