Tag Archives: Jidi Majia

Return of Pratik features Contemporary Chinese Poetry

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After a decade-long hiatus, Pratik, the English-language Nepali literary journal, is resuming publication–and with a feature of contemporary Chinese poetry including Xi Chuan, Duo Duo 多多, Jidi Majia 吉狄马加, Chen Si’an 陈思安, Zheng Xiaoqiong 郑小琼, Yuan Yongping 袁永苹, Li Yawei 李亚伟, and Shen Wei 沈苇.
Translations of Xi Chuan & Duo Duo by Lucas Klein; other translations by Jami Proctor Xu, Eleanor Goodman, Zhou Xiaojing, Tim Hathaway, and Yuyutsu Sharma with Hao Lin.
Pratik is edited by Yuyutsu Sharma.
Click for the report by The Kathmandu Tribune. For the Pratik blog, click the image.

Jidi Majia in Kiswahili

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The poetry of Jidi Majia 吉狄马加 is now available in Kiswahili! Quartz writes:

Jidi Majia, a writer from southwest China, once described himself as a Chinese poet with an “African complex.” He emulated writers like Senegal’s Leopold Sedar Senghor, Nigeria’s Chinua Achebe, or Kenya’s Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, cheered for the end of apartheid in South Africa, and cried when Nelson Mandela died … Now, the poetry of a man who has never set foot on the African continent can be read in Kiswahili, in a new collection called Maneno Ya Moto Kutoka China or Words of Fire from China … the first time a creative work of Chinese literature has been translated into the lingua franca

Click the image for the full write-up.

Jidi Majia at Chinese Literature Today

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Jidi Majia

Jidi Majia 吉狄马加, translated by Denis Mair:

Voice of the Bimo

—Dedicated to a Nuosu ritualist

When you hear it
It seems above all illusion
Like a faint wisp of bluish smoke
Why just now are the ranged mountains
Felt to be filled with a timeless stillness?
Whose voice drifts between men and ghosts?
It seems to have left the body
Yet between reality and nothingness
In tones both human and divine it utters
A praise song for life and death
When it invokes sun, stars, rivers, and ancient heroes
When it summons deities and surreal powers
Departed beings commence their resurrection!

 

毕摩的声音

—献给彝人中的祭司

你听见它的时候
它就在梦幻之上
如同一缕淡淡的青烟
为什么群山在这样的时候
才充满着永恒的寂静
这是谁的声音？它漂浮在人鬼之间
似乎已经远离了人的躯体
然而它却在真实与虚无中
同时用人和神的口说出了
生命与死亡的赞歌
当它呼喊太阳、星辰、河流和英雄的祖先
召唤神灵与超现实的力量
死去的生命便开始了复活！