Ashbery and / or Xi Chuan

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I’ve been reading, and reading about, John Ashbery recently, in part because translating Xi Chuan has put me in mind to look at the development of the prose poem in English–and Ashbery’s Three Poems (Viking Compass, 1972), of course, were fundamental in the expansion & popularization of that form–but also because Ashbery’s recently published translation of Arthur Rimbaud‘s Illuminations (Norton, 2011) have just come out, as Steve Bradbury mentioned on this blog in his write-up of the ALTA conference, and I’ve been curious about the relationship between original writing & translation in this writer (also, the model of Ashbery as a writer loved both on the margins and at the peripheries of the literary world seemed appropriate for Xi Chuan, a poet who is at once accessible and experimental, challenging and rewarding).

So I consider it a fine coincidence that I came across the following quote, which struck me as the positive version of Christopher Honey’s question of “who I am reading when I read Rexroth’s beautiful collections of Asian poetry in translation,” in Micah Towery‘s essay at The The on how “Google Translates Poetry“:

why do we want to read Ashbery’s translations of Rimbaud? I see two motivations: the first is to read Rimbaud without learning French; the second is to read Ashbery reading Rimbaud.

The second motivation, accurate as it is, only emerges when we’re dealing with the confluence of two established figures–Rexroth and Du Fu, say, or Ashbery and Rimbaud, or Kenneth Branagh and Hamlet. This does not mean that Google translate is any better for readers who want to read Rimbaud without learning French, but it does mean that, if I think few readers will be interested in reading me reading Xi Chuan, my choices may be different if I’m translating primarily so readers can read Xi Chuan without having to know Chinese.

As Xi Chuan said in an interview with the NEA, “Before I had an ‘I’ in my heart; later I found [that it was multiple] ‘I’s’ and not ‘we.’ I found that all these deceased people live in my heart.” As his translator, my goal has been to express these “I’s” of his–and perhaps find my own amongst them–rather than to subsume any of them into an “I” of my own.

Hai Zi in Swedish & English

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Segueing off the days of links to posts on Xi Chuan in German, as well as the recent reports on Chinese week at Norway’s Litteraturhuset, here are translations of Hai Zi 海子 into Swedish by Anna Gustafsson Chen.

Hai Zi, a friend of Xi Chuan’s whose suicide in 1989 left an indelible mark on the latter’s life and shifting writing styles, has also been translated into English by Dan Murphy as Over Autumn Rooftops (Host Publications), by Zeng Hong for Edwin Mellen Press, and with another book forthcoming with translations by Ye Chun (poetry) and Fiona Sze-Lorrain (prose) as Wheat Has Ripened (Tupelo Press, 2012)–and another volume is in the works by Gerald Maa.

more Xi Chuan in German

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The next–and perhaps final–installment of news on Xi Chuan in German is the Xi Chuan German Wikipedia page. It’s rather spare, but it’s the only entry in a Western language, and it’s longer than the Chinese listing. For an online encyclopedia entry on Xi Chuan in English, try the Encyclopedia of Contemporary Chinese Culture entry written by Huang Yibing. Unfortunately, it’s a bit out of date. Someone should work on an entry for Xi Chuan in the English Wikipedia. Who might that be?

Chinese Poetry Posters in Germany

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Continuing with the theme of Xi Chuan reports in German, here’s an article summarizing some of the concerns and history of contemporary Chinese poetry, springboarding from the Chinese Poetry Poster campaign Xi Chuan organized for German cities a couple years ago.

Again, if you don’t read German, you can find the Google-translated version here. This translation, however, is considerably worse than the machine-translation of Xi Chuan’s interview I posted yesterday, though worse in an at times endearing manner. The “hermetic seal” poetry (German „hermetischen Dichtung“), for instance, is the computerized English version of the German term for menglong shi 朦胧诗, which in English should be Obscure Poetry (often misleadingly translated as “Misty Poetry“), the name of the poetry movement that emerged in China after the Cultural Revolution. And consider how the 我—-不—-相—-信 of Bei Dao 北島 comes out in English via the German: “I tell you, world, / I – think – not!” (for my translation with Clayton Eshleman of this Bei Dao poem, see this or this). I expect Wolfgang Kubin‘s translation sounds better in German: „Ich sage dir, Welt, / ich – glaube – nicht!“

„Zehn Fragen an Xi Chuan“

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If you can read German, you might be interested in „Zehn Fragen an Xi Chuan“, a quick interview Xi Chuan did with Deutsch-Chinesisches Kulturnetz some time ago. If you can’t read German, the Google-translate version is bearable. Questions five and ten–about his most unpleasant experiences in Germany, and what he hopes China can learn from Germany–are the most interesting, as are his answers.

Chinese Writers on Writing

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I’ve added a new link to the Bibliography for Xi Chuan list to the right: Chinese Writers on Writing, edited by Arthur Sze, which was published last year as part of a series of on Writing titles published by Trinity University Press. My translation of the Xi Chuan essay is titled “Chinese as a Language in a Neighborhood.” Here’s the quick review by Greta Aart of Cerise Press:

It is difficult, if not impossible, to grasp a progressive development of modern Chinese literature since the wake of the 20th century, when the Chinese language became vernacular. That said, this anthology presents an intelligent, personal selection of landmark essays, novel excerpts, poems, manifestos and conversations (many of which are newly commissioned translations) by 41 writers from China, Taiwan and Hong Kong. A seminal work that helps increase a critical understanding of Chinese writing and literary aesthetics free from official ideology, Chinese Writers on Writing invigorates dialogue about the differences and universality of Chinese language — and its consciousness — in reference to our global framework today.

“In the Shadow of the Oxymoron”

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I have referred a couple of times (here and here) to Xi Chuan’s poetics of the oxymoron, and how it’s related to current Chinese realities, so I thought I would link to an essay where he begins verbalizing such formulations. Xi Chuan wrote “In the Shadow of the Oxymoron” in English for the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program for the Home / Land Symposium on the island of Paros, Greece, in May 2008. Here’s an excerpt:

Some thirty years ago, people in China said “left is right and right is wrong.” Now, to live in the shadow of oxymoron means therefore to live with embarrassment; it means to enjoy a happiness that is absurd.

But to speak in oxymorons means that you are a person who is not going to be understood. I am not using a term like “contradiction” because contradictions are yet to be blended, whereas the social oxymoron is now a reality. Yes I do know concepts such as freedom, justice, love, privacy, equality, democracy, literacy, elite, etc.—but these quasi-saturated concepts are stronger and more popular. The reason why things are going like this is probably the result of an overdone revolution meeting a half-done modernization.

Alligatorzine

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Updates to Kurt Devrese‘s Alligatorzine are now online, featuring cut-ups by Jen Hofer, Henri Michaux translated by Bernard Bador & Clayton Eshleman, prose poems by John Olson, and new Jerome Rothenberg poems in English, French, and Dutch.

Also take a look at 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 “Answering Venus (45 Fragments)” 回答启明星(45断章).

Steve Bradbury report on ALTA

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On the 17th I posted a link & video about the American Literary Translators Association’s annual convention in Kansas City. I got a letter from my friend Steve Bradbury, translator of Shang Qin 商琴 and Hsia Yu 夏宇 and editor of Full Tilt, about what I missed:

Hey Lucas

Sorry you couldn’t make the ALTA conference this year. It was a good one. I’d never been to Kansas City before and was pleased to find that it’s quite the tourist-friendly town; the accommodations were affordable and just a short walk from both the Nelson Atkins Museum and more bars and restaurants than you can shake a stick at. Silvia Kofler was the conference organizer this year. Paul Vangelisti and Douglas Hofstadter were the plenary speakers. Lisa Rose Bradford, who flew in from Mar del Plata, was this year’s NTA winner, for her stellar version of Between Words: Juan Gelman’s Public Letter.  Lisa also gave readings with sound poet Glenn North at the Jazz Museum and with me at the Writer’s Place, where I read some of my Shang Qin and Hsia Yu translations. The panel she put together on “Re/Creations and ‘Afterpoems,’” with Christian Hawkey, who talked about his Ventrakl volume, and Paul Legault, who gave us a trailer to his forthcoming collected After-Emily Dickenson “translations,” was the most interesting panel I’ve attended in years.

Chinese-language translators were a little thin on the ground this year, but the two besides me who made it did their mothers’ proud.  Your old friend and ALTA first-timer Jonathan Stalling, who drove up from Oklahoma U with his family, gave a marvelous recitation of some personal favorites in his recent collection, Winter Sun: The Poetry of Shi Zhi.  Charles Egan, who was also a first-timer, flew in from San Fran to accept the Lucien Stryk Prize for his Clouds Thick, Whereabouts Unknown: Poems by Zen Monks of China. Although Charles read his acceptance speech instead of speaking off the cuff per ALTA practice, he won the crowd from pretty much the get-go with the disarming admission that the prize was “a wonderful vindication for all the years I struggled in obscurity—I believe I saw many of you there…”

We talked for hours over martinis at the hotel bar. It was such a pleasure to run into a Chinese translator at ALTA who knows his books down to the ground and works by-and-large in fixed rhyme and meter; most of the ALTA regulars who translate Chinese classical verse are free-verse poets who can barely read a word of the language.  That was the subject of my talk on Erica Mena’s “Translating Blind: Working from a Language You Don’t Read” panel. I spoke on Amy Lowell’s and Florence Ayscough’s now largely forgotten 1921 anthology Fir-Flower Tablets, but it was Becka McKay who took the palm, for a fascinating presentation on teaching translation to monolingual students as a way of inspiring interest in literature.  Some of the student projects she showed us, which included a video game based on the Inferno and graphic adaptations of Don Quixote and The Tale of Genji, were amazing.  If Florida Atlantic U, where she teaches, wasn’t 12,000 miles away, I would sign up for her class.

Good news for those who live in or have ties to the Northeast and Great Lakes region: next year’s ALTA conference will be held in early October in Rochester, New York, “John Ashbery country.”  I’m hoping Open Letter editor Chad Post, who will be organizing the conference on behalf of the Translation Studies Program at the University of Rochester and Three Percent, will pursue my suggestion to invite Ashbery to give the keynote address. The poet’s getting on in years, but they say he still has his wits about him and gives a good talk. And he’s certainly got something to talk about: his new version of Rimbaud’s Illuminations is one of those must-read translations that make you want to throw in the towel.

                                                                                                —Steve Bradbury, Taipei

Path Light: New Chinese Writing

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Issue #1 of Path Light: New Chinese Writing, edited by Li Jingze 李敬泽, Alice Xin Liu, and Canaan Morse, is already out at the Beijing Bookworm and other venues (once it’s got an online presence / ordering page I’ll put up the link). Read this for the Xinhua English writeup, or take a look at Bruce Humes‘s list of some of the contents over at Ethnic ChinaLit:

Editorial Director Qiu Huadong (邱华栋) revealed some of the first issue’s contents:

  • Excerpts from the novels that won the 2011 Maodun Literary Prize, plus interviews with their authors.  He did not specify which novels would be excerpted, but the five winners were: On the Plateau, Zhang Wei (你在高原 , 张炜著) ;  Skywalker, Liu Xinglong (天行者, 刘醒龙著); Massage, Bi Feiyu (推拿, 毕飞宇著); Frogs, Mo Yan (蛙, 莫言著) ; and One Sentence Worth Thousands, Liu Zhenyun ( 一句顶一万句, 刘震云著) See Rewarding Writer-Officials? for insight into the controversy surrounding this year’s Maodun Prize.
  • Short stories by authors born in the 1970s and 1980s, including Jiang Yitan (蒋一谈), Qi Ge (七格) and Di’an (笛安).
  • Poems by Xi Chuan (西川), Lei Pingyang (雷平阳) and others
  • Short stories by other writers including Li Er (李洱)
  • Introductions to new books such as Ge Fei’s Spring in Jiangnan (春尽江南, 格非著), Wang Anyi’s Tiānxiāng (天香, 王安忆著), Jia Pingwa’s Old Kiln (古炉, 贾平凹著), and Fang Fang’s Wuchang City (武昌城, 方方著)

The Xi Chuan pieces they’ve published are “Looking at the Mural in the Ruicheng Temple of Eternal Joy” 观芮城永乐宫壁画, “Ill Fortune H 00325” 厄运 H 00325, “Dragon” 龙, and “The Body and History” 体相与历史.