Xi Chuan Interview part II

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Two weeks ago I linked to part one of Paul Nelson’s SPLAB interview with Xi Chuan. Paul has recently uploaded part two, which continues to show the  depth and breadth of Xi Chuan.Whereas part one spent more time on Xi Chuan’s personal history, however, in part two he discusses details from his poems “Exhortations” 箴言, “A Personal Paradise” 个人的天堂, “Ill Fortunes” 厄运 (which he reads, in English), and “Notes on the Mosquito” 蚊子志, as well as the developments in Chinese poetry since the era of the “Misty Poets” 朦胧诗人 in the ’80s. Add to this both Xi Chuan’s take on the politics of the history of Chinese and American interaction and Paul’s “American Sentence,” “A bureaucrat is someone great finding reasons why they can’t help you,” and this is clearly an interview worth listening to. Here’s Paul’s write-up:

Xi Chuan, peN

While in China for the 3rd Qinghai Lake International Poetry Festival this past August, I met one of the most renowned younger Chinese poets, Xi Chuan. He has a book coming out next year entitled Notes on the Mosquito, published in translation by New Directions. In Seattle recently to celebrate the release of an anthology of contemporary poetry from China, Push Open the Window (Copper Canyon Press) he talked about the opening in Chinese poetry after the Cultural Revolution. SPLAB Presents for the week of October 17, 2011.  Part one of the interview.  Part two is here.

SPLAB Presents airs Thursdays at 4:30 p.m. on KBCS.FM, 91.3, or you can listen to the interview here.

 

 

Push Open the Window Write-up

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Over at Writing Without Paper Maureen has posted a quick write-up of Copper Canyon Press’s NEA-sponsored anthology of contemporary Chinese poetry, Push Open the Window. An informative list of details more than a review proper, it’s nonetheless valuable for its collection of links to Chinese poetry in English translation, as well as the personal or academic websites for a number of translators. Also, I appreciate that she includes my translation of Xi Chuan along with her quotations of Steve Riep‘s Zhou Zan and Jonathan Stalling / Huang Yibing‘s Mang Ke. You can read the entire post here.

Translation- & Poetry-related links

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I wanted to help spread the word about two online posts related to poetry & translation. The first is the Third Factory / Notes to Poetry posting of Marjorie Perloff‘s list of recent poetry books worthy of attention: her last three write-ups–Jonathan Stalling‘s  Yíngēlìshī 吟歌麗詩 (Counterpath), Susan Bernofsky‘s translation of Uljana Wolf’s False Friends (Ugly Duckling), and Susan Howe’s That This (New Directions)–all bear some kind of affinity, I think, with my translations of Xi Chuan in Notes on the Mosquito (the whole Third Factory compilation of lists is worth looking at; I just noticed Johannes Göransson‘s mention of Aimé Césaire‘s unexpurgated Solar Throat Slashed, co-translated by Clayton Eshleman, with whom I have also worked).

Then there’s Richard Jeffrey Newman‘s epic post “I am a Translator of Classical Iranian Poetry. Or Maybe I’m Not.” Ranging from his loss of a union election to the obstacles he’s had to face in being recognized as a translator of classical Persian poetry, I recommend it to anyone interested in the politics of either academia or translation in the US. The bullets he ends with are sharp and quick, but they also make me yearn, in part, for a world in which Chinese poetry translation could be taken so seriously. I can’t think of an equivalence to the critical thinking around whether it’s “Persian” or “Iranian” literature, for instance, in the Chinese context.

Interview with Zhou Zan

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On October 12, the day of her Library of Congress reading with Xi Chuan to promote Push Open the Window, the NEA blog Art Works posted an interview with Chinese poet Zhou Zan 周瓒. Read the whole interview here; the following is a particularly interesting detail:

NEA: What do you remember as your earliest experience in or engagement with the arts?

ZHOU ZAN: When I was a child, maybe 4-5 years old, I was playing with my friends. For some reason, we argued, and then I discovered that I could talk in the manner in which one composes a poem: a sequence of very short sentences. I was able to talk a lot in this way, using metaphor and images. I surprised both the other kids and myself. Afterwards, I realized that I had an ability in the creative arts.

Yours Truly & Other Poems

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My copies of Yours Truly & Other Poems, the Tinfish Press chapbook of six of my translations of recent Xi Chuan pieces, just arrived in the mail today. Here are the contents: “Unusual” 反常, “I Bury My Tail” 我藏着我的尾巴, “The Neighbors” 邻居, “Somebody” 某人, “The Plains” 平原, and “Yours Truly” 小老儿. Here’s how it looks: (click on the images to order yours for only $3.00 in greenbacks!)

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Xi Chuan will be reading at the International Poetry Nights in Hong Kong, which will take place this November 10 – 13. He’ll be joining nine other Chinese-language poets from the Mainland, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, as well as ten international poets from Arkadii Dragomoshchenko and C. D. Wright to Tomaž Šalamun, Paul Muldoon, and Vivek Narayanan. Click on the image below for registration and further details:

Translation & Cultural Distinction

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In his introduction to Xi Chuan and Zhou Zan from their 92nd St. Y reading on October 10th, Forrest Gander referred to something his Brown University colleague John Cayley had said about classical Chinese poetry in English translation. Sylvia Lin and Howard Goldblatt, the translation editors of the NEA anthology Push Open the Window, also picked up on the same statement, writing in their “Translation Co-Editors’ Preface”:

When we agreed to take on this exciting project as translation editors, we were reminded of a comment that has long resonated with us, as readers and translators of Chinese literature and as “shameless” promoters of the best of it, in the original when possible and in translation otherwise. John Cayley, himself a translator and a publisher of Chinese poetry in translation, has written: “Incontestably, the translation of classical Chinese poetry into English has given us a body of work which is culturally distinct from the poetry of its host language but which has immediate appeal, and is often read with intense pleasure and a deep awareness of its moral and artistic significance.” The challenge, for us, was to assist in bringing over contemporary poetry from China such that Cayley’s assertion could be modified by replacing a single word and remain true.

This is interesting to consider. Certainly what Cayley says is true, that English translations of classical Chinese poetry have been loved by readers and influential to poets who have little or no knowledge of Chinese as a language or a culture otherwise; Eliot Weinberger‘s early Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei and more recent New Directions Anthology of Classical Chinese Poetry are testaments to this fact. And yet, when it comes to contemporary Chinese poetry, I’m not so ready to agree (I’ve been critical, for instance, of anthologies of contemporary Chinese poetry that seem to exploit the creativity of the translator and suppress what makes the original original).

Certainly translating a poem from a thousand years ago and a poem from this decade are somewhat different activities. Certainly the cultural distinction of contemporary Chinese vis-à-vis the contemporary anglophone world is much less than the cultural distinction of China in the Tang or Song. Do facts of proximity–from globalization to immigration to travel to…–mean that we translators have less cultural leeway when dealing with contemporary Chinese writing than with writing from ancient China? In other words, do we have to make our translations less culturally distinct from their originals because contemporary Chinese originals are already closer to us than ancient Chinese originals? I find this question especially relevant to translating Xi Chuan, who often incorporates a view of classical China from (for instance, his series “Thirty Historical Reflections” 鉴史三十章).

This deserves more thought, of course, and I certainly don’t want to prescribe anything all translators everywhere have to follow. I will say this, though: my goal in translation is to satisfy three kinds of readers, those who read Chinese poetry, those who read poetry in English, and those who read translations. If I don’t think what I’ve written satisfies those three very different sets of demands, I don’t think I’ve written a good translation.

The Editor’s Edits

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After weeks of delays and worrying (the first package vanished somewhere between New York and Hongkong, so a copy had to be re-sent from another service), the editor‘s notes on Notes on the Mosquito, my translation of Xi Chuan’s selected poems, arrived yesterday.

Looking at this is both humbling and exhilarating. Can’t wait to get to work!

Jia Zhangke’s Platform

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In addition to being a poet and essayist, Xi Chuan has also worked as a film actor. In Platform 站台 (2000), directed by Jia Zhangke 贾樟柯 about personal and artistic changes in Shanxi 山西 province from the ’70s to the ’90s, he plays a theater director from Beijing modeled in part off the poet Mang Ke 芒克 (co-founder of the journal Jintian 今天, and whose poetry I should be translating soon). Here’s the English-language trailer:

I’m still looking for an excerpt of one of Xi Chuan’s scenes with English subtitles, but the entire movie is available on youku.com. Xi Chuan appears at about 3:38, in disbelief that his troupe has never seen a train in person and berating them for unrealistic acting and individualism; at 32:31, interrogating a misbehaving actor about the goals of socialism under “reform and opening up” 改革开放; and again at 37:13, where his speech indicating the troupe’s future direction is, tellingly, interrupted by a solo flamenco performance.

“Is That a Fish in Your Ear” interview

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One out of every five Americans is functionally bilingual — either because they are recent immigrants or they inherited it from their family or because they learned it at school or from residence abroad. That’s quite a high percentage for an English-speaking country. America isn’t as monolingual as people say it is — but it is culturally monolingual.

Readers of poetry in translation and advocates for linguistic diversity may be interested Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything, by David Bellos (one of Bellos’s crowning achievements is the translation of Georges Perec’s Life: A User’s Manual). I haven’t read it yet, but I did appreciate his interview, under the title “The Birth of the Google Translate Era,” at Salon. The quote about is from that interview, as is the following excerpt:

Far more titles are translated from English than into English every year. What does that say about the relative status of English-speaking culture in the world?

There is a huge asymmetry. Somewhere around 3 or 4 percent of books appearing in the U.S. each year are of foreign origin, whereas in other developed book cultures, like France or Germany, it ranges from 15 to 20 percent. The English language book industry is vastly bigger than any other, so 4 percent of all the books published in English is actually quite a large number of books.

It’s partly because English is written by so many different cultures around the world — South Africans, Australians, and so forth — so the English book world is already diverse. But the fundamental reason is that publishers remain convinced that translated books are a hard sell and that they don’t have much of a public. They don’t really believe in translated books as way of making money. It’s true that very few New York Times bestsellers were originally written in another language, but these are to some degree self-fulfilling prophecies. It’s something I really want to carry on struggling against. Publishers should be more courageous and less enclosed in the received idea that translation is expensive and needs a subsidy and is never going to appeal to anybody.