Hamill’s Crossing the Yellow River Reviewed

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crossingyellowriverJohn Bradley has reviewed Sam Hamill’s Crossing the Yellow River: Three Hundred Poems from the Chinese (Tiger Bark Press) at Rain Taxi. He writes:

What is about Chinese poetry, especially the poetry of the T’ang Dynasty (618-907 CE), that has drawn so many translators over the years, such as Ezra Pound, Arthur Waley, Kenneth Rexroth, and Bill Porter, to name only a few? … Li Po’s “Questions Answered” offers a good example of that “depth and clarity and delicacy”:

You ask why I live
alone in the mountain forest,

and I smile and am silent
until even my soul grows quiet.

The peach trees blossom.
The water continues to flow.

I live in the other world,
one that lies beyond the human.

Click the image for the full review.

AAWW’s Four Poems for the Umbrella Movement

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Photo by David HillThe Asian American Writers’ Workshop has published four poems on the Occupy Central Umbrella Movement by Hongkong poets Tang Siu Wa, Chung Kwok Keung, Dorothy Tse, and Liu Waitong, as translated by Nicolette Wong, Tammy Ho Lai-Ming, and Amy K. Bell. Edited by Louise Law and introduced by Henry Wei Leung, here’s an excerpt (from Chung Kwok Keung, translated by Ho):

Let’s put silence to a coma in the dark of night
Let’s allow our voice, clear and loud, to be heard at dawn
Occupy, so that it can be put back in place
Sit down, and then stand up, one by one
When our names are called,
Each and every one of us, say: Here.

Click on the image for the full feature.

Chaves’s Wang Hongdu wins Stryk Prize

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every-rock chavesAt last week’s ALTA conference, Jonathan Chaves was announced as the winner of this year’s Lucien Stryk Prize for his translation of Wang Hongdu 汪洪度, Every Rock a Universe—The Yellow Mountains and Chinese Travel Writing (Floating World Editions, 2013). The judges were Jonathan Stalling, Janet Kim Ha, and Rainer Schulte.

Here’s a description of the work:

The Yellow Mountains (Huangshan) of China’s Anhui Province have been famous for centuries as a place of scenic beauty and inspiration, and remain a hugely popular tourist destination today. A “golden age” of Yellow Mountains travel came in the seventeenth century, when they became a refuge for loyalists protesting the new Qing Dynasty, among them poet and artist Wang Hongdu (1646–1721/1722), who dedicated himself to traveling to each and every peak and site and recording his impressions. Unfortunately, his resulting masterpiece of Chinese travel writing was not printed until 1775 and has since remained obscure and available only in Chinese.

Click the image for more information.

I Speak of Blood: The poetry of Foxconn worker Xu Lizhi

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The China Labour Bulletin has posted my translations of some poems of Xu Lizhi 许立志, a twenty-four year-old worker at Foxconn who committed suicide on September 30, 2014. As CLB reports, “In his brief two-year tenure as a production line worker at Foxconn, Xu published more than 30 articles in the in-house magazine Foxconn People.”

Here’s a sample of his work in my translation:

I speak of blood, because I can’t help it
I’d love to talk about flowers in the breeze and the moon in the snow
I’d love to talk about imperial history, about poems in wine
But this reality only lets me speak of blood

我谈到血，也是出于无奈
我也想谈谈风花雪月
谈谈前朝的历史，酒中的诗词
可现实让我只能谈到血

The blogger 鬧 has also posted translations of a different suite of Xu’s poems at libcom, and Martin Winter has his own versions in English and in German.

Tendencies in Contemporary Chinese Poetry at Harvard

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Starting Anew as a Poet: Tendencies in Contemporary Chinese Poetry
重新做一个诗人：中国当代诗歌的倾向
Eleanor Goodman 顾爱玲 and Ao Wang 王敖

Date: Tuesday, November 11, 2014, 4:15 p.m. to 6:00 p.m.

Location: CGIS South, Room S250, 1730 Cambridge Street, Harvard University

Moderator and organizer: Ling Zhang 张玲, History Department, Boston College

Click on the faces for more information.

Critic Chen Chao, 1958-2014

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3294438317Poetry critic Chen Chao 陈超 took his own life on October 31. Maghiel van Crevel writes:

Chen Chao made important contributions to scholarship and criticism. Starting from the early 1980s, he wrote numerous essays on individual oeuvres, themes, and texts, and on overarching trends in poetry and criticism.

Among many other publications, Chen served as editor of the 1993 anthology 《以梦为马：新生代卷》 [With a Dream for a Horse: Newborn Generation Volume], part of the six-volume 《当代诗歌潮流回顾》 [A Look Back at Trends in Contemporary Poetry] edited by Xie Mian 谢冕 and Tang Xiaodu 唐晓渡; and as editor-cum-author of 《20世纪中国探索诗鉴赏辞典》 [A Critical Anthology of 20t-Century Chinese Explorative Poetry], an ambitious book in the genre in which each poem is accompanied by an individual commentary, first published in 1989 and substantially revised and expanded in 1999.

Click on the image for the full post, with links to more information in Chinese.

NYTimes on The Storm of Reality

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北京文艺圈

The New York Times has a write-up on the Arts Beijing International Chinese Poetry Prize , headed by Yang Lian 杨炼, and its 50,000 entries for best poem. (In addition to Yang, Arts Beijing includes in its sphere Chinese poets such as Mang Ke 芒克, as well as W. N. Herbert, Adonis, George Szirtes, Breyten Breytenbach, Joachim Sartorius, Rebecca Horn, and Bas Kwakman) The article offers decent coverage of the breadth, if not the depth, of contemporary Chinese poetry. One point by Yang seems not only well-phrased but insightful:

“We used to say poetry was ‘hot’ because society was so ‘cold,’ ” meaning spare and poor, he said. Poets were speaking out against a highly repressive regime. “Today, they say, poetry is ‘cold’ because society is ‘hot.’ It’s economically developed. What I think they are expressing in poetry today has not been the subject of Chinese poetry before.”

Click on the image above for the article in full.

Occupy Translation

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Some weeks ago I took a walk and wrote about it. After a few more walks, I wrote a letter about something I often think about, “the ins and outs of the inter-lingual feedback loop that occurs when global events put languages and cultures in contact,” which was featured in the Asia Review of Books. Here’s how it begins:

Though many of my students have been boycotting classes, if they pay the right kind of attention, they can pick up on some of the lessons I would have led them to anyway.

Click the image above to read the brief post in full.