Tag Archives: Bonnie McDougall

Narayanan on Bei Dao at Poetry Daily

Posted on by
Bei Dao_Endure_sm-cvr
“Vivek Narayanan on a Poem’s Re-Entering History“

Poetry Daily has published Vivek Narayanan on “a Poem’s Re-Entering History,” looking at Bei Dao’s 北岛 famous poem from the seventies, “The Reply” 回答 (elsewhere “The Answer”).

“I personally like to read multiple translations against each other,” he writes:

both as a way to see and triangulate what the translator is doing and to think/feel my way into what the source poem could be like. Read the translation on our site, by Clayton Eshleman and Lucas Klein, with its clear lyrical growl, to my ear more explicit in its political echoes, against this one by Bonnie S. McDougall, a little stilted in its language but also perhaps more indirect. If you can, read the version co-authored by Donald Finkel, a seemingly “free”-er version with surprising results. And do read this fourth—unattributed—translation on a “Learn Chinese” site, also very useful, despite what will feel to some like a mildly alienated idiom. Finally, listen to the dramatic recitation of the original Chinese linked on the “Learn Chinese” site above and consider to the extent possible, without fear, the transliterated Chinese. (Tip: also try hovering your mouse over the original Chinese characters!) 

If we look at just the first two lines—

bēibǐ shì bēibǐ zhě de tōngxíngzhèng 
gāoshàng shì gāoshàng zhě de mù zhì míng

—we see that the key lies in repetition—bēibǐ (“contempt,” “debasement,” “shabbiness”) in the first line and gāoshàng (“gravitas,” “nobility,” “refined,” “lofty”, etc.) in the second. This is no simple repetition, however. The translators show us how the word in each case is being turned against itself, in a visceral struggle for personal existence and for language to have any meaning or purpose at all. From this point, the poem should start to emerge. The line “I-do-not-believe”—four stark characters isolated by dashes, like cries from deep within—continues to resonate even in the moment from which I write, thinking of the protestors in Hong Kong, the silencing of Kashmir, or the current American era, with a head of state whose every utterance stokes disbelief. 

(links to the translations and the “Learn Chinese” site in the article).

“But it would be glib to stop there, because we have not yet grappled with the poem’s final paradox: between internal and external, public and private,” Narayanan continues. Click here to read more.

Sydney Review of Books interview with Bonnie McDougall

Posted on by
Fruitful exchanges: Bonnie S. McDougall on translation

The Sydney Review of Books has published an interview with Bonnie McDougall, by Jeffrey Errington, covering topics ranging from her experiences with translation and poetry and politics.

The interview spends some time on her experiences getting to know Bei Dao 北岛, and translating his work in the eighties:

Did you meet Bei Dao at the Foreign LanguagesPress?
I had published a book of poetry and essays by the 1930s writer He Qifang [何其芳] and this book, somehow, reached Harbin in North China where a young woman read it and, in response, sent a letter to me via my publisher. When I went to China we finally met. Her journalist husband asked me, ‘would you like to meet the best young poet in China?’ This was Bei Dao, and it turned out that he was also working at the FLP, in the Esperanto office. He was obliged to study Esperanto and scour literary magazines to find writers to be translated into that language. Around 1980-81 a lot of the young men and women who were sent to factories or the countryside returned to Peking and other cities at the end of the Cultural Revolution and started to work for educational and cultural institutions such as the FLP. This included Bei Dao. It was a good job: reading through magazines and recommending works to be translated and published. As we worked in the same institution we were able to meet without attracting unwelcome attention—or so we thought. After some time the FLP told my office in the English section, rather bluntly, that Bei Dao needs to stop wasting my time as I was paid a rather large salary while his was less. So they tried to put a stop to us working together.

and

So when you get the world of a Bei Dao poem and bring it into English is it a Chinese reality that we are getting or by being reconstructed using English words is it an English-language reality — or is it swinging back and forth?
I think maybe swinging is one way to put it. There was not such a wide gap between educated young men and women in China and the young foreigners who flocked around them in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The young men and women who grew up in Cultural Revolution China were able to get books by foreign authors including works about foreign writing. So to some extent they were self-educated in twentieth-century English or French or German writing. So the lack of supervision was a major factor in the life of someone like Bei Dao, who for several years was working in a factory. Not surprisingly he was not a very effective factory worker as he was no good at pouring cement. He just sat in a corner and read. So they were self-educated in a way that produced a fairly good understanding of early twentieth-century British and American poetics.

Click through to read the interview in full.

Kapoor on Bei Dao as “tranquil bard of protest”

Posted on by

As he turns 69, Chinese poet Bei Dao remains the tranquil bard of protest, even in exileWriting for Scroll.in, Manan Kapoor writes about how “As he turns 69, Chinese poet Bei Dao remains the tranquil bard of protest, even in exile.”

The piece is full of imprecisions–it refers to Bei Dao as “Dao” throughout, misattributes poems translated by Bonnie McDougall, and spells his current translator Eliot Weinberger’s name as “Wineberger”–but it’s broadly accurate in its outlines.

At times, it’s even moving:

But even in exile, Dao did not lose his calm. After years of being away from Beijing, he believed that something good would spring up from it. He still questioned authority with serenity, equating his exile to a crusade where someone was needed to be “away from home, suffer a little” so they could gain some understanding of the world and how everything functions. He wrote, “To a certain extent, it’s a historical crusade, but the intention of the crusade is not to conquer the enemy, but for the person to conquer him/herself.” A voice like his is seldom experienced. From the choice of words, to the forms of expression and dissent, Bei Dao will go down in history as an exemplary figure who redefined the poetry of resistance.

Click the image for the full write-up.

Klein’s Duo Duo in Asian Cha

Posted on by
No automatic alt text available.

The new issue of Cha: An Asian Literary Journal is now live, and with it my translations of two new poems by Duo Duo 多多, “A Fine Breeze Comes” 好风来 and “Light Coming from Before, Sing: Leave” 从前来的光，唱：离去.

tomorrow’s already past
already offered
the past is still unknown
already spokenthe limit belongs to you
nobody can have that name

明天已经过去
已经给予
过去仍是未知的
已经说出 止境属于你
无人能有那名

Also in the issue are Bonnie McDougall’s translations of poems by Ng Mei-kwan 吳美筠, Jennifer Feeley’s translation of fiction by Xi Xi 西西, fiction by Eileen Chang 張愛玲 translated by Jane Weizhen Pan & Martin Merz, and Matt Turner reviewing Paul French and Kaitlin Solimine and Eleanor Goodman reviewing Richard Berengarten.
Click the image above to get to the issue.

Sebastian Veg: Putting Hong Kong’s New Cultural Activism on the Literary Map

Posted on by

200Sebastian Veg’s review essay of City at the End of Time: Poems by Leung Ping-Kwan 梁秉鈞 (edited by Esther Cheung) and Dung Kai-cheung’s 董啟章 Atlas: The Archaeology of an Imaginary City (translated by the author with Bonnie McDougall and Anders Hansson), titled “Putting Hong Kong’s New Cultural Activism on the Literary Map,” has been published by the MCLC. Here’s how it ends:200

the images of Hong Kong that emerge from these two collections are similar: far from the Cantonese patriotism of kung-fu films or the proudly apolitical but hugely successful taipans and tycoons of the business world, here the everyday experience and the successive reinventions of a many-layered postcolonial history are what define a new sense of belonging to Hong Kong. Both writers engage in soul-searching about the marginal position of the city, about investing with meaning a place that is not and does not aspire to become a nation-state, a place that identifies with aspects of Chinese culture but that has always cultivated its distinct “southern” difference. In these and other ways, these two writers are harbingers, not only of the emerging local sensibility that is beginning to find its translation into social movements and debates, but also of a new way of thinking about the relation between national and cultural identity, about colonial memories and postcolonial nostalgia that questions many of our assumptions about the position of the contemporary writer.

Eric Hayot on China, From Middlebrow to Highbrow

Posted on by

At Public Books Eric Hayot writes about the presentation of China in literature available to readers of English, by way of a review of Gail Tsukiyama’s A Hundred Flowers, Christopher Buckley’s They Eat Puppies, Don’t They?, Dung Kai-cheung’s 董啟章 Atlas: The Archaeology of an Imaginary City (translated by the author with Bonnie McDougall and Anders Hansson), and Lenin’s Kisses by Yan Lianke 阎连科 (translated by Carlos Rojas). Here’s how Hayot frames his discussion:

… these four novels—two satires, one melodrama, and one modernist pseudo-documentary—might all be grasped as part of the contemporary social call to understand China, to see it clearly, to name or frame it, to place it in relation to local or global politics, or to locate it inside recent or universal world history. In the last decade economic historians like Ban Wang and Kenneth Pomeranz have demonstrated that the Chinese economy dominated the planet from about 500 to 1500 CE, creating the world’s first global economic system. The possibility of China’s return to that position of dominance—and here I ask all readers to call up a mental image of a sleeping dragon awakening—is what has folks on both sides of the Pacific trembling, in fear or glee, for the “Chinese century” to succeed the American one. “China” is thus one of the names of the global future as we imagine it.

China is also, therefore, an intellectual and social problem, for everyone. What is China to us today—assuming the “us” includes (and how could it not?) the wide variety of people who think of themselves as “Chinese”? What kind of place is it? What must we know to comprehend its nature (if it has one)? What would it mean to recognize ourselves (again, the first person plural includes the Chinese) as people who want to know what China is, and who are willing to work hard, as authors and as readers, to understand it? How will such an understanding return us, like fiction, to a new vision of the world we have known until now?

Click on any of the images to link to the essay.

Lucas Klein on Dung Kai-cheung’s Atlas

Posted on by

My review of Atlas: The Archaeology of an Imaginary City, by Dung Kai-cheung 董啟章 and translated by the author with Anders Hansson and Bonnie S. McDougall, has been posted at Rain Taxi. Here’s how it begins:

“No one, wise Kublai,” says Marco Polo in Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, “knows better than you that the city must never be confused with the words that describe it.” In Atlas: The Archaeology of an Imaginary City, Hong Kong’s Dung Kai-cheung writes, “All places are misplaces, and all misplaces are misreadings,” and “The prerequisite for the setting of boundaries on maps is possession of the power to create fiction.”

Review of Bei Dao’s The Rose of Time: New and Selected Poems

Posted on by

Gryphon by Charles BaxterJonathan Hart reviews Bei Dao‘s 北島 The Rose of Time: New and Selected Poems (New Directions), edited by Eliot Weinberger, speaking “about these translations as if they were poems in English on which the reputation of the poet stands in the English-speaking world.”

He concludes that “Bei Dao’s poetry translates well in its bold imagery and implicit and oblique politics, using nature in a symbolism of indirection that is as subtle as it is apparent,” but he only mentions poems translated by Bonnie McDougall (Bei Dao’s early work) and by Weinberger (Bei Dao’s more recent work), not mentioning the poems translated by David Hinton.

For another recent collection of Bei Dao’s poetry in English, see also Endure (Black Widow Press), translated by Clayton Eshleman and me.

Douglas Robinson on Bonnie McDougall’s Translation Zones in Modern China

Posted on by

200Douglas Robinson, Chair of English at Lingnan University, has reviewed Translation Zones in Modern China: Authoritarian Command versus Gift Exchange, by star Chinese literary translator Bonnie McDougall, for Modern Chinese Literature & Culture. Here’s an excerpt:

In one sense, the core of the book is McDougall’s recollections of living in Beijing from 1980 to 1983, working full-time as a Chinese-to-English translator for the Foreign Languages Press (FLP) and translating poetry by Bei Dao and other “unofficial writers” on the side. […] This is the strategy that makes for some awkwardness in the book: McDougall is constantly converting her personal experiences into an academic ethnography of an institution, while also frequently reminding us that most of what she is telling us she knows from personal experience. The book is neither frank memoir nor memoir disguised as something more impersonal and academic; it is both at once, and to achieve that effect it travels a shifting line of conjunction between the two.

There are also great advantages to this strategy. One is that, at least part of the time, we are situated in a temporal phenomenology that gives us a sense of the insecurity of real life lived in time–the fact that one never knows, experiencing a given state of affairs, how long that state is going to last, and whether it’s going to get better or worse. When McDougall arrived in Beijing in 1980, the Cultural Revolution had ended just scant years before; the forces that had organized and fueled that dark period were still around, and seemed occasionally to be gathering strength, as in the “anti-spiritual pollution” crusade of 1983 and 1984. At several points McDougall gives us a sense of the fear many felt at the time that the campaign was a resurgence of the Cultural Revolution. Deng Xiaoping was then just beginning to liberalize the Chinese economy, and the first signs of that opening, whose blossoming we see so clearly today, are visible in this period as well. What we see in the transitional period she describes is not a stark contrast between “China then” and “China now” but significant historical tensions and continuities that help us understand not just the PRC from 1980 to 1983, but something like the last half century of Chinese history.

Interview with Dung Kai-cheung

Posted on by

The Hong Kong Advanced Institute for Cross-Disciplinary Studies has just posted Cris Mattison’s interview with Hong Kong writer Dung Kai-cheung 董啟章, one of the SAR’s most inventive authors. His novel Atlas: The Archaeology of an Imaginary City 地圖集, which mixes fiction with documentary history to chronicle the city of Hong Kong, will be out this summer in English translation by Bonnie McDougall and Anders Hansson. Here’s an excerpt from the interview where he discusses his work as related to translation and world literature in the broad sense, responding to a critique people have leveled against certain writers of modern Chinese literature for nearly a century (I expect Xi Chuan would give a similar response):

DKC: I said my language is influenced by English because since I studied Comparative Literature at the University of Hong Kong much of my reading has been done in English. The influence is not just in terms of subject matter and literary forms but also of sentence structure and diction. My Chinese has been regarded by some language purists as “Europeanized,” which is meant to be a criticism for not writing in a proper Chinese. It is in this sense that I said the language of Atlas “lends itself to translation.” By this I mean not that it is simple to translate, nor do I mean that it is written with the intention of being translated, and thus gaining international attention.