Category Archives: Ruminations

Translators of the World, Unite! Asymptote interviews Lucas Klein

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Patty Nash of Asymptote interviewed me about my thoughts on translation as a social movement. Here’s an excerpt:

As I understand it, the fact that we have “movie stars” developed out of a need for movie studios to mitigate risk. Basically, there’s no way for us to tell if a movie’s any good before we see it, but we’ll pay for anything our favorite star is in. The story goes that translators get reduced to invisibility because of how publishers want to mitigate risk—as in, they see publishing translation as even more of a risk than publishing anything else, even though translations also come with sales figures in other languages—but it’s conceivable that it could work the same way as it does with movie stars. I know I’ve bought books by authors and poets I’ve never heard of because I trust the taste and style of Gregory Rabassa, Suzanne Jill Levine, Eliot Weinberger, Rosmarie Waldrop, Clayton Eshleman, John Nathan, Susan Bernofsky…

Click on the image above for the full interview.

Translation & Translation Studies as a Social Movement

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I posted a piece on Paper Republic about the need to discuss translation as a way of promoting translation in English-speaking societies:

My view of translation is that it is, and should be conceived as, a broad-based social movement, one related to broad-based social movements for more internationalism and immigrants’ rights in otherwise xenophobic cultures. We translators and our supporters have already gained considerable victories in raising awareness of translation, particularly in book reviews—take a look at this piece praising How Translation Reviews Should Be Done, using as its example a review published in, of all places, the LARB—but we have further to go. Just as Harvey Milk is supposed to have inaugurated the fight for Gay Freedom (later called Gay Pride) by saying, “I am tired of the conspiracy of silence, so I’m going to talk about it. And I want you to talk about it. You must come out,” I believe that we as translators and people who care about translation need to end the conspiracy of silence and talk about translation. Talk about how translation exists in our lives, how it affects us, what it can do, what it cannot do, and overall increase our own and each others’ understanding of translation.

For the full entry, click the image above.

Chinese Literature Dissertation Reviews: Ding Yaokang & Ming-Qing Literature

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Ding Yaokang & Ming-Qing Literature Dissertation Reviews has posted Casey Schoenberger’s review of Ling Xiaoqiao’s dissertation, Re-reading the Seventeenth Century: Ding Yaokang (1599-1669) and His Writings. Here’s how it begins:

Living through the final decades of the Ming Dynasty and the first decades of the Qing, Ding Yaokang 丁耀亢 experienced and participated in one of the most tumultuous yet artistically fruitful periods in China’s history. The Shandong scholar, teacher, essayist, poet, and playwright’s extant corpus further reveals a variety nearly unmatched among his contemporaries. Why, then, have so few scholars, especially in the West, engaged with Ding’s work to the same extent they have with that of his prolific southern predecessors and contemporaries Feng Menglong 馮夢龍 (1574-1645) and Li Yu 李漁 (1610-1680)? Xiaoqiao Ling’s dissertation, “Re-reading the Seventeenth Century: Ding Yaokang (1599-1669) and his Writings” answers this and other questions as it explores major themes in seventeenth-century intellectual life from the variety of angles Ding’s complex corpus provides.

Susan Gillis’s When the City Goes Dark: Xi Chuan’s “Power Outage”

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Recently in conversation Phil Hall pointed to a source of continuing interest in lyric poetry: that the personal is political. This poem reminds me the reverse is also true.

There’s no happy discovery at the end of Xi Chuan’s “Power Outage” such as there is in my sentimental framing of the ice storm stories. When the power goes out, the poem-speaker is cast into a disordered state. The darkness reveals small sounds far and near, traces of human presence in “wind chimes and a cat’s footbeats,” an engine that stops and a song that goes on. Loneliness and isolation are almost palpable.

Then “time turns back,” and darkness takes on a deeper tone, as living crows converge around a plate of crow meat, and blackness engulfs the poem’s speaker entirely. Despair acquires an odour and a name: power outage. The poem-speaker is pitched into an impossible, subsuming blackness. All he can do is summon a frustrated mutter as he recognizes his own wordless shadow.

Click the image above for the whole piece, & for more of Gillis’s writings on contemporary poetry.

Former People Interview with Lucas Klein on China and Literary Modernism

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1280px-2004_0928_Nanjing_ZhongHuaGate_HorseRamp2C. Derick Varn of Former People: A Journal of Bangs and Whimpers interviewed me with a series of complex questions on modernity and modernism in and about China. And of course, I couldn’t resist talking about Xi Chuan and Chinese and international poetry. Here’s an excerpt:

So that’s the problem. But as I’ve argued in a piece that’s forthcoming, modernism in literature is postmodernist in its philosophical implications … And I don’t think I’ve ever believed in modernism so much as modernisms. An interesting observation is that modernist writers who come from countries that claim an ownership of tradition—modernists from France or Italy or Russia—are often the ones to say, like Marinetti, “Museums, cemeteries!” while the modernists from countries that cannot claim such ownership—Pound and Eliot from the US, Joyce from Ireland—are the ones who want to revivify the ancient amidst the machinations of the modern (this isn’t foolproof, of course: William Carlos Williams and Gertrude Stein stand against such generalizations). As for whether there’s a Chinese modernism, the interesting thing is that after the Cultural Revolution, you get both: those feeling like their country has too much a claim on tradition, and is overwhelmed and stifled by it, as well as those who feel like their country is too displaced from tradition, and needs to re-own it and re-define it. So at any given moment Bei Dao might read like a shrugging off of tradition, and Yang Lian might read like a refitting of it, and Xi Chuan a refitting of that refitting, but they’re also specific responses to the relationship between tradition and modernity as have played out in China in the past hundred years and more.

Click the image above for the full feature.

WLT Review of Han Dong & Ouyang Jianghe

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A Phone Call from Dalian World Literature Today has published Josh Stenberg’s review of Zephyr books A Phone Call from Dalian by Han Dong 韩东, translated by Nicky Harman, and Doubled Shadows by Ouyang Jianghe 欧阳江河, translated by Austin Woerner:

Ouyang Jianghe and Han Dong … both occupy established places in what, for over thirty years, has been known as avant-garde Chinese literature. In poetic approach, they represent divergent tendencies—Ouyang cosmopolitan, clean, and heavily referential; Han craftily offhand, personal, confidently bizarre, not tetchy about grime Doubled Shadowsor sex. Where Ouyang often seems to offer an argument about the cultural currents and skirmishes of today’s China, Han’s work most often reads as a lament for the failure of attempts to bridge the spaces between people

 

Lucien Stryk Prize Acceptance Speech

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Someone was impressed enough by my acceptance speech for the Lucien Stryk prize to suggest I share it here. So I am!

It’s a wonderful honor, both for me and for Xi Chuan, to be awarded the Lucien Stryk Prize for Asian poetry in translation. Any prize awarded by ALTA would be an honor, because ALTA is one of my favorite organizations to belong to—I’ve often said that literary translators are by definition interesting people, because by definition we’re interested in more than one thing. ALTA as a group and many of its members as individuals were very helpful in offering their time, patience, insight, and scolds as I worked on translating Xi Chuan, and much of my success as a translator is owed to the wisdom I gained from them.

The Lucien Stryk prize, in particular, is also a special one for me and for Xi Chuan, because of its dedication to honoring Asian poetry in translation, and the tradition of Asian poetry in translation—in addition to Asian poetry in general—was very much in my mind when translating the pieces in Notes on the Mosquito, as it was in Xi Chuan’s over the three decades in which he wrote the poems. As an undergrad English major, Xi Chuan wrote his senior thesis on Ezra Pound’s translations from Chinese, he recently published a translation of Gary Snyder’s poetry, and in many ways Xi Chuan was reintroduced to the literary history of his own culture from the attention and presentation he encountered in Pound, Snyder, and others, including Jorge Luis Borges.

I’m also especially honored to be part of the group of previous Lucien Stryk honorees—a group that already features some of my favorite translators! I find inclusion in such a group both humbling and inspiring, as the best Asian poetry in translation has always been.

I would like to extend my deepest gratitude to New Directions, to my editor Jeffrey Yang, and most of all to Xi Chuan, whose cooperation and friendship were essential to the success of this book. Until three years ago there were no single-author collections of poetry by Chinese-language poets currently living in mainland China published in the US, but now we are living in what appears to be a golden age of contemporary Chinese poetry in English translation, to match what may be a golden age of poetry in China itself. Thanks to New Directions for contributing to that golden age, and thanks to Xi Chuan for helping make that golden age in the first place!

Thank you very, very much!

Jade Mirror: Women Poets of China

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Jade Mirror: Women Poets of China, edited by Michael Farman.

The following is from a write-up by George Ovitt:
“Written in a Pavilion Lost in the Mists”
spring flowers, fall’s
full moon:
               the stuff of poems.
cloudless sun. clear
nights. here: mountain
                    spirits, loosed.
no reason I raised
the pearl-sewn blinds.
                won’t lower them.
my couch is moved for good now.
I’ll turn toward these hills
                and sleep.
(Yu Xuanji trans. by Geoffrey Waters)

What I have noticed is that aspiring poets can reproduce the simple description in this form– reminiscent of e.e. cummings–but when it comes to the real point of the poem, where the observing eye moves inward, when the poetic sensibility must construct meaning from the passive moment of watching flowers and moon and mountain–this is where the trouble begins.  Most pastiches of this sort of transparent poetry miss the point right at the line “I’ll turn toward these hills/and sleep.” What? Isn’t the romantic (and it is the easiest thing in the world to think of Chinese and Japanese “nature” poets as “romantics”–maybe not as loquacious as Wordsworth, but with the identical set of feelings) supposed to regard the hills?  Isn’t it rather anti-climactic to fall asleep?  And that’s the way these deceptive poems often work: they take us to the edge of a simple truth and turn it against us–this is the art of disappointment, or of beauty as emptiness rather than fulfillment.

Click the image above for ordering information.

To Foreword or Not to Foreword?

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SimitIn “To foreword or not to foreword?” Turkish – French translator Canan Marasligil and Chinese – English translator Nicky Harman discuss how the translator does, should, and shouldn’t frame the translation for the reader. Here’s an excerpt from Harman’s contribution:

Let me illustrate with a further question: Why do teachers consider it necessary to explain the role of the fool in Shakespeare’s King Lear? Because the modern meaning of the word doesn’t communicate the dramatic and social importance of the role. Granted, the reader will get some idea by the time they’ve finished the play. But why expect them to run barefoot through King Lear when we could give them a pair of running shoes, by way of an introductory note?  Fundamentally, I think that expecting the reader to appreciate a book without understanding the context in which the writer was writing and, even more importantly, what he or she was trying to do, is to do the writer an injustice. This is especially true when readers are unlikely to know much about a history and a culture far removed from their own experience. For example, in a collection of Hong Kong stories I translated recently, by the writer Dorothy Tse, I felt it was very important to explain her surrealism by quoting her own words: “Contrary to mainland literature that tried to borrow languages from the working class as well as the farmers in the 50s as a way to reach the public, Hong Kong’s literature has a tradition of resistance to the language of daily life. Its highly experimental language is a strategy to distinguish a literary work from an entertaining and commercial one. In Hong Kong, writing itself is an active rejection of utilitarian society and mundane everyday life.”

Click the image above for the dialogue in full.