Chinese Literature Dissertation Reviews: Nick Admussen’s Parallel Publications

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Translation Banks, Little Magazines & Online Venues Dissertation Reviews has posted Nick Admussen’s Talking Shop article “Parallel Publications: Translation Banks, Little Magazines, Online Venues.” Here’s how it begins:

Many scholars of East Asian Studies who are preparing dissertations based on archival research encounter, sooner rather than later, occasions for translation. Historians, political scientists, and literature scholars who are publishing outside their research language can rarely depend on prior work—Western-language communities simply have not translated a sufficient amount of material to allow for dissertations and monographs that exclusively cite previously completed translations. Some projects only require the scholar to summarize a few documents, or translate a sentence or two. Others translate so copiously that they serve as anthologies… This Talking Shop piece will give some options writers might consider, both during dissertation research and after, to make as much as possible out of the contribution that translation represents—even for those who don’t consider translation a stand-alone part of their intellectual or academic profile.

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Xi Chuan at the Copenhagen International Literature Festival

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The Writing China blog caught up with Xi Chuan (and Fan Wen 范稳 and Wang Gang 王刚) at the Copenhagen International Literature Festival, and has posted their replies to a brief questionnaire. Here’s an excerpt from what Xi Chuan had to say:

 

on STYLE: Earlier I wrote lyrical poems, now I just write texts embodying something not poetic. It’s more like poetic notes. I call it ‘poessay’ (散文诗), because it’s somewhere between poetry and essay.
on CHINESE AND EUROPEAN LITERATURE: I once met Doris Lessing. She asked me about the Cultural Revolution and I in turn asked her about European literature. She said that after 1989 it had become less experimental because of the need to deal with real social problems. I also feel that I can’t follow others, but my work has to relate to reality even if that reality is a disaster.
on TRANSLATION: When I translated the Polish writer Czeslaw Milosz, I didn’t use a dictionary, instead I asked my Polish friends whenever there was something I didn’t understand.
on THE UNIVERSAL POET: Being a poet means you have to make sacrifices. Both in China and Denmark. As the American poet Robert Frost has it: “To take the road less travelled by.”

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Cutbank Reviews on Yu Xiang

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61nowRuAZEL._SY344_BO1,204,203,200_Christina Cook of Cutbank Reviews has reviewed Yu Xiang’s 宇向 I Can Almost See the Clouds of Dust 我几乎看到滚滚尘埃, translated by Fiona Sze-Lorrain. Cook places Yu Xiang in the history of contemporary Chinese poetry, and says her

lines are neatly swept in a poetic house that has no cobwebs and does not pretend to be something it isn’t. The poem neither bears an underlying political agenda, as did the socialist, realist poetry of the mid-20th century; nor does it express a reaction against it, as did the Misty poetry of the late 20th century.  It does not even hint at the anti-hero, anti-allegory, anti-image leanings of her New Generation contemporaries. This is the house that Yu built, where the books of the past are no longer threatening or even relevant, aside from the presence of the stacked physical forms. They have become as benign as the tangerine tree or the piece of coal beside them.

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Not Altogether an Illusion: Lucas Klein on Burton Watson

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Illustration from Feng Yunpeng's Jinshi suoAs part of a Translation & World Literature feature, World Literature Today has published my short article “Not Altogether an Illusion: Translation and Translucence in the Work of Burton Watson.” Here’s an excerpt:

Since Chinese poetry started being translated into English, poets and sinologists have presented poetry and sinology as if they were locked in eternal conflict. In 1921 Amy Lowell said, “Chinese is so difficult that it is a life-work in itself; so is the study of poetry. A Sinologue has no time to learn how to write poetry; a poet has no time to learn how to read Chinese”; in 1958 George Kennedy said of Ezra Pound, “Undoubtedly this is fine poetry. Undoubtedly it is bad translation”; drawing a distinction between the “poet-translator” and “critic-translator,” James J. Y. Liu wrote in 1982 that while the latter’s “primary aim is to show what the original poem is like, as a part of his interpretation,” the former “is a poet or poet manqué whose native Muse is temporarily or permanently absent and who uses translation as a way to recharge his own creative battery [and] write a good poem in English based on his understanding or misunderstanding of a Chinese poem, however he may have arrived at this”; and in 2004, against those who “believe that translations should consist of word-for-word cribs in which syntax, grammar, and form are all maintained, and in which the translator is merely a facilitator who allows the original poem to speak for itself in a new language,” Tony Barnstone posited that the “literary translator is like the musician who catalyzes the otherwise inert score that embodies Mozart’s genius. . . . Fidelity, true fidelity, comes from a musician’s deeper understanding of the music.” The genius of Watson’s translations is that they reconcile the rift between poetry and scholarship.

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Review of Han Dong’s A Phone Call from Dalian

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200The Modern Chinese Literature & Culture list has posted my review of A Phone Call from Dalian 来自大连的电话 (Zephyr Press), by Han Dong 韩东, edited by Nicky Harman. Here’s a passage from the middle where I make a point about how having too many anthologies of contemporary Chinese poetry in English has come at the cost of single-author collections, and what that means for how we read and understand the poetry in question:

The situation of Han Dong within a social context is easy enough to assert, but harder to demonstrate in English, which involves an array of political considerations. I count eleven anthologies of contemporary Chinese poetry published in English around the world since 1990, for instance, but not one single-author collection published in English outside of Asia by a poet living in the PRC until 2008 (the single-author collections of Chinese poetry that were published in English were either poets dead by 1990, poets from Taiwan or Hong Kong, or exiles). The overabundance of anthologies would seem like sufficient background within which to place Han Dong, but anthologies necessarily focus on breadth rather than depth, and as a result readers may come away with a sense of motifs common to the poetry as a whole, but not of how individual poets respond either to trends or concerns in poetry or to predicaments in society—which is where style finds definition. In other words, the anthology hides what makes an individual poet individual.

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Heather Inwood: In China today, does poetry still matter?

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VerseIn advance of her Verse Going Viral: China’s New Media Scenes, Heather Inwood blogs for University of Washington Press on the place of poetry in China today. Here’s how she concludes:

Yet the move toward accessibility hasn’t always pleased the public. Making written poetry sound like everyday speech was supposed to facilitate communication between poets and their audiences. Instead, it appears to have prompted a large swathe of China’s online population to adopt a gatekeeping mentality of their own, complaining that poems that are too easily understood don’t deserve the title of “poetry.” In doing so, they inadvertently address the question I began with. Does poetry still matter? If the question is being asked in the first place, I would venture that we already know the answer.

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Heather Inwood’s Verse Going Viral

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New from University of Washington Press–Heather Inwood’s Verse Going Viral: China’s New Media Scenes.

Verse Going Viral examines what happens when poetry, a central pillar of traditional Chinese culture, encounters an era of digital media and unabashed consumerism in the early twenty-first century. Heather Inwood sets out to unravel a paradox surrounding modern Chinese poetry: while poetry as a representation of high culture is widely assumed to be marginalized to the point of “death,” poetry activity flourishes across the country, benefiting from China’s continued self-identity as a “nation of poetry” (shiguo) and from the interactive opportunities created by the internet and other forms of participatory media. Through a cultural studies approach that treats poetry as a social rather than a purely textual form, Inwood considers how meaning is created and contested both within China’s media-savvy poetry scenes and by members of the public, who treat poetry with a combination of reverence and ridicule.

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Chinese Literature Dissertation Reviews: Youth Literature on the Sino-Japanese War, China, & US

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Youth Literature on the Sino-Japanese War, China & US Dissertation Reviews has posted Steve Poland’s review of Chen Minjie’s dissertation, “Friends and Foes on the Battlefield“: A Study of Chinese and U.S. Youth Literature about the Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945). Here’s how it begins:

Youth literature is a powerful form of inter-generational storytelling, whereby one generation can pass along experiences of traumatic events to younger generations born into considerably different circumstances. In this capacity, youth literature also functions as a conduit of national myth-making and social reproduction, transforming a diverse multiplicity of individual lives into the recognizable types and tropes of desirable historical narratives. In her ambitious and insightful dissertation on the seventy-year role of youth literature in shaping postwar Chinese understanding of the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945), Minjie Chen interrogates the nation’s authorization of who gets to tell the war story in two ways. First, as indicated in the subtitle of the dissertation, Chen uses a comparative framework to analyze the different ways youth literature in China and the United States has (or has not) offered ethnic Chinese youth a narrative connection to Chinese experiences of World War II. Second, Chen provocatively challenges the hegemony of male, conflict-centered youth literature in China by producing an oral history of the wartime experiences of women in Yunhe 云和, Zhejiang, demonstrating how a different trajectory for youth literature in China may have looked through the authorship of marginalized and excluded voices. The dissertation utilizes a variety of methodologies to show how youth literature (including lianhuanhua 连环画, or “popular pictorial reading material”) has over the course of seventy years contributed to both historical memories and amnesia surrounding the Second Sino-Japanese War that retain political, economic, and social significance today.

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