Clifton on China in The Irish Times

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Harry Clifton and Bao Huiyi

Here’s a let-down of a travelogue: Irish poet Harry Clifton went to China and wrote about it for The Irish Times. At the invitation of Bao Huyi 包慧怡, and also led around by Zhai Yongming 翟永明, he nevertheless manages not to be able to write anything of particular insight into contemporary Chinese poetry–despite the article’s tag being about how “Harry Clifton was bowled over by nation’s teeming life on trip through its poetic heartland,” despite being in the company of two of China’s most interesting poets.

He writes:

This wonderfully preposterous event, involving Chinese professors, university students, joint-smoking hill-tribe poets and illiterates off the street, left me with an abiding conviction – that there is such a thing as inspired misunderstanding between peoples of goodwill comically ignorant of each other, which creates an energy that never would otherwise have existed. Beneath the flashing lights and projected texts on the walls, with Ms Zhai in her feisty hat puffing away in front of me, I realised something as old as the transfer of Zoroastrian texts up the Silk Road was happening, and with roughly the same level of comprehension.

Yes, there is “inspired misunderstanding,” but there’s also just not really connecting. I hope the next time an English-language newspaper commissions a poet to write something about a trip to China, the paper can be sure that the poet will do the appropriate research to make some sense of what goes on during the trip.

Disappointed with W.H. Auden’s Chinese sonnets, which he calls “all gigantism and moralising abstraction, with the human reality lost in its shadow,” Clifton promises “to write [his] own Chinese sonnets, with the life of the place inside them.” 加油!

Click here for the article.

NYU Shanghai Conversation on the State of the Art of Chinese Poetry Translation

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Panel Discussion

Chinese Poetry in Translation: A Conversation on the State of the Art

Join a panel of leading translators, scholars of contemporary Chinese poetry, and translation theorists for a conversation about the state of the art in 2018. Discussion will highlight Chinese poets whose work challenges conceptions of a literary “mainstream,” in particular with respect to gender, class, and economic inequality.

Panelists Huiyi Bao 包慧怡 (Fudan), Eleanor Goodman (Harvard Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies), Lucas Klein (University of Hong Kong) and Kyoo Lee (City University of New York) will share and discuss their work in translation and in critical scholarship, ranging from the work of a pioneer of contemporary Chinese poetry like Mang Ke 芒克, co-founder of the legendary journal Jintian 今天 (1978-1980); to the workers poetry written and shared by migrant laborers across China today; to the vital writing by women in a cultural field often dominated by male poets and critics.

  • Room 101, 1555 Century Avenue
  • Wednesday, March 14, 2018 16:3018:00

Click the image above for registration & more information.