Why This Book Should Win the BTBA: “His Days Go By the Way Her Years” by Ye Mimi

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The Best Translated Book Award winners have been announced. But here’s Anna Rosenwong on why Steve Bradbury’s translation of His Days Go By the Way Her Years by Ye Mimi 葉覓覓 should win:

The ten exclamatory, cuttingly modern poems of His Days Go By the Way Her Years are shot through with sonic gamesmanship, punning, the unbridled verbing of nouns, and voraciously transcultural allusion. Many also perform an oscillation between coy formal disruption and seductive dream logic, as in the typographically resistant line: “\ every one of the ◻◻ / could find themselves sluiced by the ◻◻◻ into a water melon frappe of a summer season.” The poems are well aware of their own cleverness, but resist turning precious as they revel in grotesque particulars and subversions of the ordinary stuff of life and poetic diction.

Click the image above for the complete write-up.

Translating Chinese poetry is hard

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噫吁嚱危乎高哉!

At Language Log, Victor Mair posts (pictured here) a handwritten translation of a famous Li Bai 李白 poem, whose translator “said he was caught doing English homework in a Chinese class by his Chinese teacher. The teacher was angry and punished the student by making him translate Shǔ dào nán 蜀道难 (‘The Way to Shu Is Hard’) into English.”

For good measure, Mair posts a translation I did of the poem when I was a college senior, and published on CipherJournal.

Click the image above for the full Language Log post, and the fruitful discussion that follows.

Jury Duty & Reading Yu Xiang

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In the Jury Assembly RoomThe Coming of the Toads blogs “On Jury Duty, Poetry Gaze, and Yu Xiang’s I Can Almost See the Clouds of Dust,” translated by Fiona Sze-Lorrain:

I take the Yu Xiang from my bag. I’m thinking of poetry gaze. In a land where poetry has been devalued beyond zero, isn’t every poem a sigh of dissentire? What is poetry gaze? I feel like Yu Xiang is watching me reading her poems. But she does not care what I think, nor even what I might be feeling. Then again, her poems are like

“…a door that says:
Be careful! You might lose your way”

Click the image above for the full post.

Ouyang Jianhe named BNU Writer-in-Residence

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Ouyang Jianghe 欧阳江河 has been named a writer-in-residence at Beijing Normal University. China Daily reports:

In a symposium at BNU on March 16, Yu Hua 余华 called Ouyang a “broad and complex” poet for relating history to modern times. Mo Yan 莫言, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2012, said Ouyang’s poems always touch on the essence of life and the poet has the ability to make his culturally profound and philosophical poems understandable to the general public.

While compliments were paid to Ouyang’s literary achievement at the symposium, the poet said he wants to hear more criticism. He said that since many new things have occurred so rapidly in modern poetry over the past three decades, it’s harder for classics and milestone pieces to emerge.

“Our poems are still just the questions, not the answers,” he said.

Ouyang also said during the symposium that one of his biggest childhood dreams was to become a college professor. However, he never had the chance to even attend college as he was already 35 when he retired from his service in the army.

Click on the image for the full article.

Nicky Harman Interviews Han Dong

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Han Dong – London, April 2009Peony Moon has published an interview with Han Dong 韩东 as conducted by his translator Nicky Harman. Here’s a teaser:

NH: You famously said that, “poetry does not go beyond language” (“诗到语言为止“). Do you still believe that? If not, what do you think are the most important principles of poetry?

HD: When I said that, it was to counter the prevailing view (in China) that “the written word must express a moral view”, and to emphasize the importance of language in poetry. But ultimately this was just another creed and, to that extent, one-sided. I understand poetry in a more rounded way now, not just as in opposition to something else. Poetry is an absolute, or at least an indication of an absolute. Analysing poetry is of limited use. Poetry doesn’t exist in the abstract, only in specific poems, in the writings of a particular poet, and we shouldn’t try to over-explain it. I dream of being able to write poems which need little or no explaining, and can be understood intuitively. Readers don’t need training but poets do, and that training ought to include how to stir people’s hearts.

Click on the image above for the full interview.

Chinese Literature Dissertation Reviews: Sent-down Youth Literature in Post-Mao China

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Sent-Down Youth Literature in Post-Mao China Dissertation Reviews has posted Zhu Yanhong’s review of Wang Yanjie’s dissertation, The “Sent-Down” Vision: Poetics and Politics of Zhiqing Literature in Post-Mao China. Here’s how it begins:

Zhiqing 知青 writers are often considered by literary critics as a generation who express a profound sense of nostalgia in their writing. Yanjie Wang’s dissertation The “Sent-down” Vision: Poetics and Politics of Zhiqing Literature in Post-Mao China is an insightful and probing study that challenges this conventional yet still prevalent view of zhiqing literature. Defining the zhiqing generation rather as rootless and displaced, Wang skillfully investigates what she calls the “sent-down” vision of the zhiqing writers. She convincingly demonstrates that such a vision is enabled and enriched by zhiqings’ decade-long rustication experience and that the past associated with the sent-down experience is invoked not simply to express nostalgic feelings but rather to offer a “critique of contemporary China’s massive modernization project” as driven by developmentalism, materialism, and consumerism (p. 1).

Click the image above for the full review.

CFP: 3rd CAAP Convention, Shanghai December, 2014

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The 3rd Convention of the Chinese/American Association for Poetry and Poetics will take place in Shanghai from December 18 to19, 2014. This convention will be hosted by Shanghai University and co-sponsored by Central China Normal University, Foreign Literature Studies, Forum for World Literature Studies, University of Pennsylvania, and China Three Gorges University. Papers are called from scholars all over the world.

I. Conference Topics
1. Modern and contemporary poetry and poetics
2. Meaning/politics of poetic form
3. On and off the page: Poetry, society, culture
4. Poetry in the genealogical perspective: the evolution (and devolution) of poetic genres
5. Poetry and poetics in the context of comparative literature and comparative arts
6. Poetry in the global context: Diffusion, exchange, conflict
7. Poetry and new media
8. Poetics of translation

For the full call for papers at Charles Bernstein’s blog, click the image above.

Yang Lian in Michigan at The Struggle of Memory Against Forgetting

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As part of a three-day retrospective event to mark the 25th Anniversary of the Tiananmen Student Movement of 1989, Yang Lian 杨炼 will be giving a reading at the University of Michigan as part of The Struggle of Memory Against Forgetting: Tiananmen 25 Years On.

Location: Stern Auditorium
University of Michigan Museum of Art
525 S. State Street, Ann Arbor, MI 48109

Description:
6:00pm:  Reception ~ UMMA Commons Area
7:00pm:  Poetry Reading ~ UMMA Stern Auditorium

Yang Lian will be introduced by Kelly Askew, Director of the African Studies Center, and moderated by Professor San Duanmu, U-M Dept. of Linguistics.

Yang Lian was born in Bern (Switzerland) in 1955, where his parents were in the diplomatic service, and grew up in Beijing…
A recent passion and project of Yang Lian is to encourage the production and translation of poetry written in dialects of Chinese: Sichuan dialect, Shanghainese and Beijing dialect. There is currently no vehicle for writing poetry in these languages since Chinese orthography supports Mandarin only. Yang has been closely involved with a collective of Slovenian poets who, despite the small population of their country, support poetic production in nine Slovene dialects. He is currently working with Kelly Askew (U-M) and a formerly exiled Kenyan poet, Abdilatif Abdalla, on translating poetry composed in various dialects of Swahili into English and from English into dialect forms of Chinese. The idea is ultimately to produce a volume on ‘dialect poetry’, written in the shadows of dominant, politically powerful, languages (Mandarin and Standardized Swahili being but two examples).

Organized by the African Studies Center and co-sponsored by the Center for Chinese Studies, the International Institute, and the Confucius Institute at the University of Michigan.