Liu Qian reviews Jonathan Stalling’s Yingelishi

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YingelishiFollowing up on her interview with Jonathan Stalling, World Literature Today has published Liu Qian’s 刘倩 review of Yingelishi. Here’s how it begins:

Our appreciation of poetry almost always takes place within a single language. Although poems written in one language can be translated into other languages, often-translated poems lose their unique prosody, images, and culturally specific significance. From this perspective, Jonathan Stalling’s new book, Yingelishi, can be regarded as a crucial breakthrough. This book of poetry wanders freely between Chinese and English, leaping over the gap between sound and meaning, providing its readers with an experience virtually unprecedented as the same sounds enact poetic references in both languages simultaneously.

Click on the image to read the full review. And here’s my review again, for good measure.

The War On in American Poetry

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Poet / lawyer / blogger Seth Abramson has been blogging, as part of his preparation for his PhD preliminary exams, about the Creative Writing MFA and its place in the polysystem of American literature, especially poetry. His overall point is to overturn the standard narrative of the Creative Writing MFA, which is that it “institutionalizes.” Abramson argues pretty convincingly that the “institutionalization” reading comes from an ideologically-based analysis of the current economy of poetic production that conspicuously overlooks both the history and the present reality of the MFA as an institution. As a poet with an MFA, Abramson clearly has a dog in this fight.

But he’s also getting a PhD, which puts him in an interesting position in what he describes as the “125-year-long battle between two opposing forces in American poetry, ‘creative writing’ and ‘the Academy.’” I take it Abramson is motivated against what he sees as the predominant model of an embattled American poetry scene (as Abramson says, “the Combatants Aren’t Who You’d Suspect“), defined by Ron Silliman as the “post-avant” vs. the “School of Quietude,” and enshrined in places like Cole Swensen’s anthology American Hybrid (a hybrid can only emerge from forces in opposition to each other). Rather than the opposing forces being two different ways of writing poetry, Abramson says, it’s two different ways of conceiving poetry. My tendency in the decade or so that I’ve been following Ron Silliman’s blog has been to see the shifting battle lines historically, that is, what used to be a split between Academic Study of poetry vs. Creative Writing poetry had shifted to be a split between poetry inspired by & engaged with the continued relevance of Pound and / or Stein vs. poetry that would rather imagine that moment had never existed. Abramson is asking that we take another look at the fundamental division; if nothing else, it’s fair to say there are many fronts in this fight, as well as some unexpected allegiances.

I can relate to Abramson’s approach because I think one of the reasons I got so interested in translation during college was my frustration with many of the approaches to poetry I’d witnessed in both the creative writing classes I took and the academic courses for my major. In short, I turned to translation for something that could provide both the rigor I came to expect from academic coursework and the freedom I looked for in the Creative Writing workshop. And yet since then I have also become only more and more of an academic. In many ways this tension within me still exists, as I define the translations I don’t like (mine or by others) as being either too “academic” or too much defined by a “poetic voice” I recognize from the workshop atmosphere but don’t recognize in the poet being translated. But as an academic–albeit not of the English dept., which I think is where the brunt of Abramson’s analysis falls–I have seen a lot of how my colleagues and I and the institutions around us tend to treat the things we treat. And this is where I think Abramson’s reading of the battle between Creative Writing and the Academy falls short: basically, I don’t recognize the academy in his description of “the academy.”

Abramson makes some interesting points about the university–such as how it is “pro-multiculturalism in discourse, anti-multiculturalism in community“–but more often I find myself lost in unexplained statements like “Consistent with their academic affiliations, the forces of the Academy are anti-aesthetics and pro-poetics” and “The Academy equates aesthetics and politics.” Does that mean the Academy is anti-political? I’m confused. If I could recommend a quick corrective to Abramson’s view of the Academy, it would be that he treat it with the same care with which he treats the MFA. Be more clear on its history the recent developments within literature departments, sure (for instance, have discursive appeals to multiculturalism been followed up by increased multiculturalism amongst and within academic communities?), but specifically in terms of the relationship between the Academy as an institution–a university with a bureaucracy, endowment, and workplace regulations–and the Academy as a literature dept. in which people talk about writing. Then I’d be more interested in what he’s got to say about it, and less prone to believe that his appeals for peace between “creative writing” and “the Academy” weren’t disingenuous attempts to ensure his side more respect from the other.

Still, I do agree with his conclusions. He writes, in the last paragraph:

if we could get all these folks together we could probably remake the presence of the literary arts in the academy in a generative way that would take us to the next stage in the development of American poetry. It’s time for those dissatisfied with 125 years of fruitless propaganda-laden battles to put down their swords and seek a better way forward for all.

For me, that would have to include–and even be based on–translation.

Sean O’Brien reviews Jade Ladder

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The Guardian has published Sean O’Brien’s review of Jade Ladder: Contemporary Chinese Poetry, edited by Yang Lian 杨炼, W N Herbert, Brian Holton, and Qin Xiaoyu 秦晓宇. It’s a fine and enthusiastic take written by an obviously engaged reader conversant with the current goings-on of poetry worldwide. Here’s how it begins:

The diversity and richness of contemporary Chinese poetry defy description. As Zang Di understatedly puts it in “Cosmo-Sceneriology”, “We seem / to have come to a new place”, but the place itself is multiple. In “100 Years of Solitude for the New Poetry”, the same poet suggests that poetry “has dismissed language” and finds that “yes, for an instant, it was almost not written by you”. To the reader coming newly to the subject, or with the competing translatorial templates of Ezra Pound and Arthur Waley in mind, these are exciting declarations, even as, or maybe because, they resist confident analysis.

O’Brien also singles out Xi Chuan for mention, with an interesting observation that dovetails with some of what he writes about Chinese and Eastern European literature in the afterword to Notes on the Mosquito, “The Tradition This Instant” 传统在此时此刻:

A western reader is likely to be reminded here of Mandelstam’s ill-fated “Stalin Epigram“. Although Mao is seen posthumously by a poet born in 1960, subsequent Chinese administrations have proved just as interested in the ideological demeanour of the arts as were Kruschev and his successors in Russia. Xi Chuan’s “Commandments” could be a poem from the eastern bloc of the 1950s (in this translation it recalls Zbigniew Herbert): “you shall not covet / so it’s not a bad idea to crown yourself king in a dark room / and why not cut a skeleton key and carry it in your hand? / walk, stop, turn: in that capital city under the light of your sun / you will disdain to open each rusted lock”.

The version of “Commandments” 戒律 quoted here is Holton’s from Jade Ladder. My version is included in Notes on the Mosquito.

Tremolo interview with Jonathan Stalling

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Jonathan StallingLast month’s Tremolo was the English version of Liu Qian’s 刘倩 interview with Jonathan Stalling, which had previously appeared in Chinese in the Journal of Chuxiong Normal University 楚雄师范学院学报. Here’s the beginning (and bulk) of the interview:

LQ: So you are a scholar, translator, editor, and poet. Which one of these roles is most important to you and how do they relate to one another in your work?

JS: I don’t usually think of the title “poet” “scholar” “translator” “editor” as mutually exclusive, but porous in nature. So I cannot say if one is more important than another as they all come together into the basic components of my life along with being a father, husband, brother, son, friend, teacher etc. These are all just parts of the aggregate. But I think one can see how all of these elements come to fuse in my “work” more generally. For instance, I think of all of my work engaging in linguistic and cultural crossing and mixing. As a scholar I explore the historical crossings between American poets and Chinese philosophy and poetics; as an editor, I work with others to make a space for contemporary Chinese writers and critics to be heard in English; as a translator, I try to make available voices (like the poet Shi Zhi, who we featured in issue #2 of CLT magazine and a book of my translations will come out from Oklahoma University Press early 2012) that have not been heard in English, or to create new poetic techniques to reveal the sound of different languages within our own by bending and fusing languages together, and as a poet, finally, I write poetry in the hopes that I can find a music that enacts new forms of philosophical inquiry and ethics so that we might better attend to otherness without mastering or trying to control it with knowledge, and to re-examine the lyrical voice, the subjective voice, as ultimately arising from a plural being rather than singular one. In this way, one can think of my poetry as drawing heavily on both Neo-Daoism’s anti-ocularcentric epistemology (Guo Xiang) and various Confucian and Neo-Confucian notions of “love” and “self” (single-plural). As a literary scholar of East-West poetics, I try to understand all of the transpacific influences of China on American poetry, but this also allows me to see what has not been done, what influences have not become fully formed, and much of my work seeks to manifest poetry from the here-to-fore unexplored areas of the “transpacific mind.” ‬The next book I am presently working on “Evolving from Embryo/Changing the Bones: English as a Medium for Classical Chinese Poetry” is perhaps the most direct attempt in this regard.

Jennifer Feeley on Flash Fiction from Contemporary China

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200Modern Chinese Literature & Culture has just published Jennifer Feeley’s review of The Pearl Jacket and Other Stories: Flash Fiction From Contemporary China, edited by Shouhua Qi 祁寿华. While there’s a discussion to be had about the relationship, or difference, between flash fiction and prose poetry, Qi’s anthology doesn’t seem to engage in that point (and for what it’s worth, I’d say that Xi Chuan’s prose poems are closer to “flash nonfiction,” anyway). Here’s how Feeley begins her review:

In an age of diminishing attention spans, stories that can be read in the few minutes it takes to wait for the bus, stand in line, or smoke a cigarette are valued for their ability to entertain on demand. Mobile technologies such as text messaging and micro-blogging on cell phones and tablets spur both the production and consumption of this economic genre—the shortest of these works can be contained within a single computer screen or a few text messages. Flash fiction (微型小说), or short-short fiction, is by no means a recent phenomenon, however. Shouhua Qi, editor and translator of The Pearl Jacket and Other Stories: Flash Fiction From Contemporary China, traces its multiple origins thousands of years back to Aesop’s fables from ancient Greece and the Chinese creation myths of Nüwa, Fuxi, and Pangu.

Interview with Antibookclub

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The Arabic Literature (in English) blog has posted an interview with Antibookclub founding editor Gabriel Levinson about their new plan for re-vivifying the publishing industry in the 21st century. Consciously modeling Antibookclub off Grove, Black Sparrow, and New Directions, here’s how Levinson explains responding to the challenges of publishing translations in English:

GL: The biggest challenge, unfortunately, is the risk factor: Before I took on the role of publisher, I was confused as to why only 3% of our books are translated literature, but getting into it was a big wake up call: It costs quite a bit for a book to be translated and even then you don’t know if it’s a book you want to publish until you read it. To put up the money for a manuscript that may or may not be publishable is a daunting task, and when you are as small as us with only two books a year…such a risk is not negligible. But we are determined to find the most exciting literature in the world and even if we cannot release as many translated works as we would like to in these early days, it is our long term goal to remain committed to the global scene.

Hai Zi Festival in Qinghai

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From China Daily, this report on an upcoming festival to honor Hai Zi 海子, an early friend of Xi Chuan’s, in Qinghai Province 青海:

To commemorate Haizi, a bust made of jade from Kunlun Mountain will be unveiled beside Bayin River during the festival, along with 18 stone slabs of different shapes engraved with his poems.

A memorial hall encompassing 1,300 square meters will open to exhibit his legacy, including his works and personal belongings.

The poetry festival will assemble contemporary Chinese poets and critics for seminars on Haizi and other Chinese poets. A poetry contest will be held for entrants from all over the country.

Xi Chuan in Scotland in August

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According to the bewilderingly titled “Edinburgh to start festive season with Chinese elements” posted on Xinhua Net’s English site, Xi Chuan will be in Scotland in August for the Edinburgh International Book Festival. The article reports:

Another cultural event is the Edinburgh International Book Festival, scheduled for August 11-27, which will invite 800 authors from 43 countries and regions, including China, said Frances Sutton, press manager of the festival.

“They include Guo Xiaolu, Li Yiyun and Xi Chuan,” she said.

Aside from Xi Chuan, I find this a strange list with which to promote Chinese literature. Both Li Yiyun 李翊雲 and Guo Xiaolu 郭小橹 write in English.

How “International” is Poetry?

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At the English Pen site, Michele Hutchison has posted an article titled “How international is poetry?” that looks at the kind of poetry included in international literary festivals like Rotterdam. Here’s a bit of what she says:

If international is taken to mean universal and accessible to all, there are a few stumbling blocks. A haiku is not the same as a sonnet is not the same as badi, but cultural context is just as complex as form. […] The reader/listener’s knowledge or ignorance of a foreign culture is just as limiting to the transmission of literature as a translator’s inability to pick up and carry across all of the layers of meaning, without footnotes.

During the course of the symposium, I learn that K. Satchidanandan has translated his own work into beautiful English and in doing so, he has opted to cut out cultural references which might disturb the Western reading process, for example, ‘rain from the Hindu Treta Yuga period’ has become ‘rain from a bygone age’. Is this globalisation that Tim Parks keeps writing about on the NYR blog at work? Have the poets been invited precisely because they write the kind of neutral, non-culturally specific poetry that translates and travels easily?

In addition to what Tim Parks has written w/r/t fiction, this is also close to what Stephen Owen wrote in a review of Bei Dao‘s 北岛 poetry in 1990: a certain kind of “international” or “world poetry” crops up that translates well, but which gives undue weight to the cultural expectations of readers in Europe and North America at the expense of literary traditions in other parts of the world. Hutchison takes this even further, noting that poetry from other parts of the world may still come up short when judged against writing from the center of the current world system, which will find ways of reiterating its own centrality:

Headliner Ron Silliman, one of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets, reads work that is playful and incomprehensible. Does he get away with this because he writes in English and refers to the dominant culture? […] Are the most complex and impenetrable poets here the ones who write in English?

While this is an interesting argument to pursue, and important for understanding what’s been happening, and what continues to happen, in literary history around the world, the way the argument slides over too easily into value judgment bothers me. Certainly it’s a problem that local traditions are being sacrificed at the altar of international exchange, but a poem is not necessarily good or bad because it embodies or rejects cultural specificity (to be fair, this is the point Hutchison makes at the conclusion of her post).

Moreover, just as translation can be a vehicle for the global propagation of an American Standard poetry (and we should remember that American Standard usually refers to a toilet), translation can also work against that standardization and remind readers in a new language that writing from around the world can be at least as complex and rewarding as what they’re used to. Hutchison quotes Poetry International magazine’s Correen Dekker, who explains that “translators are more willing to work on texts which allow for a successful end product”; this is true, but for me translating Xi Chuan, I do not judge the success of the end product based on how much it adheres to an ethnocentric vision of poetry cleansed of foreign reference points, but rather on how it expresses an aesthetic experience that can include the complex fullness of what both poetry and Chinese culture can entail.