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Yang Mu wins Newman Prize for Chinese Literature
Taiwan-born and -raised poet Yang Mu 楊牧 has won the Newman Prize for Chinese Literature from the University of Oklahoma.
Yang was nominated by UC Davis professor Michelle Yeh, co-translator with Lawrence R. Smith of Yang’s collection No Trace of the Gardener (another volume, translated by Joseph Allen, was published as Forbidden Games & Video Poems: The Poetry of Lo Chʻing [羅青]). The other nominees were Hsia Yü 夏宇, Yang Lian 杨炼, Zhai Yongming 翟永明, and Ouyang Jianghe 欧阳江河, nominated by Jennifer Feeley (U. Iowa, USA), Michel Hockx (U. London SOAS, UK), Wolfgang Kubin (Bonn U., Germany), and Zhang Qinghua 张清华 (BNU, PRC), respectively.
Rare for contemporary Chinese poetry, all nominated poets have single-author collections available in English translation. Coincidentally, three of the nominees–Hsia, Zhai, and Ouyang–have had their only books in English published by Zephyr Press.
Quorum: Časopis za književnost
Quorum, featuring Miroslav Kirin & 
his translations of Xi Chuan into Croatian, as well as the following:
Luka Bekavac, Fili Žganjar, Darko Šeparović, Darija Žilić, Marija Karaklajić, Olja Savičević Ivančević, Monika Bregović, Irena Čurik,Goran Pavlić, Alem Korkut, Boris Greiner, Miroslav Mićanović, Marinela, Mario Suško, Senko Karuza, Vesna Biga, Suzana Bosnić, Darija Domić, Ivan Molek, Igor Rončević, Krešimir Pintarić, Dorta Jagić, Marko Pogačar, Katarina Brajdić, Kemal Mujičić Artnam, Tonko Maroević, Ivan Šamija, Anera Ryznar, Vladimir Arsenić
Poetry International Interview with Eleanor Goodman
Poetry International has published its interview with poet & Chinese translator Eleanor Goldman, whose responses include a plug for Xi Chuan’s Notes on the Mosquito–she calls it “an example of the work of a mature poet working at the top of his craft”! Here’s how she explains how her interests in Chinese poetry began:
I’m embarrassed to say that when I first lived in China, it was as though Chinese literature didn’t exist. I remember being so starved for something to read that I asked my father to send a box of books, and he mailed by freight a box packed with Gogol, Faulkner, and Dickens. I have no idea how he came up with that list, but it was life-sustaining. At that point, my Chinese wasn’t good enough to read anything but the simplest of texts. But when I got back to the States and started to read as part of my efforts not to forget Chinese, I encountered some wonderful books of poetry. I had brought back a children’s addition of the famous compilation, Three Hundred Tang Poems 唐诗三百首, and I started to go through it systematically. I understood a tiny percentage of the allusions, but I basked in the richness of the imagery and related to the cleverness of language and emotional depth of these little lyrics. I memorized dozens of them and would recite them to myself while taking walks. Then in graduate school at Boston University, I took Rosanna Warren’s amazing translation workshop, and as my final project I translated a selection of Wang Wei poems into English. They were terrible translations, but I didn’t know that at the time. Rosanna encouraged me to send them to the Seneca Review, which published three of them. That was a much nicer welcome than any of my own poems had gotten at that point, so I thought, this is a great racket, I’m going to keep doing this. Several years later, the poet and translator Afaa Michael Weaver asked me to help him put together a contemporary Chinese poetry conference at Simmons College, where he teaches. That was my first introduction to contemporary Chinese poetry and it knocked my socks off.
Click here for the full interview.
ALTA 2012
The annual conference of the American Literary Translators Association begins today, in Rochester, NY. In addition to the scheduled events–such as a plenary address by Is That a Fish in Your Ear? author David Bellos–there will also be recently added tributes to Michael Henry Heim, the master translator who passed away this week.
Speaking in Tongues: Chicago, October 1
International Translation Day
September 2012 Cha
The September 2012 issue of Cha is now available.
I’ll be guest-editing the “Ancient Asia Issue,” scheduled to launch this time next year–so get your submissions ready. See also their earlier publication of my translation of five sections from Xi Chuan’s “Thirty Historical Reflections” 鉴史三十章 from their China Issue.
Gamsa on Chinese Translations of Russian Writing Reviewed
The MCLC has just posted Roy Chan’s review of two scholarly books by Mark Gamsa, The Chinese Translation of Russian Literature: Three Studies and The Reading of Russian Literature in China: A Moral Example and Manual of Practice. Here’s the second paragraph of the review:
The development of good scholarship on Sino-Russian literary relations has been obstructed, perhaps foremost, by the linguistic difficulty of the endeavor. There are precious few scholars who are equally at home working in both Russian and Chinese sources, a task made more arduous when the scholar in question is neither Russian nor Chinese. Beyond issues of linguistic difficulty, however, is the problem of having a sufficient grasp of the national literatures of either Russia or China and the cultural, historical, and methodological problems that accompany the concept of the national. Linguistic expertise cannot gloss over a ham-fisted sense of literary terrain in either the Russian or Chinese context, especially considering how the latter are bound up with contentious ideological and political struggles. In the face of these daunting challenges, Mark Gamsa’s admirable control of the major issues that underlie both Russian and Chinese literatures, together with his encyclopedic ability to pull together numerous sources and facts, makes him the envy of anyone who attempts the treacherous study of
transcultural literary and textual history. While I have some reservations about points of framing and interpretation (particularly with regard to the second book), these two books chart the course for future studies and different perspectives. For these reasons, Gamsa’s contributions deserve to be recognized as nothing short of trailblazing.
