Almost Island editor Sharmistha Mohanty sent me the following pictures from the India-China Writers Dialogues. In the first is, from the top left, Xi Chuan, Li Tuo 李陀, Lydia Liu 刘禾, Zhong Yurou 钟雨柔, Kabir Mohanty, Ge Fei 格非, with Sharmistha Mohanty, Bei Dao 北岛, Ashwini Bhat, and Ouyang Jianghe 欧阳江河 in the bottom row.
In the second shot, we have Xi Chuan with Ouyang Jianghe and Sharmistha Mohanty.
The pictures were taken by Samimitra Das.
Also in other contemporary Chinese poetry news, Winter Sun, the selected poems of Shi Zhi 食指, translated by Jonathan Stalling, is now available from Oklahoma University Press–the first book in the Chinese Literature Today Book Series.
Shi Zhi was one of the first poets in the PRC to enact a conscious break with orthodox Maoist style, and as such was a precursor not only to the so-called Obscure Poets 朦胧诗人, but to Xi Chuan and his generation of writers as well. The publication of this book in English represents a big step in introducing English-language readers to the intricacies of contemporary Chinese poetry and the literary history of modern China.
In other contemporary Chinese poetry news, Yang Lian has been awarded the prestigious Nonino International Prize for Literature for 2011.
The above piece is a video shot & directed by Mycal Ford, a student at Pacific Lutheran University (the actress is Mikela Moore, and the voice-over work is by David Chen, both also of PLU). I find it a pretty fascinating take on one of Xi Chuan’s poems, “Sunset on the Square” 广场上的落日; while the poem read in Chinese in the video will not be included in Notes on the Mosquito, follow the link above to read Michael Day‘s translation, along with Ford’s discussion of the piece.
The January 2012 issue of Asymptote is now online, featuring Xi Chuan‘s “Beast” 巨兽, “The Distance” 远方, and “Poison” 毒药, in my translations. You can also hear a recording of “The Distance” read in Chinese by Huang Yin-Nan.
This issue also hosts a great range of international writing, especially when it comes to writing in Chinese: there’s Xi Chuan’s friend Ouyang Jianghe 欧阳江河, translated by Austin Woerner, and Taiwanese superstar poet Hsia Yü 夏宇, translated by Steve Bradbury. And then there’s the Taiwan Fiction Feature.
Great to be included in that group!
The Winter 2012 issue of Almost Island is finally here, featuring an essay Xi Chuan wrote in English titled “Style Comes as a Reward,” his prose poem “What the Tang Did Not Have” 唐朝所沒有的 in my translation, and my translation of “The Original Way” 原道 by Tang Dynasty man of letters Han Yu 韓愈 (768 – 824), which should be provocative on its own but also provides some historical context for Xi Chuan’s prose poem.
The issue also includes poetry by Amanda Berenguer translated by Kent Johnson, an essay by Ravi Shankar titled “The Geology and Physics of Style,” new poems by Stephen Burt, and more.
At the china Avant-garde blog Paul Manfredi has posted his notes to the intro for Xi Chuan he gave at last week’s Seattle Public Library reading. I particularly liked this paragraph:
To be influential in this context means more than finding a way to cause other poets to follow one’s example in style or substance. It is a matter of literally finding a viable language in which to speak. Viability in terms of poetry relates to some form of authenticity, which means some form of “truth,” a fact which separates literature generally but poetry in particular from other realms of linguistic experience. Think politics, where the opposite is the case—Chinese politics in particular (though recent debates in the United States makes one think of this country as well): here we experience language not as something predicated on viability (it needs no such bolstering) or authenticity. Political language in China is not truth to power, it is power to truth.
Follow the links above for the whole piece.
Under the title “None the verse” (a headline I first found lame, but after a bit more reflection find reveals something interesting about Xi Chuan’s writing) is another China Daily article on Xi Chuan and his career in poetry. It took me so long to find it because it refers to Xi Chuan, inexplicably, as “Xichuan,” but it offers a decent overview of the changes of his work and quotes translations by Maghiel van Crevel (unattributed; go figure), and ends with a decent discussion about the Xi Chuan’s understanding of the place of poetry in China and the world today:
Although Xichuan admits that the Chinese have almost forgotten poetry in their pursuit of material success, he is continuing his explorations as a serious intellectual trying “to influence the quality of life in China in an indirect way”.
One of these experiments is a drama adapted from his long poem Flowers in the Mirror and the Moon on the Water in collaboration with Chinese avant-garde director Meng Jinghui. Xichuan was pleased to see that its non-traditional structure made people think from a post-modernism perspective, an approach they were unfamiliar with in the past. “Even if they felt uncomfortable, it was an important social effect,” he says.
“I have to acknowledge that the past decade has been unfavorable for Chinese poets, but they have far transcended themselves, in terms of new expression, sophisticated rhetoric, and greater growth and solidity.”
Issue 9 of Terractotta Typewriter (a literary journal with Chinese characteristics), edited by Matthew Lubin, is finally here, featuring my translation of three Xi Chuan pieces, “Experience” 体验, “Written at Thirty” 写在三十岁, and “Midnight Sonata” 午夜的钢琴曲.
The issue also features the work of several other China-based writers in English. Follow the links to download your .pdf of the issue!
American poet Rachel Blau DuPlessis attended last week’s discussion at the MLA between Xi Chuan and Chris Lupke. The following excellent essay is her take on the event:
A Note on hearing Xi Chuan for the First Time
Rachel Blau DuPlessis
The poet Xi Chuan appeared at the annual conference of the Modern Language Association in Seattle in January 2012, in a question and answer session curated by Professor Christopher Lupke of Washington State University, interspersed with a reading by the poet (in Chinese) and by his translator Lucas Klein (in English). The event was very striking to me. There are various “paths” one can pick at this bazaar-like humanities conference, but as part of the “county fair” or “state fair” array, the path that leads the attendee to new information certainly counts for something. The session on Xi Chuan, in a solemn hall, was attended by a number of scholars and teachers with an interest in Asian literature, and of these, there were many Chinese speakers. There were also a few spare poets and folks committed to poetic culture. Among those, me.
The most interesting phenomenon of the occasion, at least to this particular “spare poet,” was the very polite and quiet resistance of some members of the audience to what they saw in Xi Chuan’s work as—here’s what I would call it—non-poetic (or anti-poetic, or un-poetic). That is, people challenged his lexicon (range of words, some quite colloquial) as brought forward by the translator; they challenged why this material is classified as poetry; they wanted (politely, etc.) to suggest that perhaps the poet had missed that he was writing in prose, or making short fiction, or working in a hybrid genre, but that he wasn’t really writing what they would call (in somewhat hushed tones), “poetry.” Or perhaps with a capital “P”: “Poetry.” “Why,” one person asked, “is poetry the most appropriate mode in which to articulate your cultural critique?”
This was (and remains) a very good question, but I suspected it was motivated by the questioner’s resistance to the fusion of poetry and critique rather than, as I’d think, an interest in how one can, may, and even should be able to propose and carry out this goal for poetry as a mode of practice. (By the way, I’d define poetry as a mode of writing in chosen rhythmic segments that are culturally read as poetry. Clearly, the issue of “cultural reading” was precisely at stake for some of the people hearing Xi Chuan.) Such a question also shows that a whole range of world poetries and poetics of the 20th and early 21st century were not being credited. In short, some of the members of the audience had a strong case of what I’d call “poetry ideology.” They not only preferred the focused lyric, the misty, “pure poetry,” and the “poetic” on principle, but they seemed to find this the only kind of writing worthy of the honorific “poetry.” Some silvery aura of specialness shimmered around “poetry”; some sense that it should stay untainted by… well, by what? by words like “shithole” (country colloquialism for latrine) or by noticing some kids (“delinquents”) in a country town, acting up by dying their black hair yellow. Or by the general air of realist disjunction so well-honed that it passes into almost-surrealism. Or by a meta-commentary or sense of allegory that infuses some of the work. Or by the desire to record everyday life seen in such a light as it is both comic, observationally accurate, and endowed with a humane generosity and ethical melancholy within that notional intensity. “Dignity and shithole together” is how Xi Chuan characterized this move.
In short, the reading offered evidence of a cultural clash around issues fundamental to modern and contemporary poetry. Xi Chuan fed this clash and teased about it, stating that he did know how to write “good poems”—I assume this means poems conventional in this milieu, using or alluding to the appropriate formal and imagistic conventions of Chinese poetry, including stanza and rhyme. He said that he even had written such “good poems,” and that every once in a while he still did. He has loved the work of both Yeats and Valéry. But generally, “I am trying to be a person writing texts.” That is, he has been touched by certain rhetorics and forms with which I am familiar from Western cultural traditions and would refer to via these names and practices—by the term “writing” for William Carlos Williams (see Spring and All), by the urban, suspicious and sometimes “crashed out” sensibility of Charles Baudelaire, by the prose poem tradition of, say, Robert Bly (whose work he read in his student days courtesy of a Peking University professor of English named Herbert Stone).
Xi Chuan’s personal/social history as it bears on his poems was quickly sketched in. The years around Tiannamen Square (when he was in his mid-twenties) were exciting and difficult; a friend died, another committed suicide; he was “lonely” and felt “crashed out.” (Xi Chuan’s English is excellent, and this verb—slightly unidiomatic—is notably expressive. All apparent citations here are what I heard.) He could not write poetry for a couple of years; he wrote notes only, and then discovered that these fragments were the germ for a new kind of text. “History and reality gave me the way of writing.” The fusion of aesthetic and ethical concerns in his work is serious and generative.
Xi Chuan’s work in the English translation of Lucas Klein will be published by New Directions in April 2012 under the title Notes on the Mosquito.
