As one who has had the good fortune to see and hear Xi Chuan for some years, publication of Notes on the Mosquito affords the long-anticipated pleasure of reading him. And what a pleasure: this book, with translator Lucas Klein’s introduction, Xi Chuan’s own Afterword, and its bilingual presentation of the poems, is a literary highlight of the year. The sensibility in these poems is unlike anything else in my reading–unique in its knowing, range, humor, smartness–and yet with a humility, an awareness of things larger and older. It will be fun putting this in other readers’ hands.
–Rick Simonson, Elliott Bay Book Company
Officially Released!
CBC Radio Interview with Xi Chuan
An excellent interview with Xi Chuan done a couple years ago by Eleanor Wachtel of the Canadian Broadcasting Company has just been released online, in advance of tomorrow’s release of Notes on the Mosquito.
Click the icon above to listen to Xi Chuan explain the complexities of China today, his thoughts on China’s future–and the future of its past–and his country’s propensity, as he sees it, for oxymoron. His interview starts at the 30:55-minute mark.
Poem Flow: The Other Side of the River
I still want to give updates on my trips to New Zealand and India (including my brief visit in Delhi with Xi Chuan’s friend and mine, poet Vivek Narayanan), but first, there’s this amazing bit of poetic application, from Poem Flow and the American Academy of Poets, my translation of Xi Chuan’s “The Other Side of the River” 在河的那一边 (click the image to see the poem in action):
I’m back from my trip to India
from Xi Chuan’s “A Sanskrit Brick from the Nanzhao Kingdom (738–937 CE): After a Vietnamese Poet” 南诏国梵文砖：仿一位越南诗人:
On the gray-green brick eleven lines of Sanskrit. The hands that molded the Sanskrit lines. The hands that inlaid the brick into the base of the pagoda. The late Nanzhao monk who could read the eleven lines of Sanskrit. The man or men who brought Sanskrit from India through Nepal to Nanzhao.
Short Takes on Long Poems
The Short Takes on Long Poems conference, from which I just returned on Monday, was one of the better short academic conferences I’ve attended–in part because it wasn’t entirely academic, but a mixture of explications of long poems and recitations or performances of long poetry as well. I showed up late, so unfortunately had to miss seeing my friend Jacob Edmond‘s presentation (which was very funny, according to all reports), but I met his father Murray Edmond, as well as Hilary Chung, and had great run-ins with John Tranter, Pam Brown, Robert Sullivan, Susan Schultz, and Rachel Blau DuPlessis, all of whom, I’m happy to say, were not only enthusiastic about my presentation on Yang Lian 杨炼 and Xi Chuan, but also looking forward to the release of Notes on the Mosquito. In the afternoon of the second day, we spent the afternoon on Waiheke island–a forty-minute ferry ride from Auckland–writing a physically long poem on the beach. Given that Chinese poet Gu Cheng 顾城 had lived and committed suicide on the island, I commemorated him in my section of the poem with his most famous lines, 黑夜给了我黑色的眼睛 / 我却用它寻找光明.
Also at the conference the new issue of k a m a t e k a o r a was released, with a slew of discussions and commentaries on poetry and translation. Hilary Chung’s “Ghosts in the City: The Auckland Exile of Yang Lian and Gu Cheng” I found particularly helpful.
Paper / Back
I got back last night from New Zealand, where I’d been for the Short Takes on Long Poems conference (which I’ll go into detail about later), to find this nice gift sent from New Directions:
Click the pic for ordering information.
Translator Page Online at New Directions Website
In addition to the webpage for Notes on the Mosquito being finally up, New Directions has also uploaded my translator’s page, with brief bio & picture (yep, that’s me), and of course a link to the main Notes on the Mosquito page. A blurb at the top of the page promoting other New Directions authors changes with each re-load, but for the moment, I can pretend “A keenly discriminating literary mind”–a quip from the New York Times Book Review on George Steiner–is about me.
Crossing Paths
Talk about “world” poetry. Xi Chuan arrives in Hongkong tomorrow morning to take part of this spring’s International Poets in Hong Kong event at Chinese University, leading workshops on American poetry and introducing his translations of Gary Snyder (Snyder will be here at the end of April; I’ll be moderating a couple of his programs). Given inopportune scheduling, though, I’m flying to New Zealand tomorrow evening to attend the Short Takes on Long Poems conference with Rachel Blau DuPlessis (and Jacob Edmond, Susan Schultz, and others), where I’ll be presenting on Xi Chuan and contemporary Chinese poetry. Unfortunately, Xi Chuan leaves Hongkong the day I get back from Auckland! At least I’ll be able to have a quick lunch with him tomorrow before I leave.
B. J. Epstein on Reading Translations
My old friend B. J. Epstein (we co-edited our school’s literary journal back in high school) is a translator from Swedish and Norwegian (interestingly, not only did we both end up as translators, we both translate from languages not taught in our high school when we were there), and a blogger for HuffingtonPost UK. Her most recent piece is on how to read translations. Here’s an excerpt:
If we consider how we read – just compare how you read the newspaper to how you would read a textbook, or how you read a novel when you were a teenager to how you do so 15 years later – it becomes clear that we do read different texts in different ways, with different aims guiding our reading, at different points in our lives and in different contexts. This suggests, then, that reading a translation will be a different project from reading a non-translated piece of writing, and also that there are multiple ways of reading a translation, just as there are multiple ways of reading any text.