Tinfish Retro Series Writeup

Posted on by

At the Honolulu Weekly, Matthew DeKneef has a writeup of Tinfish Press’s Retro Series of chapbooks, Small Press, Big Fish, including special mention of Xi Chuan’s Yours Truly & Other Poems. Here’s an excerpt:

From kitchen sink approaches to poems with more intentional goals, part of the fun is reveling in those novel gems. Personal favorites include Revilla’s “Pull Without Push,” Aitken’s “The Day Danno Died (In Memory of James MacArthur)” and [Xi] Chuan’s “Yours Truly.” Though most exciting about the Retro Series … is feeling a sense that each has a charged responsibility to their words. That they matter. Or maybe that’s just how you feel as reader. Either way, you’ve been hooked.

New Issue of Cerise Press

Posted on by

The new issue of Cerise Press, the French-based English-language online literature journal, is now available. In addition to translations of poems by editor Fiona Sze-Lorrain of Chinese poets Lan Lan 蓝蓝 and Bai Hua 柏桦 (who’s also interviewed), the current issue features translations of Korean poet Ko Un by Brother Anthony of Taizé and of French poet Auxeméry by one the most secretly influential writer of the last half-century, Nathaniel Tarn. Click the image below for the current issue:

For my feature “Xi Chuan: Poetry of the Anti-lyric” from the last issue, with translations of “Power Outage” 停电, “Re-reading Borges’s Poetry” 重读博尔赫斯诗歌, and “Three Chapters on Dusk” 黄昏三章, click here. (And here for my earlier co-translations of poems by Bei Dao 北岛 with Clayton Eshleman).

Words and the World

Posted on by

Words & The World, the twenty-volume box set of multilingual pocket-sized poetry books for this year’s International Poetry Nights in Hong Kong (which will take place from the 10th to 13th this month) has been published. It will be on sale at the festival, and in select Hong Kong bookstores soon. Click on the image below for another press release:

The Xi Chuan volume, A Song of the Corner, is a selection of poems that will appear in the forthcoming Notes on the Mosquito (New Directions, 2012), featuring the following pieces: “Somebody” 某人, “The Neighbors” 鄰居, “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, “Companion” 伴侶, “My Grandma” 我奶奶, “Manes of Yellow” 黃毛, “Drizzle” 連陰雨, “Six Dynasties Ghosts” 六朝鬼魅, “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 other books, featuring the remaining nineteen participants of the International Poetry Nights, are by María Baranda (Mexico), Régis Bonvicino (Brazil), Arkadii Dragomoshchenko (Russia), Bejan Matur (Turkey), Paul Muldoon (Ireland), Vivek Narayanan (India), Tomaž Šalamun (Slovenia), Silke Scheuermann (Germany), Tanikawa Shuntarō (Japan), C. D. Wright (USA), Chen Ko-hua 陳克華 (Taiwan), Ling Yu 零雨 (Taiwan), Luo Chih Cheng 羅智成 (Taiwan), Tian Yuan 田原 (PRC / Japan), Wong Leung Wo 王良和 (Hongkong), Yao Feng 姚風 (PRC / Macau), Yip Fai 葉煇 (Hongkong), Yu Jian 于堅 (PRC), and Yu Xiang 宇向 (PRC). All books include the original language of composition, plus English and / or Chinese translations.

After the Poetry Nights, each book will sell for HK$25, with the whole set at HK$450. During the festival you can enjoy a 50% discount.

More Press on Translation

Posted on by

Salon.com has another article on translation, by Kevin Canfield, misleadingly titled “How do you say ‘balls of gold’ in French?” (wouldn’t a more accurate headline be “How do you say ‘des couilles en or‘ in English”?). Nevertheless, it’s a decent take. Here’s an excerpt that displays an interesting way of considering an old problem:

Not too long ago, Imre Goldstein completed a translation of Hungarian novelist Peter Nadas’ 1,100-page “Parallel Stories,” which comes out in the U.S. in November (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). Does Goldstein believe translators are appreciated, and properly compensated, for the work they do? “I do not,” he said in an email from Tel Aviv.

But, Goldstein added, “I reach back to the theater where I spent more than four decades, to draw not a conclusion but only a parallel. Potentially the most gratifying and elevating teamwork, a theatrical production, as everyone knows, requires the input of many collaborators. Often, reviewers write only about some, say, the director, the actors and the costume designer, leaving out others, such as the composer, the musicians, the lighting designer, fight choreographer and all the invisible but indispensable tech crew, without whom there would be no production. When, as a translator, I am not mentioned in a review, I console myself by assuming that the reviewer read the text as if it were the original.”

Northern & Central European Writers in Hongkong

Posted on by

The participants of this year’s International Writers’ Workshop (which hosted Xi Chuan last year) at Hong Kong Baptist University will be reading at the Fringe Club in Central Hongkong tomorrow night, along with HK’s own Poetry Out Loud. Unfortunately, Zhai Yongming 翟永明 wasn’t able to make it, but here’s a full list of participants. Click on the poster above for a larger image, or note the following details:

DATE: 3 Nov 2011 (Thursday)
TIME: 8:00 p.m. – 9:30 p.m.
VENUE: Fotogalarie, 2/F, Fringe Club, 2nd Lower Albert Road, Central
Host: Mr. David McKirdy (Poetry OutLoud)

Weinberger & Subin in Hongkong

Posted on by

I had lunch yesterday with Nina Subin & Eliot Weinberger (New Directions author and translator of Octavio Paz and Bei Dao 北島, among others), in town for work with Chinese University Press on their way to Vietnam and Laos. The topics–they’re epic conversationalists–ranged from Cantonese cuisine to museums under colonialism to out-of-print sinology to the Poetry Foundation to American politics. And of course to Xi Chuan, whose photo-portrait by Nina from a few years ago should appear on the forthcoming Notes on the Mosquito, and whom Eliot met with recently during Xi Chuan’s New York stop on the Push Open the Window reading tour. In Oranges & Peanuts for Sale, Eliot mentions a trip to China where he met a Chinese poet “polymath, equally at home discussing the latest American poetry or Shang dynasty numismatics”; that was Xi Chuan.

Here’s a clip of Eliot reading at the International Poetry Nights Hong Kong two years ago:

(click here for information on this year’s Poetry Nights, including Xi Chuan’s events)

Revisions

Posted on by

Not too long ago I posted a picture of the handwritten edits my New Directions editor sent me on my Xi Chuan manuscript. I thought I’d follow-up with a couple visions of what those edits have entailed in type. The first is from a translation that’s already been published, and in the spirit of comparison that motivated the printing in the PEN Translation Slam, I thought I’d provide an update:

The second example, so far unpublished, is a stanza from “Proscriptions” 戒律, which I’ve re-written thoroughly:

Xi Chuan & the International Poetry Nights Hong Kong

Posted on by

Xi Chuan will be in Hong Kong for this year’s International Poetry Nights in a week and a half. He’ll be taking part in a panel discussion on the topic of “Masters and (M)other Tongues” moderated by Prof. Leo Ou-fan Lee 李歐梵 on Thursday the 10th at 3:30 p.m. and reading that evening at 7:00 (also, on Friday the 12th, I’ll be moderating a panel on “Writing Across Languages”). Click on the images below for a larger version of the full schedule, or click here for the .pdf version. For more details and registration, click here.

Jade Ladder: Contemporary Chinese Poetry

Posted on by

I just received the press release for another anthology contemporary Chinese poetry, this one edited by Yang Lian 杨炼 and William Herbert (with Brian Holton and Qin Xiaoyu 秦晓宇 as associate editors) under the title Jade Ladder. It promises to be an exciting collection, and will feature my translations of some of Xi Chuan’s work as well. Click on the image below for more information:

The poetry world needs to have a long discussion about anthologies, especially all the anthologies of contemporary Chinese poetry that have been published recently or which are forthcoming. Compiling an anthology is as complicated as translation, and has similar questions—how do we represent what we’re representing, and to whom? What do we sacrifice, and for what gain? Add to that the fact that too often anthologies of Chinese poetry in English have stood in the way of single-authored collections being published (though this is changing), and things get quite complicated. Nevertheless, since Jade Ladder is published by the UK press Bloodaxe, and aims to showcase “the diversity of Chinese poetry as it renegotiates its relationship with Western modernist and postmodernist poetry, and re-engages with its Classical heritage,” as well as including “publication in exile,” it promises to be a fine counterpoint and complement to the US government-funded Push Open the Window.