Modern Chinese Literature & Culture has just posted my friend Cécile Lagesse’s review of Dai Sijie’s 戴思杰 novel Once on a Moonless Night, as translated from the French by Adriana Hunter. The review presents a detailed look at Dai’s transnational story, in which “the Chinese language is associated with pain,” even as “one might feel that his novel’s historical references fit almost too well the pre-conceived expectations that his western-educated audience could have of China.” Nevertheless, between these poles, Cécile writes:
Aside from its use of historical reference, Once on a Moonless Night also pays tribute to the long tradition of translation that has played a crucial role in shaping Chinese culture. The novel is built around the search for a missing Buddhist sutra, but it is less the fact that the document is Buddhist that is essential to the understanding of the story and more that it represents a historical relic, the trace of an important moment in Chinese history when translation of Buddhist texts by missionaries was prevalent.
A well-written review, and I look forward to reading the novel in full.
The new issue of Eleven Eleven, the journal of the MFA Writing Program at the California College of the Arts, is now up, featuring my translations of three Xi Chuan pieces: “Ill Fortune C 00024” 厄运 C 00024, “Ill Fortune O 09734” 厄运 O 09734, and “King of Chess” 棋王.
In addition to lots of great new work in English, the issue also includes new translations of Vladimir Mayakovsky by Alex Cigale and a section of The Bhagavid Gita as translated by Gavin Flood and Charles Martin.
Poetry translator and scholar Jacob Edmond has a new blog to promote his forthcoming book, A Common Strangeness: Contemporary Poetry, Cross-Cultural Encounter, Comparative Literature (forthcoming from Fordham University Press). Using Walter Benjamin‘s take on Baudelaire and flânerie to take a new look at World Literature, Edmond reads Chinese poets Yang Lian 楊煉 and Bei Dao 北島, Russian poets Arkadii Dragomoshchenko and Dmitri Prigov, and Americans Charles Bernstein and Lyn Hejinian. The blog, and especially the book, both promise to be fascinating reads.
While Xi Chuan has less to do with exile, often central to critical discussions of Bei Dao and Yang Lian, I’m sure that Common Strangeness, and common strangenesses, will also be helpful in providing tools to understand both the Chinese and international aspects of the writing of Xi Chuan.
A couple days ago I posted a link to the view from Xi Chuan’s studio window as drawn by Matteo Pericoli posted on the Paris Review Daily. Here’s a list from the Paris Review‘s tumblr feed of all the people who’ve reblogged the image so far. Follow the links to an amazing collection of internationalism, art, and political engagement that represents, I think, the internet at its best.
Kurt Devrese‘s Alligatorzine is newly updated, featuring a bilingual recording by Sandra Moussempès & Kristin Prevallet, as well as new work by American greats Heller Levinson (poetry), Will Alexander (prose poetry), and Rachel Blau DuPlessis (collages) (and for Rachel’s take on Xi Chuan at the MLA, click here).
Click these links for Alligator‘s earlier publication of my Xi Chuan translations, “A Personal Paradise” 个人的天堂, “Friends” 熟人, “Companion” 伴侣, “Drizzle” 连阴雨, and selections from “Answering Venus (45 Fragments)” 回答启明星(45断章).
I teach translation, so I have no shortage of offered-up speculations and analyses, from my students and from myself, about why a given translator might choose to translate a term or phrase one way over another. We all know about Ezra Pound’s formulation, for instance, of dichten = condensare, and how that influenced a tighter economy of language in poetry, which translation has had to follow.
And yet sometimes it comes down to some simple external influences. Working on the layout for Notes on the Mosquito, for instance, we have to struggle at times to make a line, or even a whole poem, fit on the page. When Xi Chuan wrote 玫瑰, should that be “roses,” or “the rose”? Sometimes it just comes down to which one’s shorter.
As part of its series on “what writers from around the world see from their windows,” the Paris Review Daily recently featured Matteo Pericoli’s drawing of the view from Xi Chuan’s studio window. The feature also includes a passage from Xi Chuan, which he wrote in English, about his view. It ends:
But the whole city of Beijing was a giant construction site in the 1990s and 2000s, and the view couldn’t last. Once I got used to the buildings in the window, I seldom looked out of it. No trees can reach the fifteenth floor, so no birds perch at my window. When I look out, I see cars running on the bridge. Nothing else.
