Issue 17 of Cha Now Live

ImageThe new issue of Cha: An Asian Literary Journal is now live. Guest edited by Divya Rajan (poetry) and Bob Bradshaw (prose), it features work by Sarah Stanton, Eddie Tay, Kim Liao, and others.

I’ll be guest-editing Cha‘s “Ancient Asia Issue,” scheduled to launch August 2013. See also their earlier publication of my translation of five sections from Xi Chuan’s “Thirty Historical Reflections” 鉴史三十章 from their China Issue.

Issue 16 of Cha

The new issue of Cha is now online. Take a look for poetry by Ricky Garni (“the citizen is in a box, / his body parts fall / from his body. / he watches the / others who are free.”), nonfiction by Chelsea Bainbridge-Donner (“I don’t remember my first train, but my mother does, and she loves to tell the story.”), Mani Rao’s review of new translations of Rabindranath Tagore (“When so much contemporary literature generated in Indian languages goes untranslated, the Tagore phenomenon seems disproportionate. One cannot hold that against a translator, however.”), and more.

I’ll be guest-editing Cha‘s “Ancient Asia Issue,” scheduled to launch August 2013. See also their earlier publication of my translation of five sections from Xi Chuan’s “Thirty Historical Reflections” 鉴史三十章 from their China Issue.

Review of Cha’s “China Issue”

Rare are reviews of literary journals, but over at Lantern Review‘s “Panax Ginseng” Henry W. Leung has a write-up of Cha‘s “China issue”–where five of my translations from Xi Chuan’s “Thirty Historical Reflections” 鉴史三十章 appeared–in which he looks at poetic representations of China in English and in Chinese as translated into English. I don’t know if he didn’t read the Xi Chuan or just has nothing to say about his work, but I was impressed by the opening:

The China Issue” of Cha: An Asian Literary Journal presents itself with an ambiguous title. It is the journal’s literary issue on China, but it might just as well be ‘the issue of China,’ i.e. the problem of it, a claim to authority and singularity; or simply ‘the issue of representing China,’ the question of it, the difficulty. ‘China’ as a thematic boundary is naturally complex for a journal based in Hong Kong—but virtually, over the internet—and presented in English. Most of this issue’s poems are translations from the Chinese, with the originals preserved; of these, few refer explicitly to or narrow themselves by locality… Some of the poems written in English, however, announce their ‘Chineseness’ with archetypal localities, such as romanticized pastorals of farmland China, or romance recalled as manufacture…

Fourth Anniversary Issue of Cha

The fourth anniversary issue of Cha: An Asian Literary Journal is now live. In addition to the quality poetry, fiction, & non-fiction, this issue also features new sections such as a Supplement on publishing in Hongkong, Singapore, Malaysia, and Macau. The book review section is also worth noting, especially for its take on Amblings, the new selected poems of Leung Ping-Kwan 梁秉鈞.

I’ll be guest-editing Cha‘s “Ancient Asia Issue,” scheduled to launch August 2013. See also their earlier publication of my translation of five sections from Xi Chuan’s “Thirty Historical Reflections” 鉴史三十章 from their China Issue.