Omniglot Seminar: Cosmologies of the Classical with Chloe Garcia Roberts & David Hinton

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headshotDavid Hinton, author of Mountain Home and translator of Chinese poets including Wang Wei 王維, Hsieh Ling-Yün 謝靈運, and Bei Dao 北島, joins Chloe Garcia Roberts, translator of Derangements of My Contemporariesheadshot by Li Shangyin 李商隱. They will discuss their individual approaches to classical poetries and cosmologies, while exploring the influence of classical Chinese poetry on American modernism.

When: Wednesday, September 24, 6:00 p.m.
Where: Woodberry Poetry Room, Lamont Library, Room 330.
Harvard University, Cambridge MA

Li Shangyin translations at Drunken Boat

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Drunken Boat has published three poems by Li Shangyin 李商隱 in my translation.

I’ll come is   empty talk   I’ll go and then no trace
The moon slants   over the tower   the fifth clack of the bell

Li Shangyin 李商隱The page also includes a note where I explain how my translations “aim to link the opposition to the social order that motivated these poems in the ninth century with an opposition to the social orders relevant to dense and allusive poetry today.”

Thanks to Managing Editor Erica Mena, Translation Editor Anna Rosenwong, and founding editor Ravi Shankar for including my work!

Video of Ouyang Jianghe reading from Phoenix

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The write-up from Paul Manfredi’s China Avantgarde blog:

Ouyang Jianghe’s 欧阳江河 poem was inspired by a sculptural work of the same title by Xu Bing 徐冰. Xu Bing’s sculpture, actually two sculptures–a male “feng” 鳳 and female “huang” 凰– is comprised almost entirely of objects found on worksites in Beijing … Ouyang’s poem was also a two-year project, extending between 2010 when he saw Xu’s sculpture in New York, and 2012, when the work of 19 stanzas was finally published. At roughly 400 lines, the poem was first published in 2012 by Oxford (Hong Kong), and then re-published by Chinacitic Press this past July. The recording of the poem in the video took place on July 5, at the Central Academy for Fine Arts in Beijing where Chinacitic was promoting Ouyang’s book…  Xu Bing was also present at the event.

As Manfredi’s first feature in his Visual Poets series, the reading is preceded by close-ups of Ouyang Jianghe’s calligraphy of poetry by Bei Dao 北島 in different styles. Subtitled translation by Austin Woerner. Available for order from mccm creations.

Song of Shadows from Restless Books

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Restless Books announces the publication of Song of Shadows by Xiao Hai 小海, translated by Zhu Yu 朱玉. Here’s a hint:

影子说，
在确定的末日，
我们要加倍繁殖，
就像你们的词典– – 。

Shadows say,
“On the decided doomsday,
we will multiply more than ever,
just like your dictionary—”

Click on the cover image above for purchasing information.

Oleander Press’s Selected Poems of Xu Zhimo and Denial of the Translator

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PictureOn their promotional webpage for the Selected Poems of Xu Zhimo 徐志摩, Oleander Press cites Andrew Hamilton’s praise for the volume’s “excellent translations.”

Hamilton’s praise, however, must not have registered enough with the Oleander editors, since nowhere in the book do they credit any translator, and on the copyright page the press–not the translator–asserts copyright over the translation.

I’ll quote The Complete Review on a similar case:

Folks, this is not okay. This is not acceptable. This is outrageous.
… any publisher that is commissioning ‘work for hire’ translations, or that retains the translation copyright, is not doing right by authors, translators, readers, or the literary culture in general.
I remind you that PEN explicitly advises translators: “We do not recommend accepting work-for-hire agreements”. No kidding. But translators often don’t have bargaining power; publishers with any sort of integrity shouldn’t even be suggesting it. (Alas, many, many still do — you know who you are, and shame on you.)

My sources tell me that Oleander, a Cambridge UK-based press, is only publishing this book to sell as a souvenir to tourists to their city (a demographic that in recent years has trended Chinese), where Xu famously attended classes for a year. I do not see this as a sufficient excuse for refusing to credit the translator, particularly when they advertise their publication of “excellent” versions.

Jeffrey Yang wins NEA Fellowship to Translate Bei Dao Memoirs

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Cover of "The Art of Empathy' and full page spreadThe National Endowment for the Arts announced their Literary Translation Fellowships recently, with one of the fellowships going to Jeffrey Yang for his translation of City Gate Open Up 城門開, a “lyrical autobiography” by Bei Dao 北島. Here is the NEA’s announcement:

A $25,000 fellowship to Jeffrey Yang (Beacon, NY) to support the translation from the Chinese of City Gate Open Up, a lyrical autobiogaphy by poet Bei Dao. This project aims to translate the lyrical prose memoir of his childhood and adolescence in Beijing, where he was born in 1949. It is a book not only of the poet as a child, but of the metropolis itself, coming alive through the memories of its neighborhoods and residents, gardens, and temples, schools and music, and vibrant ways of life. Since the Tiananmen Square Massacre in 1989, [Bei] Dao had been living in forced exile, moving from country to country, forbidden by the Chinese government to return to his homeland. The compulsion to write this book began in 2001, when Dao was allowed back into China to see his sick father.

Click on the image above for more information about other fellowship winners, and to download The Art of Empathy, the NEA’s new collection of essays about the importance of literary translation.

Literary Translation Fellowships
Literary Translation Fellowships

Forthcoming: Burton Watson’s Chinese Rhyme-Prose Re-release

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Chinese Rhyme-Prose coverBurton Watson’s 1971 collection Chinese Rhyme-Prose will be re-released as part of the New York Review Books / Chinese University Press Calligrams series, with a short essay of mine as a preface. Here’s a sample of the jacket copy from the publishers:

The fu, or rhyme-prose, is a major poetic form in Chinese literature, most popular between the second century BCE and the sixth century CE. Unlike what is usually considered Chinese poetry, it is a hybrid of prose and rhymed verse, more expansive than the condensed lyrics, verging on what would be called Whitmanesque. The thirteen long poems included here are descriptions of and meditations on such subjects as mountains and abandoned cities, the sea and the wind, owls and goddesses, partings and the idle life.

Click on the image above for pre-ordering information.

Asian Review of Books on Goodman’s Wang Xiaoni

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The Asian Review of Books has published Jennifer Wong’s review of Something Crosses My Mind 有什么在我心里一过 by Wang Xiaoni 王小妮, translated by Eleanor Goodman. Here’s an excerpt:

Goodman’s strength as a translator lies in her ability to render the Chinese poetic language faithfully and with elegance, adhering to syntax and line breaks, while taking care that the translated verse does not alienate the reader. She has kept true to Wang’s immediate, unaffected voice, and maintained her uncanny, pithy word choice. She also refrains from the temptation to over-translate or gloss over the strangeness of poetic language. A fuller annotation of terms might however benefit those readers unfamiliar with Chinese rituals, regional life and dialects. The decision to make this book a bilingual edition makes it possible for sinologists and those who are able to access both languages to compare and understand how Chinese and English poetic language and form operate.

Click on the image above for the full review.

Stanford News on Egan’s Li Qingzhao

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Poet Li QingzhaoStanford News has a brief feature on Ronald Egan’s new book on Li Qingzhao 李清照 (1084-1150s): The Burden of Female Talent: The Poet Li Qingzhao  and Her History in China, they say, “is the first critical treatment of Qingzhao’s writing in English to appear in 50 years.” They don’t know that Chinese surnames come before given names, but the feature is still worth reading. Here’s an excerpt focusing on what makes Egan’s approach important:

Unlike traditional Chinese scholarship, Egan’s groundbreaking approach to investigating Li Qingzhao’s life and writings examines her place in history before analyzing her literary work. Reconstructing the social and literary world in which Qingzhao wrote has to come first, Egan explained, because it enables him to address the gender biases she has faced throughout the past 800 years of Chinese scholarship and criticism.

“I can’t start talking about my understanding of her literary works,” Egan said, “until the reader sees the whole story unpacked and deconstructed. And then we can go back with all that in mind and have a fresh look at her literary works. Only by doing that can we accurately gauge her achievement as a poet.”

Click the image above for the full piece.

A Student’s Dictionary of Classical and Medieval Chinese

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Forthcoming from Brill, A Student’s Dictionary of Classical and Medieval Chinese, edited by Paul W. Kroll with William G. Boltz, David R. Knechtges, Y. Edmund Lien, Antje Richter, Matthias L. Richter, & Ding Xiang Warner. From the press description:

A Student’s Dictionary of Classical and Medieval Chinese is the long-desired Chinese – English reference work for all those reading texts dating from the Warring States period through the Tang dynasty. Comprising 8,000+ characters, arranged alphabetically by Pinyin.
As a lexicon meant for practical use, it immensely facilitates reading and translating historical, literary, and religious texts dating from approximately 500 BCE to 1000 CE. Being primarily a dictionary of individual characters (zidian 字典) and the words they represent, it also includes an abundance of alliterative and echoic binomes (lianmianci 連綿詞) as well as accurate identifications of hundreds of plants, animals, and assorted technical terms in various fields. It aims to become the English-language resource of choice for all those seeking assistance in reading texts dating from the Warring States period through the Tang dynasty.

Over at his blog, Tom Mazanec calls this “the most important development in Classical Chinese-to-English lexicography since R. H. Mathews’s Chinese-English Dictionary (from 1943).” He says, “nearly every other Chinese dictionary out there lumps together a character’s usage over 3,000 years in a single entry, with no notes on time. This deliberate ignoring of linguistic development help create a false sense of a timeless, unchanging ‘traditional China,’ a myth widespread among East Asians and Westerners alike” (and gives an example of Kroll’s exacting sense of English vocabulary to render medieval Chinese).

Click on the image for further details, including ordering information.