Contemporary Chinese Literature in Translation at AWP

Posted on by

Thursday, March 7, 4:30 p.m. to 5:45 p.m.:

R267. Contemporary Chinese Literature in Translation. (Lucas Klein, Xi Chuan, Jonathan Stalling, Eric Abrahamsen, Eleanor Goodman) Panelists will discuss the pleasures and frustrations they encounter translating contemporary Chinese literature, including issues of linguistic differences between Chinese and English, problems of copyright, the rise of web-based literature, and how to identify appropriate projects. Each panelist will read a short excerpt of recent work to illustrate. Xi Chuan will speak as a poet whose work has been translated into English and who has also translated literature into Chinese. (Room 305, Level 3)

New Issue of Cerise Press

Posted on by

The new issue of Cerise Press is here, with work by Stephen Kessler, Ron Padgett, Eileen Tabios, Lu Ye 路也 translated by Dian Li , and more. Click the image above for the full issue.

see my feature “Xi Chuan: Poetry of the Anti-lyric” from an earlier issue, with translations of “Power Outage” 停电, “Re-reading Borges’s Poetry” 重读博尔赫斯诗歌, and “Three Chapters on Dusk” 黄昏三章. (And my earlier co-translations of poems by Bei Dao 北岛 with Clayton Eshleman).

Chinese Literature Dissertation Reviews: Esther Sunkyung Klein’s History of a Historian

Posted on by

Sima Qian & the Author-Function Dissertation Reviews has posted Vincent Leung‘s review of Esther Sunkyung Klein‘s The History of a Historian: Perspectives on the Authorial Roles of Sima Qian. Here’s how it begins:

Sima Qian 司馬遷 (ca. 145 or 135 BCE-86 BCE) once famously declared that his monumental Shiji 史 記 (ca. 91 BCE) is intended not for readers in his own time but for those in posterity. The reason for such an authorial gesture, unusual in the early Chinese corpus, is unclear, but in any event he would not have been disappointed had he been able to witness the tremendous reception of the Shiji in the last two millennia. It is fair to say that the Shiji is one of the most widely read texts in the entire Chinese literary tradition. This is easily attested by the staggering amount of commentaries on it throughout the imperial period as well as the numerous articles and monographs devoted to its study over the last century. This voluminous scholarship represents an expectedly diverse range of readings of the Shiji, with the nevertheless common goal of articulating the significance of the Shiji as intended by its compiler Sima Qian by reconstructing an accurate and relevant context for its composition. Readings that disagree on the significance of the Shiji are essentially disagreements over how it should be properly contextualized in relation to its author and/or the supposed historical condition of the early Han, and over the last two millennia as many contexts motivating Sima Qian have been imagined as there have been readers of the Shiji.

Schedule of Xi Chuan’s US Reading Tour 2013

Posted on by

Thursday, March 7:

4:30 – 5:45: AWP Boston: R267. Contemporary Chinese Literature in Translation, with Eleanor Goodman and Jonathan Stalling (Room 305, Level 3)

7:30: Cha: An Asian Literary Journal reading at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University, with Eleanor Goodman, W. F. Lantry, Kim Liao, Mai Mang (Yibing Huang), Tracy Slater, Marc Vincenz, and Nicholas YB Wong. Hosted by March issue guest editors Kaitlin Solimine and Marc Vincenz.

Friday, March 8:

12:00 – 1:30: Harvard University EALC Common Room (2 Divinity): Notes on the Mosquito – Poetry Reading and Talk by Xi Chuan, moderated by David Der-wei Wang and Lucas Klein

Monday, March 11:

7:00-8:00: Middlebury College Axinn Center 229: Poetry Reading by Xi Chuan

Tuesday, March 12:

4:30: Middlebury College Robert A. Jones ’59 House conference room: Translating Poetry: A roundtable discussion with Chinese poet Xi Chuan, Central Academy for Fine Arts (Beijing), and his translator, Assistant Professor Lucas Klein of City University of Hong Kong, and Middlebury College faculty.

Wednesday, March 13:

6:30 – 8:30: “Senses of Reality” 现实感 — A Talk from Chinese Writer & Poet Xi Chuan, with translator Lucas Klein, at NYU China House, 8 Washington Mews

Friday – Saturday, March 15 – 16:

2013 Princeton Poetry Festival

SCMP on Bai Hua’s Wind Says

Posted on by

The South China Morning Post has published a review of Wind Says 风在说 (Zephyr Press), by Bai Hua 柏桦 and translated by Fiona Sze-Lorrain.

It’s a positive review, but it’s a horribly written one: full of cliches about Chinese essences (“Messages are conveyed in sharp but poignant images, paying homage to Chinese and Western writers of the past, as well as to the philosophical tradition in which Chinese writing is steeped.”), the untranslatability of translated poetry (“one must question how much is lost to the non-Chinese reader in translation”), and literary historical nonsense (“realism is, after all, a defining characteristic of Misty poetry, a reaction against restrictions on art during the Cultural Revolution”). By the time we reach the end line (“In Bai’s poetic voice, one can almost feel the winds of change blowing through the pages”), I feel queasy and am embarrassed to say I like the translations in a book that could inspire such homely homilies.

Oh, and there’s a picture of Chinese mountains enshrouded in mist–you know, because Bai Hua is post-“Misty,” get it?

Petition to Macalester College in Support of Wang Ping

Posted on by

Following last week’s post on Wang Ping’s grievance against Macalester College, here is a petition saying, simply:

For more background and to sign the petition, click the image above. The beginning of the explanation reads:

Wang Ping is an internationally renowned poet and professor at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota. She has published ten books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. As an academic advisor, her students have gone on to become award-winning authors and even professors themselves. Macalester should be proud to have such a brilliant woman teaching at their institution.

But they’re not.

Yet More Mo Yan

Posted on by

Sandalwood Death and Pow! make the top of the New York Times’s “Editors’ Choice” book list: “Abuse of power, gross materialism, corruption and venality are the targets of the Chinese Nobelist’s satirical novels.”

Yiyun Li reviews Pow!: “Perhaps this is a way to stay away from politics: to be a fabulist, but not to be taken so seriously.”

Ian Buruma of the New York Times reviews Pow! and Sandalwood Death: “By concentrating on human appetites, including the darkest ones, Mo Yan can dig deeper than political commentary. And like the strolling players of old, the jesters and the public-square storytellers he so admires, Mo Yan is able to give a surprisingly accurate impression of his country. Distorted, to be sure, but sharply truthful, too. In this sense, his work fits into a distinguished tradition of fantasists in authoritarian societies: alongside Mikhail Bulgakov or the Czech master, Bohumil Hrabal.”

Chad Post talks to Tom Roberge in the first 3% Podcast of 2013 about Pow! and Sandalwood Death and the wrongness of how Mo Yan has been pitched for his cultural significance rather than his literary significance. Roberge asks, “What are you selling? Are you selling the book or are you selling the fact that it’s different, and a novel about China?”

Charles Laughlin speaks on “Mo Yan’s Nobel Prize: Resetting Chinese Literature” at University of Iowa.

Notes on the Mosquito on New Books on East Asian Studies

Posted on by

Carla Nappi of New Books in East Asian Studies spoke with me (yes, me!) about my translation of Xi Chuan’s Notes on the Mosquito: Selected Poems. Here’s her flattering write-up:

First things first: this is a book of amazing, beautiful poetry, and you should read it.

In translating Xi Chuan’s Notes on the Mosquito: Selected Poems (New Directions, 2012), Lucas Klein has given readers access to a bilingual journey through more than two decades of Xi Chuan’s evolution as a writer, a person, and a historian. The poems collected and rendered in Notes on the Mosquito range from evocative lyric verse about shepherds and loneliness to historical essays that consider the “New Qing History.” (It is a striking range, and one that was quite unexpected for this reader and historian.) In our conversation, Lucas was generous enough to explain many aspects of his process and approach as a translator, and to read a number of the translated poems collected in the volume. We talked about several aspects of his work, including both practical issues and more conceptual questions about the linking of history and poetry in the writing of a poet and a reader’s approach to the resulting work. It was a pleasure, and I hope you enjoy listening.

Click the image above or listen here:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Chinese Literature Dissertation Reviews: Richard Jean So’s Coolie Democracy

Posted on by

“Coolie Democracy”, US-China Exchanges 1925-1955 Dissertation Reviews has posted Nan Z. Da‘s review of Richard Jean So‘s Coolie Democracy: US–China Political and Literary Exchange, 1925–1955. Here’s how it begins:

Literary-critical study of China-US relations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is experiencing an exciting emergence, and Richard Jean So’s dissertation, Coolie Democracy, finds itself at the vanguard of this development in the field. This project combines language expertise with transnational methodologies that emerged from Americanists’ de-centering of the United States to forward a self-consciously comparative study of alternative forms of the democratic discourse from the 1920s to the 1950s. At the macro-level, Richard So makes a literary-historical argument and a political-theoretical argument. He looks at an “in-between” time in American literary history and the history of US-China relations from 1900-1950, a period that current scholarship strings along a series of flashpoints: anti-Chinese sentiments and policies in the late 1800s; the repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Acts in 1943; the concurrent formation of Chinese-American immigrant communities and identities; and the official “break” between China and the United States over Communism and political allegiances on the eve of World War II. So recovers a forgotten segment in this period. So reconstructs, through meticulous and creative research, a series of unlikely Chinese-American exchanges and intellectual circles. These exchanges and collaborations coincided with the rise of the Leftist cultural front in the US, a movement So investigates for its transnational figures and their complicated translingual activities in China. This was a moment during which American and Chinese authors actively and directly engaged with each other to think out in literature the possibility of a politically united “Chinese America.” This by-and-large discursive “Chinese America” would be built upon a shared concept of “natural democracy” that comes organically of the texts of both nations, a concept that called upon the figure of the coolie to serve as an example of such democratic principles in praxis and as a cipher of mutual resistance against capitalism.