Announcing publication of Chinese Poetry and Translation: Rights and Wrongs

We are pleased to announce publication of Chinese Poetry and Translation: Rights and Wrongs (Amsterdam University Press, 2019).

Open access download here. Order print copies here.

CHINESE POETRY AND TRANSLATION: RIGHTS AND WRONGS
    edited by Maghiel van Crevel and Lucas Klein

Introduction: The Weird Third Thing
    Maghiel van Crevel and Lucas Klein

Part One: The Translator’s Take

(1) Sitting with Discomfort: A Queer-Feminist Approach to Translating Yu Xiuhua
     Jenn Marie Nunes

(2) Working with Words: Poetry, Translation, and Labor
     Eleanor Goodman

(3) Translating Great Distances: The Case of the Shijing
     Joseph R. Allen

(4) Purpose and Form: On the Translation of Classical Chinese Poetry
     Wilt L. Idema

Part Two: Theoretics

(5) Embodiment in the Translation of Chinese Poetry
     Nick Admussen

(6) Translating Theory: Bei Dao, Pasternak, and Russian Formalism
    Jacob Edmond

(7) Narrativity in Lyric Translation: English Translations of Chinese Ci Poetry
    Zhou Min

(8) Sublimating Sorrow: How to Embrace Contradiction in Translating the “Li Sao”
    Nicholas Morrow Williams

(9) Mediation Is Our Authenticity: Dagong Poetry and the Shijing in Translation
    Lucas Klein

Part Three: Impact

(10) Ecofeminism avant la lettre: Chen Jingrong and Baudelaire
    Liansu Meng

(11) Ronald Mar and the Trope of Life: The Translation of Western Modernist Poetry in Hong Kong
    Chris Song

(12) Ya Xian’s Lyrical Montage: Modernist Poetry in Taiwan through the Lens of Translation
    Tara Coleman

(13) Celan’s “Deathfugue” in Chinese: A Polemic about Translation and Everything Else
    Joanna Krenz

(14) Trauma in Translation: Liao Yiwu’s “Massacre” in English and German
    Rui Kunze

(15) A Noble Art, and a Tricky Business: Translation Anthologies of Chinese Poetry
    Maghiel van Crevel

Baty’s Review Frodsham’s Li He

https://i0.wp.com/cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0726/9203/products/Li_He_cover_2048x2048.jpg?resize=338%2C522&ssl=1Tank Magazine has published Jamie Baty’s review of The Collected Poems of Li He 李 賀 (c. 790–c. 817), translated by J. D. Frodsham, under the title of “The Sound of Glass.” Baty writes:

Frodsham presents Li as a poète maudit in the mould of Baudelaire, or Rimbaud. From the first pages of the introduction, Li’s “modernity” is illustrated with a quote from the 20th-century writer Hugo Friedrich; Baudelaire’s poem “L’Invitation au voyage” is quoted to illustrate Li’s (categorically non-Western) conception of heaven; his approach to composition is likened to the poetic philosophy of Gautier and the Parnassiens. Such examples masquerade as glimpses of an interconnected network of culture entirely free from geography or history, but in reality they assert a profoundly European sense of linear “progression”, with the ultimate effect of claiming Li as some form of non-Western, proto-modern Western modernist.

But on many occasions, when he is trying most concertedly to claim Li for the “modern” West, Frodsham is defending himself from those who claim the translation of Chinese poetry to be altogether impossible.”

Despite this interesting frame, I should point out some slight errors in the review: the book is credited as being published by “University of Hong Kong Press,” but in fact it’s Chinese University Press, in coordination with New York Review Books; also, the review states that the book is “the second English translation of Li’s work published in the 50 years,” but since it’s a reprint, the referenced earlier translation may be Frodsham’s, as well (I find a 1970 version as well as a 1983 version)–and of course this does not include the various piecemeal translations that have appeared in anthologies, journals, and scholarly writing.

Click the image for the full review.

Admussen on Bien’s Baudelaire in China

200MCLC has posted Nick Admussen’s review of Gloria Bien’s Baudelaire in China: A Study in Literary Reception. Here’s how it begins:

As Chinese intellectuals of the May Fourth era were making a concerted effort to learn foreign languages and engage with foreign literature, the work of Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) was also beginning to garner belated acclaim in and out of France. A poet, essayist, and translator best known for his collections Les Fleurs du mal and Petits Poèmes en prose, Baudelaire was an aesthetic, formal, and conceptual innovator, and poets and critics of many nations still work to understand and react to his legacy. In China, the broad and sustained circulation of Baudelaire’s poetry is visible in the many versions of his Chinese name: in her Appendix I, Gloria Bien lists forty variants spanning almost a century, from the first translators of Baudelaire’s poetry into Chinese (including Zhou Zuoren 周作人) to those found in Zhang Daming’s (张大明) 2007 work A Hundred Years of Chinese Symbolism (中国象征主义百年史). Baudelaire’s work has passed through the hands of China’s greatest writers and thinkers and makes up a persistently relevant part of the tradition of modern Chinese poetry. The works and authors that intersect with Baudelaire’s poetry, moreover, are particularly diverse, and the impact of Baudelaire’s work on Chinese writing is fundamentally multivalent. For nearly a hundred years, writers of conflicting ideologies, competing schools, and disparate methods have transformed and been transformed by Baudelaire’s work with a complexity that makes the accumulation and categorization of data—to say nothing of interpretation—a substantial task.

Jacob Edmond’s Common Strangeness Blog

Poetry translator and scholar Jacob Edmond has a new blog to promote his forthcoming book, A Common Strangeness: Contemporary Poetry, Cross-Cultural Encounter, Comparative Literature (forthcoming from Fordham University Press). Using Walter Benjamin‘s take on Baudelaire and flânerie to take a new look at World Literature, Edmond reads Chinese poets Yang Lian 楊煉 and Bei Dao 北島, Russian poets Arkadii Dragomoshchenko and Dmitri Prigov, and Americans Charles Bernstein and Lyn Hejinian. The blog, and especially the book, both promise to be fascinating reads.

While Xi Chuan has less to do with exile, often central to critical discussions of Bei Dao and Yang Lian, I’m sure that Common Strangeness, and common strangenesses, will also be helpful in providing tools to understand both the Chinese and international aspects of the writing of Xi Chuan.

Rachel Blau DuPlessis on Hearing Xi Chuan for the First Time

 

American poet Rachel Blau DuPlessis attended last week’s discussion at the MLA between Xi Chuan and Chris Lupke. The following excellent essay is her take on the event:

A Note on hearing Xi Chuan for the First Time

Rachel Blau DuPlessis

The poet Xi Chuan appeared at the annual conference of the Modern Language Association in Seattle in January 2012, in a question and answer session curated by Professor Christopher Lupke of Washington State University, interspersed with a reading by the poet (in Chinese) and by his translator Lucas Klein (in English). The event was very striking to me. There are various “paths” one can pick at this bazaar-like humanities conference, but as part of the “county fair” or “state fair” array, the path that leads the attendee to new information certainly counts for something. The session on Xi Chuan, in a solemn hall, was attended by a number of scholars and teachers with an interest in Asian literature, and of these, there were many Chinese speakers. There were also a few spare poets and folks committed to poetic culture. Among those, me.

The most interesting phenomenon of the occasion, at least to this particular “spare poet,” was the very polite and quiet resistance of some members of the audience to what they saw in Xi Chuan’s work as—here’s what I would call it—non-poetic (or anti-poetic, or un-poetic). That is, people challenged his lexicon (range of words, some quite colloquial) as brought forward by the translator; they challenged why this material is classified as poetry; they wanted (politely, etc.) to suggest that perhaps the poet had missed that he was writing in prose, or making short fiction, or working in a hybrid genre, but that he wasn’t really writing what they would call (in somewhat hushed tones), “poetry.” Or perhaps with a capital “P”: “Poetry.”  “Why,” one person asked, “is poetry the most appropriate mode in which to articulate your cultural critique?”

This was (and remains) a very good question, but I suspected it was motivated by the questioner’s resistance to the fusion of poetry and critique rather than, as I’d think, an interest in how one can, may, and even should be able to propose and carry out this goal for poetry as a mode of practice. (By the way, I’d define poetry as a mode of writing in chosen rhythmic segments that are culturally read as poetry. Clearly, the issue of “cultural reading” was precisely at stake for some of the people hearing Xi Chuan.) Such a question also shows that a whole range of world poetries and poetics of the 20th and early 21st century were not being credited. In short, some of the members of the audience had a strong case of what I’d call “poetry ideology.” They not only preferred the focused lyric, the misty, “pure poetry,” and the “poetic” on principle, but they seemed to find this the only kind of writing worthy of the honorific “poetry.”  Some silvery aura of specialness shimmered around “poetry”; some sense that it should stay untainted by… well, by what? by words like “shithole” (country colloquialism for latrine) or by noticing some kids (“delinquents”) in a country town, acting up by dying their black hair yellow. Or by the general air of realist disjunction so well-honed that it passes into almost-surrealism. Or by a meta-commentary or sense of allegory that infuses some of the work. Or by the desire to record everyday life seen in such a light as it is both comic, observationally accurate, and endowed with a humane generosity and ethical melancholy within that notional intensity. “Dignity and shithole together” is how Xi Chuan characterized this move.

In short, the reading offered evidence of a cultural clash around issues fundamental to modern and contemporary poetry. Xi Chuan fed this clash and teased about it, stating that he did know how to write “good poems”—I assume this means poems conventional in this milieu, using or alluding to the appropriate formal and imagistic conventions of Chinese poetry, including stanza and rhyme. He said that he even had written such “good poems,” and that every once in a while he still did. He has loved the work of both Yeats and Valéry.  But generally, “I am trying to be a person writing texts.” That is, he has been touched by certain rhetorics and forms with which I am familiar from Western cultural traditions and would refer to via these names and practices—by the term “writing” for William Carlos Williams (see Spring and All), by the urban, suspicious and sometimes “crashed out” sensibility of Charles Baudelaire, by the prose poem tradition of, say, Robert Bly (whose work he read in his student days courtesy of a Peking University professor of English named Herbert Stone).

Xi Chuan’s personal/social history as it bears on his poems was quickly sketched in. The years around Tiannamen Square (when he was in his mid-twenties) were exciting and difficult; a friend died, another committed suicide; he was “lonely” and felt “crashed out.” (Xi Chuan’s English is excellent, and this verb—slightly unidiomatic—is notably expressive. All apparent citations here are what I heard.)  He could not write poetry for a couple of years; he wrote notes only, and then discovered that these fragments were the germ for a new kind of text. “History and reality gave me the way of writing.” The fusion of aesthetic and ethical concerns in his work is serious and generative.

Xi Chuan’s work in the English translation of Lucas Klein will be published by New Directions in April 2012 under the title Notes on the Mosquito.