The New Directions webpage for Notes on the Mosquito is finally up. Click on the image above to order the clothbound edition.
Jade Ladder Now Available for Order
Click image to order Jade Ladder: Contemporary Chinese Poetry, edited by Yang Lian 杨炼 and William Herbert with Brian Holton and Qin Xiaoyu 秦晓宇.
Chris Livaccari on Overcoming Misconceptions about China
Salon.com posted an interview with Chris Livaccari of the Asia Society (New York) with a guided reading list of how to overcome misconceptions about China. Here’s how he begins his responses:
I recently asked some school kids, “If you had the opportunity to go to China today, what do you think you would see?” One of the students said there would be a lot of lanterns everywhere, a lot of red, and a lot of dragons. I thought, “Wow. If this kid stepped into Shanghai in 2012, he would really be bowled over.”
The books he mentions are Robert Ramsey’s The Languages of China, Joanna Waley-Cohen’s The Sextants of Beijing, Zhuangzi 莊子 as translated by Victor Mair (called Wandering on the Way), the stories of Lu Xun 魯迅 (the article links to William Lyell’s translations), and The Story of the Stone 石頭記 by Cao Xueqin 曹雪芹 and translated by David Hawkes and John Minford. Not surprisingly, his list contains no poetry. Perhaps one day somebody will compile a list like this and Xi Chuan will be on it.
NYTimes Bilinguals are Smugger
The New York Times / International Herald Tribune blog ran a particularly frustrating piece the other day under the title “Rendezvous Always Knew ‘Bilinguals Are Smarter.’” Yes, I agree that mastering other languages benefits intelligence, but it was the particular smugness–and cultural superiority–that I writhe against. In particular, Marcus Mabry’s argument for learning other languages involves not only edification, it involves economic rational action, as well, hence his decision to teach his kids both French and have them learn Mandarin via a Chinese nanny (though not everyone can afford the six-figure salary such services claim). I have no problem with economic motivation for learning languages, but I found Mabry’s rhetoric pretty annoying: after listing Camus and the romance of the Paris Métro, he says, ““Le français c’est pour s’amuser, le chinois c’est pour travailler.” French is for fun, Chinese is for work.” So, no arguments with Beijing cab drivers? No Chinese literature, from the Book of Change 易經 to Du Fu 杜甫 to the Journey to the West 西遊記 to Xi Chuan? No, I guess the only reason to learn Chinese is to suck up to the people who’ll be paying you, since it’s not like anything Chinese could be fun.
Plume #9
The new issue of Plume is here, with new work by Andrei Codrescu (“way too human too fast way too boring too quick”), Rosmarie Waldrop (“The line between water and grammar.”), Lydia Davis, translating the Dutch of A. L. Snijders (“I’m very fond of
coincidence, and so when I thought about it again I was not surprised that the first bang occurred after the word ‘fired.'”), and more.
Click here for my translation of Xi Chuan’s “The Ant’s Plunder” 蚂蚁劫, published in Plume last November.
Issue 16 of Cha
The new issue of Cha is now online. Take a look for poetry by Ricky Garni (“the citizen is in a box, / his body parts fall / from his body. / he watches the / others who are free.”), nonfiction by Chelsea Bainbridge-Donner (“I don’t remember my first train, but my mother does, and she loves to tell the story.”), Mani Rao’s review of new translations of Rabindranath Tagore (“When so much contemporary literature generated in Indian languages goes untranslated, the Tagore phenomenon seems disproportionate. One cannot hold that against a translator, however.”), and more.
I’ll be guest-editing Cha‘s “Ancient Asia Issue,” scheduled to launch August 2013. 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.
Ocean of Poetry
I just found out about Ocean of Poetry, a new website featuring all sorts of information and examples of classical Chinese poetry in English translation, edited by Stuart Carduner and translator J. P. Seaton. The translation of classical Chinese poetry over the past century has contributed to the development of changing aesthetics in English-language poetry, and this site–with translations and articles by Kenneth Rexroth, Burton Watson, Gary Snyder, David Hinton, Tony Barnstone, and others–looks like a great resource for making those links a bit more explicit. And considering that one of the reasons Xi Chuan became so interested in ancient Chinese poetry was because of the force it exerted on twentieth-century English-language poets, this site should also be of interest to readers of contemporary Chinese poetry.
Julia Lovell on Chinese Fiction Translations
Translator and scholar Julia Lovell has a long review in the UK-based Prospect magazine on the new crop of Chinese fiction translations on offer from Path Light and Chutzpah 天南, English-language journals published in China. She discusses only fiction and doesn’t mention poetry, but here’s a taste of her worthy piece:
Pathlight and Chutzpah try to favour younger authors, who have so far been relatively neglected both in China and in translation. For the past decade, the dominant form in literary Chinese fiction has been the realist historical novel set mainly in Maoist China, as penned by male authors born in the late 1950s or early 1960s (Life and Death are Wearing Me Out by Mo Yan, Su Tong’s The Boat to Redemption and others). These grand narratives have been preoccupied with the traumatic landmarks of Maoism: land reform, the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, and so on. Both Chutzpah and Pathlight, by contrast, draw attention to novelists born between the late 1960s and 1980s. These generations of writers are broadly unified by a couple of shared literary characteristics: by a strongly individualistic, personal voice and by a determination to illuminate (often with wry humour or playful surrealism) the intense strangeness of the capitalist society that the Chinese Communist party is now building.
Interview with Dung Kai-cheung
The Hong Kong Advanced Institute for Cross-Disciplinary Studies has just posted Cris Mattison’s interview with Hong Kong writer Dung Kai-cheung 董啟章, one of the SAR’s most inventive authors. His novel Atlas: The Archaeology of an Imaginary City 地圖集, which mixes fiction with documentary history to chronicle the city of Hong Kong, will be out this summer in English translation by Bonnie McDougall and Anders Hansson. Here’s an excerpt from the interview where he discusses his work as related to translation and world literature in the broad sense, responding to a critique people have leveled against certain writers of modern Chinese literature for nearly a century (I expect Xi Chuan would give a similar response):
DKC: I said my language is influenced by English because since I studied Comparative Literature at the University of Hong Kong much of my reading has been done in English. The influence is not just in terms of subject matter and literary forms but also of sentence structure and diction. My Chinese has been regarded by some language purists as “Europeanized,” which is meant to be a criticism for not writing in a proper Chinese. It is in this sense that I said the language of Atlas “lends itself to translation.” By this I mean not that it is simple to translate, nor do I mean that it is written with the intention of being translated, and thus gaining international attention.
Poetry Translation Debated
If you’re a poet outside the Anglophone world, and you manage to win the Nobel Prize, two things are likely to happen. First, your ascendancy will be questioned by fiction critics in a major English-language news publication. Second, there will be a fair amount of pushing and shoving among your translators (if you have any), as publishers attempt to capitalize on your 15 minutes of free media attention.
So begins David Orr‘s essay “Versions,” about the translations of last year’s Nobel laureate for literature Tomas Tranströmer. Maybe one day in the future Xi Chuan will win the Nobel prize, and we’ll be able to test this hypothesis (or test it with the last two Nobel Prize-winning poets from outside English, Wisława Szymborska [1996] and Octavio Paz [1990]); at any event, the article gives an interesting take on a worthwhile debate. I’ll come down on the side of Robin Fulton in this debate–not just that we share a publisher, but that I believe New Directions to have picked the right translator for the task.
[Fulton has also published a book of translations of the Norwegian poet Olav Hauge, whom Xi Chuan has also co-translated into Chinese; for a discussion of Xi Chuan’s translations, click here.]