Writing for The Poetry Project, Simon Schuchat has reviewed two books of contemporary Chinese poetry in English translation that came out last year, Duo Duo’ 多多 Words as Grain: New and Selected Poems, translated by Lucas Klein, and by Wang Yin’s 王寅 Ghosts City Sea, translated by Andrea Lingenfelter.
He writes:
Here are two new translations of important and wonderful Chinese poets, by two of the finest contemporary translators of Chinese literature. A northerner and a southerner. One was already adolescent during the Cultural Revolution, the other a primary school student … These two poets speak to the reader, without the formality of direct address in classical poetry, but without losing the paratactic and indeterminate potential of the classical tradition. That acknowledged, both Lucas Klein and Andrea Lingenfelter, consistently achieve the impossible and bring the poetry into English. They recreate voices for the poets themselves, which do not resemble their invisible interpreters.
About Duo Duo in particular, Schuchat says:
his poetry is more than the exile’s lament, and beyond either the hopes of the early reform era or their subsequent crushing first by armed force and then by raging capital. Surrealist poetry, loosely speaking, seeks to produce or transmit an emotional message that resists paraphrase or explanation, jumping over logical connections.
Recently I posted about my translations of poetry by Liu Waitong 廖偉棠 on Hong Kong Protesting. In fact, the site, edited by Tammy Lai-ming Ho, editor as well of Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, is quickly becoming a go-to site for new translations of contemporary Chinese poetry.
Here is an excerpt of one of Ho’s Chung translations:
FORGET NOT
Forgetting is near. What are we rushing to clamber over? Blood and sweat of three million people only to demand a fictive rope? Are there balloons up there? Only billowing clouds As though the screaming across the city has muted its own cries Turning into fists lashing out helplessly
Is our energy running low? Are the long streets still beating? The heavy thump in Pacific Place resounds in Fanling Red and white plastic barriers blossom in Golden Bauhinia Square Taller than the people. Tomorrow, ah, there’s still tomorrow Tomorrow the wealthy and powerful will start feasting Indifferent to the rancid-smelling blood that rises from their heads
ZOOM: https://bit.ly/2YHxitE (Meeting ID: 959 2591 8289) Saturday June 13, 11:00 a.m. Hong Kong time (click here to find the date & time for you)
Congratulations to Zephyr Press! They are celebrating their 40th anniversary this year, and “Translators Speak: Translating Chinese Poetry” is part of the celebrations.
“Translators Speak: Translating Chinese Poetry,” co-sponsored by Zephyr Press, features several translators from Zephyr’s Jintian Series of Contemporary Chinese Poetry. Nick Admussen, Lucas Klein, Andrea Lingenfelter, and Jami Proctor Xu will talk about and introduce the poets they translated, the translation process, their views on translating Chinese poetry (as opposed to translating other genres), and advice and suggestions they would give other translators. They will also read from their books and contextualise the poems and their translations. We will have a Q&A session as well. This discussion will take place via Zoom and people from all over the world are welcome to listen in. [Find out what time it will be where you are: https://bit.ly/2W8O57q] Moderated by Cha’s co-editor Tammy Lai-Ming Ho.
TRANSLATORS SPEAK: TRANSLATING CHINESE POETRY Date: Saturday 13 June 2020 Time: 11:00 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. (GMT+8) Platform: Zoom https://bit.ly/2YHxitE (Meeting ID: 959 2591 8289) Languages: English Speakers: Nick Admussen, Lucas Klein, Andrea Lingenfelter, and Jami Proctor Xu Moderator: Tammy Lai-Ming Ho
BIOS:
◓ NICK ADMUSSEN (speaker) Nick Admussen is an associate professor of Chinese literature and culture at Cornell University. He is the author of Recite and Refuse: Contemporary Chinese Prose Poetry, the translator of Ya Shi’s poetry collection Floral Mutter, and a poet whose most recent chapbook is titled Stand Back, Don’t Fear the Change. He was the recipient of a 2017 grant from the PEN/Heim fund for translation, has been anthologized in Best New Poets 2018 and Best Short Fictions 2017, and was a 2018 National Poetry Series finalist.
◓ LUCAS KLEIN (speaker) Lucas Klein (PhD Yale) is a father, writer, and translator. His scholarship and criticism have appeared in the monograph The Organization of Distance: Poetry, Translation, Chineseness (Brill, 2018), as well as in Comparative Literature Studies, LARB, Jacket, CLEAR, PMLA, and other venues. His translation Notes on the Mosquito: Selected Poems of Xi Chuan (New Directions, 2012) won the 2013 Lucien Stryk Prize; other publications include his translations of the poetry of Mang Ke, October Dedications (Zephyr and Chinese University Press, 2018), and contributions to Li Shangyin (New York Review Books, 2018). His translations of the poetry of Duo Duo, forthcoming from Yale University Press, won a PEN/Heim Translation Fund grant, and he co-edited Chinese Poetry and Translation: Rights and Wrongs (2019) with Maghiel van Crevel, downloadable for free from Amsterdam University Press. He is an associate professor in the School of Chinese at the University of Hong Kong.
◓ ANDREA LINGENFELTER (speaker) Andrea Lingenfelter is a writer and translator whose published books include The Changing Room: Selected Poetry of Zhai Yongming (Northern California Book Award winner), Hon Lai Chu’s The Kite Family, (NEA Translation Fellowship grantee), Li Pik-wah’s Farewell My Concubine and The Last Princess of Manchuria, and Candy and Vanishing Act by Mian Mian. Her poetry and prose translations have appeared in Manoa, Granta, Chinese Literature Today, Pathlight, Zoland Poetry Annual, Words Without Borders, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, Two Lines, Chicago Review, and elsewhere. Her own work has appeared in various publications, including Strix and Cha. Current book-length translation projects include a collection of poems by Wang Yin, Zhai Yongming’s Following Huang Gongwang Through the Fuchun Mountains, and Wang Anyi’s novel Scent of Heaven. She is a contributor to the Los Angeles Review of Books and its affiliated China Channel, and is a two-time Vermont Studio Center Luce Translation Fellowship recipient (with Wang Yin [2017) and Cao Shuying [2019] respectively). Currently based in Northern California, she teaches literary translation and literature and film of the Asia Pacific at the University of San Francisco.
◓ JAMI PROCTOR XU (speaker) Jami Proctor Xu is a poet, mother and translator. She writes in English and Chinese and splits her time between Northern California, Arizona, and China. Her publications include, among others, a Chinese chapbook, Shimmers (EMS, 2013) a Chinese poetry collection Suddenly Starting to Dance (Yi, 2016), an English chapbook, Hummingbird Ignites a Star, the translated collection of Jidi Majia, Words from the Fire (Manoa, 2018), and the translated collection of Song Lin, Sunday Sparrows (Zephyr, 2020). Her current translation projects include translations of poetry collections by Zhao Ye, Xiao Xiao, and Shu Cai. Jami is also editing an anthology of Chinese translations of US poets born in the 1970s as well as anthologies of international poets forthcoming from Beijing Normal University. Since 2016, she has co-organised an annual international poetry exchange at Beijing Normal University’s International Writing Center, and since 2019, she has collaborated with Zolani Mkiva to co-organise international poetry events in South Africa. Jami frequently reads at festivals around the world, and her poetry and translations have been published in anthologies in several languages. She is a recipient of the Zhujiang Poetry Award (2013) and the First Reader Best Poet Award (2016).
◒ TAMMY LAI-MING HO (moderator) Tammy Lai-Ming Ho is the founding co-editor of the first Hong Kong-based international Asia-focused journal, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, an editor of the academic journals Victorian Network and Hong Kong Studies, and the first English-language Editor of Voice & Verse Poetry Magazine 聲韻詩刊. She is an Associate Professor at Hong Kong Baptist University, where she teaches poetics, fiction, and modern drama. She is also the President of PEN Hong Kong, a Junior Fellow of the Hong Kong Academy of the Humanities, an advisor to the Leeds Centre for New Chinese Writing, and an Associate Director of One City One Book Hong Kong. Tammy’s first collection of poetry is Hula Hooping (Chameleon 2015), for which she won the Young Artist Award in Literary Arts from the Hong Kong Arts Development Council. Her first short story collection Her Name Upon The Strand (Delere Press), her second poetry collection Too Too Too Too (Math Paper Press) and chapbook An Extraterrestrial in Hong Kong (Musical Stone) were published in 2018. Her first academic book is Neo-Victorian Cannibalism (Palgrave, 2019). Tammy edited or co-edited seven literary volumes having a strong focus on Hong Kong, the most recent one being Twin Cities: An Anthology of Twin Cinema from Singapore and Hong Kong (Landmark Books, 2017). She guest-edited a Hong Kong Feature for World Literature Today (Spring 2019) and the Hong Kong special issue of Svenska PEN’s PEN/Opp (formerly “The Dissident Blog”). She is currently editing a Hong Kong chapbook for Cordite Poetry Review and she will be co-editing 2020: A Bilingual Anthology of Hong Kong Poetry with Chris Song. Tammy is also a translator and her literary translations can be found in World Literature Today, Chinese Literature Today, Pathlight: New Chinese Writing, among other places, and International Poetry Nights in Hong Kong (香港國際詩歌之夜) volumes (2015, 2017 and 2019). Her own poems have been translated into a number of languages, including Chinese, French, German, Latvian and Vietnamese.
Nearly every other festival, public lecture, and concert in Hong Kong seems to have been canceled, but International Poetry Nights in Hong Kong will take place as scheduled! (though at a different venue than earlier planned)
Join thirty international poets, plus musicians and esteemed literary translators, for a festival of poetry (and the resilience of culture in Hong Kong), on the theme “Speech and Silence.”
Events will take place at the Jao Tsung-I Academy 饒宗頤文化館, 800 Castle Peak Road, Lai Chi Kok, Kowloon.
Readings are from 6:30 – 8:30 p.m., with music concerts following. For times and information on panel discussions on themes such as “Genre and Gender,” “The State of Resistance,” “Poetry, Translation, Hong Kong,” and “AI, Translating the Mother Tongue of Poetry,” check the full schedule.
Here is the list of participating poets and their places of origin:
Tamim AL-BARGHOUTI (Palestine) Martin SOLOTRUK (Slovakia) TÓTH Krisztina (Hungary) Anastassis VISTONITIS (Greece) Ana BLANDIANA (Romania) Ana RISTOVIĆ (Serbia) Derek CHUNG 鍾國強 (Hong Kong) Forrest GANDER (United States) Miłosz BIEDRZYCKI (Poland) Renato Sandoval BACIGALUPO (Peru) MATHURA (Estonia) Louise DUPRÉ (Canada) Ana Luísa AMARAL (Portugal) HWANG Yu Won (South Korea) Jen BERVIN (United States) Abbas BEYDOUN (Lebanon) Maxim AMELIN (Russia) Sergio RAIMONDI (Argentina) K. SATCHIDANANDAN (India) MAOZI 毛子 (PRC) ZHENG Xiaoqiong 鄭小瓊 (PRC) Ijeoma UMEBINYUO (Nigeria) Aleš ŠTEGER (Slovenia) Jan WAGNER (Germany) Ernest WICHNER (Germany) YANG Chia-Hsien 楊佳嫻 (Taiwan) Yasuhiro YOTSUMOTO (Japan) YU Youyou 余幼幼 (PRC) ZHOU Yunpeng 周雲蓬 (PRC) Maria STEPANOVA (Russia)
And here the list of special guests, including translators and AI poets:
Nick Admussen John Cayley Johannes Göransson David Jhave Johnston Andrea Lingenfelter Yara El-Masri Jennifer Feeley Eleanor Goodman Ting Guo 郭婷 Tammy Ho 何麗明 Viorica Patea Lea Schneider Ulrich Schreiber Zhao Si 趙四 Jordan A. Y. Smith
The Monsoon 2019 issue of Almost Islandis here, and with it a feature of poetry and prose from last October’s India-China dialogues in Hong Kong and Hangzhou.
Almost Island writes, announcing the feature:
This issue continues our dialogue with leading Chinese poets and novelists, ongoing since 2009. The dialogue was begun by Chinese poet Bei Dao [北岛] and Indian novelist and poet Sharmistha Mohanty. The most recent meeting between Indian and Chinese writers, curated by Almost Island and the Chinese journal Jintian [今天], took place in October 2018 in Hong Kong and Hangzhou.
Scholar Lydia H. Liu, in her essay The Gift of a Living Past, a tribute to Ashis Nandy, which we publish here, says:
“Confucius traveled from state to state—across many warring states before the unification in BCE 221—offering advice to the heads of states and attempting to counsel them, but everywhere he went, Confucius’s ideas were met with indifference and rejection. With his noble aspirations getting nowhere, Confucius gained the reputation of a homeless dog. The astonishing thing is that not only did the Master not mind being called homeless dog but he found the epithet to be a suitable description of his plight. I suspect that the story tells us something interesting about the defeat and survival of rootless intellectuals, and this story is the polar opposite of what you get from the official discourse of Confucianism in China.
Like Confucius, all rootless intellectuals are, in a sense, homeless dogs. This story lives on in our midst, like a gift to the present. As we share more of each other’s stories, the Chinese and Indian writers are essentially building a transnational literary alliance based on our melancholy knowledge of the living pasts. That our friendship can grow and form a lasting bond is owing to the fact that, in Nandy’s words, ‘India and China are both in some fundamental sense societies which negotiate the past and the future similarly despite all differences. This similarity lies in the fact that in both countries the past is as open as the future.’”
This openness of time speaks through Bei Dao’s new book length poem, from which we have excerpts here, translated by Eliot Weinberger and seen for the first time in English in this issue.
Ouyang Jianghe [欧阳江河] follows Sufis and drifters in his poems in which “A screw and a flower embrace, tightening time.” The luminous translations are by Lucas Klein.
The poems of Xi Chuan are hard, sharp and brilliant, diamond like. Once again Lucas Klein achieves this in English.
Zhai Yongming [翟永明] has, on the surface, a seemingly lighter touch, but underneath she walks the razor’s edge. Andrea Lingenfelter renders this deftly into English.
We have an excerpt from novelist Han Shaogong’s [韩少功] deeply original A Dictionary of Maqiao, written in fact in the form of dictionary entries, each entry looking closely at different aspects of the village of Maqiao during the Cultural Revolution. Translator Julia Lovell catches the extraordinary within the ordinary in Shaogong’s prose.
And Ashis Nandy’s opening talk at the last India-China Dialogues held in Hong Kong and Hangzhou, Oct. 2018, where in his inimitable way he pries open the twentieth century to find that its most lasting legacy is genocide.
Click the highlighted links to download the .pdf files and begin reading!
Matches Polished into Lights: Tiananmen Thirty Years On June 3, 2019, at Bleak House Books, Hong Kong
Speakers: Jennifer Anne Eagleton, Guo Ting, Louisa Lim, William Nee, Mei Kwan Ng, Kate Rogers, and Lian-Hee Wee (with two special guest readers, Jeff Wasserstrom and Andrea Lingenfelter). Moderator: Tammy Lai-Ming Ho
For selected texts by featured speakers, click here.
For Tammy Ho’s piece, published as South China Morning Post‘s “Young Post,” see here:
As part of Paper Republic‘s series of blogs for Global Literature in Libraries throughout February, Eleanor Goodman writes on Zephyr Press, which she says “has done more to raise the profile of contemporary Chinese poetry in English translation than any other press today”:
Their books are carefully curated, well edited, and beautifully produced. Above all, their translators (here I must profess that I am one of them) tend to be at the top of the field, which is of course essential to the making of a good book in English.
Alongside mentions of their publications of Han Dong 韩冬, Bai Hua 柏桦, Lan Lan 蓝蓝, and Yu Xiang 宇向, Goodman specifically writes about her translation of Wang Xiaoni 王小妮, about Andrea Lingenfelter’s translation of Zhai Yongming 翟永明, Austin Woerner’s translations of Ouyang Jianghe 欧阳江河, Jennifer Feeley’s translation of Hong Kong poet Xi Xi 西西, Steve Bradbury’s translation of Taiwanese poet Hsia Yü 夏宇, and my own forthcoming translations of Mang Ke 芒克.
With with “deep resources of scholarship and natural talent to draw upon,” she writes, it is
this mix of qualities—the best of the contemporary Chinese poetry world combined with translators who are also careful readers and appreciators of poetry—that makes the Zephyr collection so unique and valuable. These books are a labor of love from start to finish, and it shows in the final products. There is simply no better introduction to the contemporary Chinese poetry scene available today.
Queen Mob’s Teahouse now features Greg Bem’s review of Lost Wax, poems by Jonathan Stalling with Chinese and English re-translations by Zhou Yu, Yao Benbiao, Nick Admussen, Jennifer Feeley, Jami Proctor-Xu, Eleanor Goodman, Andrea Lingenfelter, and me. Here’s how it ends:
Moving from poem to poem, curiosity strikes me: is the primary goal of this book to bring us toward an understanding of the nuances of multilingual and multi-personal translation? Is this just an editor’s paradise to see how the process of a significant body of learned, engaged writers see the shape of a work? If there some collective meaning across the pages? By the end of the book, I hoped for commentary. I hope for more “meta.” An afterward from or an interview between the technicians. But in its absence, I was left with my own thoughts and theories (and a drive to learn some Chinese) in hopes of getting towards an understanding of what the core meaning of “lost wax” really is.
The new issue of Cha is here, featuring my translation of three poems by Mang Ke 芒克 from the forthcoming October Dedications (Chinese University & Zephyr)–“Street” 街, “Even After Death We Grow Old” 死后也还会衰老, and “Late Years” 晚年:
we will hope, wishing we could live forever
wishing we were not some animal to be hunted
cooked over open flame, eaten
we will hurt, and oh we won’t be able to bear it
the white hair of the dead grows from the ground
which makes me believe: even after death we grow old
也还会希望,愿自己永远地活着 愿自己别是一只被他人猎取的动物
被放进火里烤着,被吞食 也还会痛苦,也还会不堪忍受啊
地里已经长出死者的白发 这使我相信:人死后也还会衰老
The issue also includes poetry by Andrea Lingenfelter, DeWitt Clinton adaptating Kenneth Rexroth’s 100 Poems from the Chinese, Karen An-hwei Lee, and more. Click the image above for the link.
