An Impossible Present: Five Poets from Nanjing at AAWW

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Nanjing is a tragic city. Its tourist spots are either places where people died or places people have been buried. Despite having been the capital during imperial China’s Six Dynasties (220-589), the city is scarred by the decline and fall of those ephemeral kingdoms. Today in Nanjing few historic landmarks remain intact, due to successive waves of destruction inflicted by Mongolian nomads, Manchu occupation, the Taiping Heavenly Army, Japanese invasion, the Civil War, and the Cultural Revolution. The city’s real history exists largely in the imagination: in myths and legends, poetry, drama, and art.

The Asian American Writers’ Workshop has published a feature of five poets from Nanjing, “An Impossible Present,” with translations by Dong Sun and Josh Stenberg, edited by Andrea Lingenfelter. Poems by Dong Sun, Huang Fan, Lu Dong, Hu Xuan, and Yu Bang. Here’s a sample from Lu Dong:

Men imitate birds
Birds imitate men’s nightmares
The greatest birds
Aim high, fly far
After a lifetime aloft
They drop from the sky
And discover that flying
Out of every kind of magic
Is the lowest trick of all.

Click the image above for the full feature.

Mani Rao at HKU: Translating the Bhagavad Gita as a Modern Poem

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Rao posterTRANSLATING THE SANSKRIT BHAGAVAD GITA AS A MODERN POEM

A talk and reading by Mani Rao about the process and challenges when translating the canonical spiritual text of the Gita.

“Rao’s  version  of  the Bhagavad  Gita unpacks  the  original Sanskrit with a range of avant garde techniques—in prosody, diction, mise-en-page and lineation—rendering a new translation of the well-known philosophical text unlike any before it.” – The Oxford Companion to Modern Poetry, 2013.

“The great virtue of The Bhagavad Gita is courage, and in her luminous new translation, Rao is courageous indeed. Her lines venture to keep pace with the original, stride for stride, revelation for revelation. As Wittgenstein wrote, ‘courage is always original.’ I can avow that Rao’s is the first truly original version of this sacred text to appear in decades.” – Donald Revell

“Mani Rao has transformed the most famous spiritual poem in India to a multi-layered poem … a poem to be perceived directly, intuitively, cutting through reason and linearity to arrive at the underlying undying poetry and grace of this epic work.” – Frederick Smith

Mani Rao is the author of eight poetry books and two books of translation. Mani worked at Star TV Hong Kong for a decade before turning to writing and scholarly pursuits full-time. She has an MFA in creative writing, and is currently doing a PhD in Religious Studies in the USA. http://www.manirao.com has links to her books and writing.

Date and Time: July 14, 2014 (Monday); 5:30-6:45pm
Venue: Room 730, Run Run Shaw Tower, Centennial Campus, University of Hong Kong
All are welcome

“Institution, Translation, Nation, Metaphor” at ACLA’s State of the Discipline Report

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The American Comparative Literature Association asked me (me? I know!) to contribute to the decennial State of the Discipline Report, and my response–titled “Institution, Translation, Nation, Metaphor“–is now live. Here’s one of my more hyperopic paragraphs:

Institution, Translation, Nation, Metaphor

While translation is too often proposed as a “problem” rather than as a solution, it is indeed a problem to narrow conceptions such as that of the institutionalized nation. David Damrosch explains in his contribution here that what I referred to above as the common language assumed for national literature departments leads too easily to deeply engrained “Herderian assumptions”: “that the essence of a nation is carried by its national language, embodied in its highest form by the masterpieces of its national literature.” Yet many of the paradigmatic forms of national literatures were in fact developed out of translations: blank verse was invented for the translation of the Aeneid by Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (c. 1516 – 1547), who also created the English sonnet by dividing the Italian into rhymed, metered quatrains (does the conceit of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese represent the form’s residual foreignness?). The stakes I see in paying more attention to translation are not, then, limited to comparatists, but to people who think in and about and from institutions of national literature, as well.

Click the link above for the full article.

hile translation is too often proposed as a “problem” rather than as a solution, it is indeed a problem to narrow conceptions such as that of the institutionalized nation. David Damrosch explains in his contribution here that what I referred to above as the common language assumed for national literature departments leads too easily to deeply engrained “Herderian assumptions”: “that the essence of a nation is carried by its national language, embodied in its highest form by the masterpieces of its national literature.”[8] Yet many of the paradigmatic forms of national literatures were in fact developed out of translations: blank verse was invented for the translation of the Aeneid by Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (c. 1516 – 1547), who also created the English sonnet by dividing the Italian into rhymed, metered quatrains (does the conceit of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese represent the form’s residual foreignness?).[9] The stakes I see in paying more attention to translation are not, then, limited to comparatists, but to people who think in and about and from institutions of national literature, as well. – See more at: http://stateofthediscipline.acla.org/entry/institution-translation-nation-metaphor#sthash.RBKrdnSP.dpuf
While translation is too often proposed as a “problem” rather than as a solution, it is indeed a problem to narrow conceptions such as that of the institutionalized nation. David Damrosch explains in his contribution here that what I referred to above as the common language assumed for national literature departments leads too easily to deeply engrained “Herderian assumptions”: “that the essence of a nation is carried by its national language, embodied in its highest form by the masterpieces of its national literature.”[8] Yet many of the paradigmatic forms of national literatures were in fact developed out of translations: blank verse was invented for the translation of the Aeneid by Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (c. 1516 – 1547), who also created the English sonnet by dividing the Italian into rhymed, metered quatrains (does the conceit of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese represent the form’s residual foreignness?).[9] The stakes I see in paying more attention to translation are not, then, limited to comparatists, but to people who think in and about and from institutions of national literature, as well. – See more at: http://stateofthediscipline.acla.org/entry/institution-translation-nation-metaphor#sthash.RBKrdnSP.dpuf
While translation is too often proposed as a “problem” rather than as a solution, it is indeed a problem to narrow conceptions such as that of the institutionalized nation. David Damrosch explains in his contribution here that what I referred to above as the common language assumed for national literature departments leads too easily to deeply engrained “Herderian assumptions”: “that the essence of a nation is carried by its national language, embodied in its highest form by the masterpieces of its national literature.”[8] Yet many of the paradigmatic forms of national literatures were in fact developed out of translations: blank verse was invented for the translation of the Aeneid by Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (c. 1516 – 1547), who also created the English sonnet by dividing the Italian into rhymed, metered quatrains (does the conceit of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese represent the form’s residual foreignness?).[9] The stakes I see in paying more attention to translation are not, then, limited to comparatists, but to people who think in and about and from institutions of national literature, as well. – See more at: http://stateofthediscipline.acla.org/entry/institution-translation-nation-metaphor#sthash.RBKrdnSP.dpuf

The Complete Sino-Platonic Papers for Free

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The entire run of Sino-Platonic Papers are now available for free download, including Jiaosheng Wang’s translations of The Complete Ci-Poems of Li Qingzhao 李清照 (1989), David McCraw’s Pursuing Zhuangzi as a Rhymester (1995), and Jonathan Ratcliffe on “The Mythos of the One-Eyed Man in Greek and Inner Asian Thought” (2014). From Victor Mair:

Sino-Platonic Papers began in 1986 and for its first twenty years remained a print publication.

In 2006, however, Sino-Platonic Papers became an electronic publication, with all new issues released on the Web for free. Since that time we have been gradually converting the print issues to PDFs so that they could also be made available for free to readers around the world. We are very pleased to announce that process is now complete–Two hundred and forty-nine and counting!

All issues of Sino-Platonic Papers are now available for free at www.sino-platonic.org.

We continue to publish new material, so check our website often to find our latest issues.

Victor Mair

Michel Hockx’s Internet Literature in China

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Internet Literature in China

by Michel Hockx

Now available for pre-order from Columbia University Press.

Since the 1990s, Chinese literary enthusiasts have explored new spaces for creative expression online, giving rise to a modern genre that has transformed Chinese culture and society. Ranging from the self-consciously avant-garde to the pornographic, web-based writing has introduced innovative forms, themes, and practices into Chinese literature and its aesthetic traditions. Conducting the first comprehensive survey in English of this phenomenon, Michel Hockx describes in detail the types of Chinese literature taking shape right now online and their novel aesthetic, political, and ideological challenges.

Offering a unique portal into postsocialist Chinese culture, this book presents a complex portrait of internet culture and control in China that avoids one-dimensional representations of oppression. The Chinese government still strictly regulates the publishing world, yet it is growing increasingly tolerant of internet literature and its publishing practices while still attempting to draw a clear yet ever-shifting ideological bottom line. Readers interested in encountering these new forms of writing, some of which are no longer available online, will value this book. Hockx interviews online authors, publishers, and censors, capturing the convergence of mass media, creativity, censorship, and free speech that is upending traditional hierarchies and conventions within China—and across Asia.

Michel Hockx is professor of Chinese at SOAS, University of London, and founding director of the SOAS China Institute. He studied Chinese language and literature at Leiden University in The Netherlands and at Liaoning University and Peking University in China. His research looks at modern and contemporary Chinese literary communities and the way they organize themselves, their relation to the state, and the technologies they employ to distribute their work. He is the author of Questions of Style: Literary Societies and Literary Journals in Modern China, 1911–1937 and A Snowy Morning: Eight Chinese Poets on the Road to Modernity.

Eleanor Goodman’s Wang Xiaoni on Circumference

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1-王小妮照片EG headshot 2014In advance of Something Crosses My Mind 有甚么在我心里一过, Circumference has published two Wang Xiaoni 王小妮 poems as translated by Eleanor Goodman. Goodman writes:

Wang Xiaoni is a poet of small gestures. The energy in her work comes not from grand pronouncements or abstractions, but from the details of daily life. She writes of trains and pockets, cold weather and potatoes, windows and the moon. Yet this poet’s daily life also includes ghosts, ancient scarecrows in dresses, and lotus ponds that bubble black.

And here’s a taste of the poetry:

Ah this mind, there is nothing it likes
it can only like the boundless black depths behind the night sky.

The train is too flustered to pick a track
it grasps the gilded silver-inlaid earth
for fear it will be thrown off, or soar up and crash back down.
Centipedes slide about, landing legs in the air, haha, in the pale moonlit night.

Click the images above for the two poems in full.

Power to the People? Heather Inwood on Contemporary Chinese Poetry at HKU

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This paper adopts a cultural studies lens to examine the often fraught relationship between China’s poetry scenes and members of the public, exploring key media dynamics and social practices that shape the writing, publication, and reception of modern Chinese poetry in the age of the Internet. I argue that so-called “new media” have also enabled new means of literary gatekeeping, whereby poets and the general public alike adopt participatory strategies for deciding what is and is not a poem. Such strategies have interesting implications for poets’ often-stated desire to continue opening poetry up to the masses, as well as for widespread assumptions about the democratizing potential of the Internet.

Heather Inwood is Lecturer of Modern Chinese Cultural Studies at the University of Manchester, where she teaches classical Chinese language and literature, modern Chinese literature, and contemporary Chinese popular culture and media. Her research focuses on interactions between contemporary Chinese literature, culture, and media. Her first book, Verse Going Viral: China’s New Media Scenes, was published by the University of Washington Press in 2014.

Date and Time: June 24, 2014 (Tuesday); 5:30-6:45 p.m.
Venue: Room 730, Run Run Shaw Tower, Centennial Campus, University of Hong Kong

All are welcome

Sal Robinson on “The Translator Writes Back”

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Melville House editor and founder of The Bridge Series Sal Robinson introduces “The Translator Writes Back“:

“The Translator Writes Back” is a Tumblr blog on which translators can post their responses to reviews of their work. It has so far one entry, from Alison Entrekin, translator from Portuguese. But oh man, what an entry … It isn’t the dismissal here that stings — all reviewers have the right to say that some words and lines and books are better than others. It’s [the reviewer’s] automatic location of the fault in the translation, without any reference to the original. It is actually an easy problem to solve, even the space of a short review: you just say whether or not you have read the original, and if you haven’t, make that clear. And then go forward with your critique. Without parceling out praise to the author and blame to the translator in a kind of “giveth with one hand, taketh away with the other” move.

In the past, a translator’s options for responding to a review like this would have been limited: a letter to the editor, grousing on Facebook, perhaps an email to the reviewer. The fact that “The Translator Writes Back” exists feels like an indication that another stage has been reached in translators’ visibility, and in making these discussions basically more intelligent and less lazy. That Entrekin signs off her letter “Faithfully” (was this deliberate? how could it not have been?) only sweetens the situation.

To submit to “The Translator Writes Back,” write to thetranslatorwritesback (a) gmail.com.

Yale’s Frederick Iseman Professor of Poetry in White People’s Languages

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“Since the 18th century, poetry has been a cornerstone of the Yale curriculum.” It makes sense that Yale News–writing from the US, in English, for a university whose English dept. has contributed and constituted much of its fame–to highlight poetry in English when discussing poetry’s stony corner at Yale and the inauguration of the Frederick Iseman Professor of Poetry Fund. Hence:

The university has been home to many distinguished figures in its teaching and study—among them William Lyon Phelps, known for his charismatic recitations of Tennyson, poet and New Criticism co-founder Robert Penn Warren, and Marie Borroff, a renowned poet, translator, and pioneer in the art of computer poetry.

But we live in non-parochial, multinational times, so it also makes sense to highlight that poetry has not only been written in English, and that the endowed professorship can be available to poets and scholars teaching in other languages:

The Frederick Iseman Professor of Poetry Fund will support a recognized living poet or a scholar who teaches poetry or dramatic poetry of any era. Those appointed may teach poetry in English, French, Italian, Spanish, German, Russian, ancient Greek, or Latin.

But notice anything? Just like Robert Penn Warren, or for that matter Harold Bloom, or Paul de Man, or anyone else important to the history of scholarship in poetry in Western languages, Yale has also been home to George Kennedy, Hans Frankel, Hugh Stimson, and Kang-i Sun Chang 孫康宜, not to mention several others in the interim who have broadened and deepened the teaching and research of Chinese poetry–and in the case of Cheng Chou-yu 鄭愁予, writing it. But their like will not be included by the Frederick Iseman Professor of Poetry Fund.

“This professorship is very broad — it can cover the work of Chaucer, Dante, Catullus, and Aeschylus, all the way to Akhmatova, Rilke, Lorca, and Beckett,” Iseman said. “Yale has a surpassing commitment to the humanities, and I want to help that any way I can.”

So broad, this professorship, that it will not cover the Shijing 詩經, Du Fu 杜甫, Li Shangyin 李商隱, or Xi Chuan. Or any poets unfortunate enough to write in Arabic, Sanskrit, Javanese, Japanese,or any other language not spoken primarily by Europeans.

George Szirtes’s Attempt to Categorise Translated Poetry

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“Poetry is very hard to translate because no poem means just one thing,” writes George Szirtes, an English poet and translator from the Hungarian.

Or rather, if two of you read a poem you might agree on a lot, but you’d take away some impressions that were different. That might be because your experiences were different – one reader might like spiders and enjoy being reminded of them because of the delicacy of their webs in the sunlight, while another might hate them and prefer not to think of their scuttling on the floor. So one reader thinks about webs, the other about scuttling.

I usually focus on Chinese poetry, of any time period, on this blog, though from time to time that will involve raising questions of translation. Less often will I draw attention to writing on translation per se, regardless of the language it comes from. But this is one of those times.

Part of why I’m linking to George Szirtes’s “attempt to categorise translated poetry” is that Szirtes is translator of László Krasznahorkai, who won the Best Translated Book Award two years in a row (including for Szirtes’s translation of Satantango last year), and I’ve become very curious about Krasznahorkai’s life and works (click here for a 3% podcast about László’s relationship with New Directions). But mostly it’s because Szirtes’s categories–“Translations that look and sound much like their originals,” “Translations that are vigorously reinvented and re-imagined so we see them anew,” “Translations that introduce us to poems from less known languages,” etc.–are so accurate and worth repeating.

And in case you absolutely insist that what I post here have something to do with China, know that Krasznahorkai’s wife is evidently a sinologist, and the time he’s spent in Asia has been very important to his developing work (particularly Seiobo There Below, translate by Ottilie Mulzet, as well as much of his yet untranslated oeuvre). Also, Szirtes mentions Du Fu 杜甫 in “Brian Holton’s translation from Classical Chinese into Scots, re-titled ‘Spring Sun on the Watterside Clachan,’” in his mention of “poems that are not translated into standard English.”