The new issue of Plume is up, with excellent new pieces from the likes of Cole Swensen and Georg Trakl (translated by Mark Wunderlich). And Xi Chuan, in my translation of “The Ant’s Plunder” 蚂蚁劫 (according to Daniel Lawless’s Editor’s Note, their “first work from a Chinese poet”). Plume only publishes twelve pieces a month, so their dedication of space to Xi Chuan is all the more exciting.
Thanks to Steve Bradbury for pointing me to Plume!
As I mentioned yesterday, Xi Chuan flew from Hongkong to Norway, where he’s participating in Chinese Literature week at the House of Literature along with Wang Hui 汪晖, Murong Xuecun 慕容雪村, Ma Jian 马建, Leslie T. Chang, Rebecca Karl, Michael Dutton, Yiyun Li 李翊雲, Hong Ying 虹影, Mian Mian 棉棉, Xu Zechen 徐则臣, Han Song 韩松, Lan Lan 蓝蓝, Annie Baobei 安妮宝贝, Cheng Yong Xin 程永新, Zou Zou 走走, and Paper Republic‘s Eric Abrahamsen. Click here for the full schedule; the following is the list of events involving Xi Chuan (though I’m afraid one looks like it’s already in the past):
MONDAY THE 14TH OF NOVEMBER
7.30pm: Putting a Modern Face on the Classics
Discussion with Xi Chuan and Cheng Yongxin
Traces of this classic literature are also still to be found in today’s contemporary Chinese literature. What is the relationship between the classics and today’s writers, and do the latter use them in their own literature? Xi Chuan and Cheng Yongxin discuss their relationship to classic literature.
Language: Norwegian (with translation from Chinese)
THURSDAY 17TH OF NOVEMBER
8pm: Chinese Contemporary Poetry
Glimpse of the World’s Oldest Poetry Tradition
Stage conversations with Lan Lan and Xi Chuan
From early times, poetry played a far greater role in China than it did in the West. Even under the Zhou dynasty, more than a thousand years before the Western Christian Era, important political statements were often phrased as verses of famous poems. What does contemporary poetry look like in a country with such a long poetic tradition? Harald Bøckman talk with two poets about their works and the current trends in modern Chinese poetry.
Language: Norwegian (with translation from Chinese)
FRIDAY THE 18TH OF NOVEMBER
10am-2pm: From China to the World and Back: Seminar on translation
Introduction by Anna Gustafsson Chen, Eric Abrahamsen, Xi Chuan, Harald Bøckman, Lars Devold and others
Translating between Chinese and European languages can prove to be a difficult task when the written languages present such different linguistic structures. In Europe, Chinese literature is often translated from earlier English translations, a practice which can lead to mistakes and inaccuracies. What are the challenges one faces while translating and interpreting between Indo-European languages and Chinese? We meet up with translators who tell us about their work.
Language: English
SATURDAY THE 19TH OF NOVEMBER
8pm: An Evening of Celebration!
Readings by Yiyun Li, Lan Lan, Murong Xuecun, Cheng Yongxin, Li Er, Xu Zechen, Mian Mian, Han Song and Xi Chuan
Welcome to our evening of celebration with eleven Chinese writers, book readings and a concert. We close this Chinese literature week at the House of Literature with literary and cultural experiences. Concert with Chinese folk musician Xiaogang Zeng and Rolf-Erik Nystrøm. Host: Anna Bache-Wiig
Language: Norwegian (with translation from Chinese)
The final reading of the International Poetry Nights Hong Kong 2011 took place last night, with Paul Muldoon (Ireland / USA), Tian Yuan 田原 (China/Japan), and Yip Fai 葉煇 (Hong Kong) reading. Tian Yuan also read the poems of Japanese poet Shuntarô Tanikawa, who was prevented from traveling due to illness. And as with Xi Chuan’s graciousness on the first night’s reading, Tian Yuan extended thanks to his English translator, Denis Mair.
Though the Nights are over, and Xi Chuan has flown off to Norway (about which I’ll be posting anon), the conversation continues at Paper Republic, with notes by Canaan Morse and extra commentary by Yours Truly. Also, I expect that videos of the readings will be posted on YouTube, as they were two years ago, so expect clips and further links to those as they appear.
Having edited Chinese to English translations for the International Poetry Nights‘ Words & the World booklets, I am familiar with all the participating poets who write in Chinese. Still, having a chance to hear Hongkong poet Wong Leung Wo 王良和 read his poems–written in standard Chinese, pronounced as Mandarin in my head–in Cantonese was fascinating for the linguistic disjunctiveness the poems created beneath their poetic smoothness (added to by Canaan Morse‘s excellent English translations, also onscreen behind Wong as he read). But even more exciting for me were the poets I hadn’t had much chance to encounter before; in particular, Mexican poet María Baranda‘s reading from “Cartas a Robinsón” / “Letters to Robinson,” translated by Joshua Edwards in a way that brings out the rolling passion of Baranda’s Spanish, was enthralling, as was Tomaž Šalamun‘s switching back and forth between Slovenian and English as he read (I saw Tomaž being interviewed by Xi Chuan and Chinese poetry critic Tang Xiaodu 唐晓渡, an interview I’ll be sure to link to if it appears online).
The finale for the International Poetry Nights is tonight at 7:00 at the Lee Shau Kee School of Creativity (Multi-Media Theatre, 135 Junction Road, Kowloon), with readings by Paul Muldoon (Ireland / USA), Tian Yuan 田原 (China/Japan), and Yip Fai 葉煇 (Hong Kong).
The “Writing Across Languages” panel yesterday was, I thought, a grand success. As I mentioned in introducing the panel yesterday, the title itself was an act of what it describes, since the Chinese title of “Writing Across Languages” is 跨語際寫作 (“Translingual Writing”), which is the Chinese title of the monograph by Lydia Liu 劉禾 on how early 20th century Chinese literature crafted a new language out of the translations of other concepts and literatures; the title of her book in English–the language it was first written in–is Translingual Practice, a fine example of which is the transformation of the term “Translingual Practice” to 跨語際寫作 to “Writing Across Languages.” Our panel was also interesting in part because our panelists did not share a common language, and so we embodied not only writing across languages, but speaking across languages as well. Many thanks to our tireless simultaneous interpreters, Pan Jun 潘珺 and Wu Hui 吳惠!
All four participants–Bejan Matur (Turkey), Tomaž Šalamun (Slovenia), Tian Yuan 田原(China / Japan), and Yao Feng 姚風 (China / Macau)–had fascinating stories to tell and analyses to provide about their relationships with several languages, and how these languages and relationships helped create their poetry. Amidst Matur’s and Šalamun’s speeches about politically-motivated silencing–of Kurdish in Matur’s Turkey, and of Serbian in the Trieste of Šalamun’smother’s youth–I couldn’t help but think of Paul Celan, and how his writing in German worked to dismantle the language, and thereby cleanse it of its recent historical associations (some have said something similar about Bei Dao‘s search for a clean Chinese).
I think the role of the moderator is to speak little, a difficult task for me since my inclination is also to be a decidedly immoderate moderator. Nevertheless, I will add here a point I raised in response to Xu Xi‘s mention of the imperialism of English: it’s irresponsible–if not impossible–to talk about the spread of English without talking about the spread of American imperialism and all the changes, for the better and for the worse, that that has brought to the world; but the logic of empire is not to admit translations: much was translated out of Sanskrit, but Sanskrit evidently didn’t have a word for translation; Greek was translated into the “barbarian” languages, but what was kept in those languages was not transmitted into Greek; and Latin was translated into the other languages of Europe and North Africa, not the other way around. This model is mirrored in the obvious imbalance of translations into and out of English–much of translation around the world is from English into other languages, whereas translations only account for a notorious 3% of the American book market. To that end, the more we translate into English, the more we we allow English to be one language amongst others, instead of a hegemonic language imposing its logic and worldview on the rest of the world; in short, the more we translate into English, the more we are working against the imperialism of English and American economic and cultural domination.
Two more readings today for the International Poetry Nights, both at the Lee Shau Kee School of Creativity (Multi-Media Theatre, 135 Junction Road, Kowloon): at 3:30 with Vivek Narayanan (India), Silke Scheuermann (Germany), Wong Leung Wo 王良和 (Hong Kong), and Yao Feng (Macau), and then at 7:00 with María Baranda (Mexico), Chen Ko Hua 陳克華 (Taiwan), Tomaž Šalamun (Slovenia), Yu Jian 于堅 (China).
The “Masters & (M)other Tongues” discussion at CUHK yesterday was fascinating, though not in the ways I had expected. I had thought that it would be a discussion about the tension between the two sides of the parenthesis around “(m)other tongues,” and about the models the poets use for their own work from traditions either native or foreign to them. But now that I look at the schedule online again I see that it’s simply “Masters & Mother Tongues,” which creates a different kind of tension; perhaps this accounts for the difference, since all the participants—Liu Wenfei 劉文飛 (the Chinese translator of Arkadii Dragomoshchenko, unable to attend due to illness), Silke Scheuermann, Vivek Narayanan, and Xi Chuan—ended up discussing “mother tongues” amidst the troubling connotations of the word “master.” And they all ended up talking about their own sense of awkwardness and embarrassment. Xi Chuan, for instance, said that while people from other parts of China used to have to apologize for not speaking Mandarin well, he feels embarrassed about only speaking Mandarin, and only rarely speaking the related, but distinct, Beijing dialect.
The evening’s reading was excellent. Liu Wenfei read Dragomoschenko’s poems in Russian, followed by Ling Yu 零雨 (some of whose pieces I also translated), then C. D. Wright, and then Xi Chuan—with excellent zither 古琴 performances by Yao Gongbai 姚公白 interspersed. During Ling Yu’s reading she was mysteriously moved to tears by the memories her poems called up, which was stunning to witness, not least because my experience translating her work was to be filled with a very different sense of mystery. And Xi Chuan, always gracious, was the only of the poets reading to thank his translator—to which I can only say, my pleasure!
Above and below are two shots I took of Xi Chuan’s reading.
This afternoon at 3:30 at City University (Connie Fan Multi-media Conference Room, 4/F Cheng Yick Chi Building) I’ll be leading a discussion on “Writing Across Languages” with Bejan Matur (Turkey), Tomaž Šalamun (Slovenia), Tian Yuan 田原(China / Japan), and Yao Feng 姚風 (China / Macau). The readers this evening at 7:00 at the Lee Shau Kee School of Creativity (Multi-Media Theatre, 135 Junction Road, Kowloon) are Régis Bonvicino (Brazil), Lo Chih Cheng 羅智成 (Taiwan), Bejan Matur, and Yu Xiang 宇向 (China).
Last night the International Poetry Nights hosted a banquet dinner at the China Club, at the top of the old Bank of China building. Here’s a picture of me and Xi Chuan, with the new Bank of China Tower in the background:
Xi Chuan will be part of the panel discussion “Masters and (M)other Tongues,” moderated by Prof. Leo Ou-fan Lee, this afternoon at 3:30 at Chinese University of Hong Kong (Cho Yiu Conference Hall, G/F Administration Building), and reading tonight at 7:00 at the Lee Shau Kee School of Creativity (Multi-Media Theatre, 135 Junction Road, Kowloon) with Arkadii Dragomoshchenko, Ling Yu 零雨, and CD Wright.
The following is Bei Dao‘s “Note from the Editor,” which I translated for the International Poetry Nights‘ Words & the World anthology:
Poetry exists between the word and the world. With the key of language, poetry unlocks the world from its state of concealment. As Heidegger pointed out in Poetry, Language, Thought, “Truth, as the clearing and concealing of what is, happens in being composed, as a poet composes a poem. All art, as the letting happen of the advent of the truth of what is, is, as such, essentially poetry.”
At present, we are experiencing a retreat to human civilization’s last line of defense—ours is an era void of spiritual direction, an era of lost cultural value and ideals, an era ridden with linguistic garbage. We live amidst separate jargons: scholarly jargon, businessmen’s jargon, political jargon, and more; but at the same time, what has greatest currency is the language of entertainment, the language of the internet and the new media, and in the internet age of so-called globalization, vulgar and elegant meld to form a common pact, simplifying humanity’s linguistic expressivity.
What, then, can poetry do? This ancient term takes on a particular significance today. With this in mind, the theme of the 2011 International Poetry Nights in Hong Kong is Words & the World.
We have invited ten international poets and ten Chinese-language poets to join our international poetry festival. In addition to a bi- or tri-lingual pocket-sized selection for each invitee, we have also produced a multilingual anthology containing work by all our poets. In editing these two publications, I have been joined by Professor Gilbert Fong, Dr. Shelby Chan, Dr. Lucas Klein, and Ms. Amy Ho. On behalf of all of them, I extend our sincerest thanks to the poets and translators, as well as to the friends and members of the organizing committee, without whose assistance none of this would have been possible.
If you’re in the Hongkong area, I hope to see you there!
In addition to the twenty-volume box set I wrote about Friday, the International Poetry Nights (taking place this week from Thursday to Sunday) has also published the Words & the World anthology, which is now back from the printers’:
The anthology features the work of all twenty participating poets, a sampling of what appears in the individual booklets. The Xi Chuan poems included are “I Bury My Tail” 我藏着我的尾巴, “A Song of No Matter” 無關緊要之歌, “A Song of the Corner” 牆角之歌, “Friends” 熟人, “Manes of Yellow” 黃毛, “A Sanskrit Brick from Nanzhao (738 – 937): after a Vietnamese poet” 南詔國梵文磚：仿一位越南詩人, and “Falcons, Swans, and Pearls” 獵鷹、天鵝與珍珠.
The list price is HK$160, but will be sold at half off during the festival.
The International Poetry Nights Hong Kong 2011 is attracting attention mainland China, as well. Here’s one page promoting the event with a picture of C. D. Wright (click on the image to visit the site) and a cycle of micro-blogs 微博 about the festival’s attendees:
