Moving the Goalposts:
Symposium on Translation and Modern Chinese Poetry
龍門陣：翻譯與現代中文詩歌研討會
16 June 2017
LBYG06, Lingnan University
9:30–18:30
Tag Archives: Jonathan Stalling
Bem on Stalling’s Lost Wax
Queen Mob’s Teahouse now features Greg Bem’s review of Lost Wax, poems by Jonathan Stalling with Chinese and English re-translations by Zhou Yu, Yao Benbiao, Nick Admussen, Jennifer Feeley, Jami Proctor-Xu, Eleanor Goodman, Andrea Lingenfelter, and me. Here’s how it ends:
Moving from poem to poem, curiosity strikes me: is the primary goal of this book to bring us toward an understanding of the nuances of multilingual and multi-personal translation? Is this just an editor’s paradise to see how the process of a significant body of learned, engaged writers see the shape of a work? If there some collective meaning across the pages? By the end of the book, I hoped for commentary. I hope for more “meta.” An afterward from or an interview between the technicians. But in its absence, I was left with my own thoughts and theories (and a drive to learn some Chinese) in hopes of getting towards an understanding of what the core meaning of “lost wax” really is.
Click the image for the full review.
Admussen on Mang Ke & Ashbery
At the Boston Review, Nick Admussen writes about the language of John Ashbery and Mang Ke 芒克–especially in “Sunflower in the Sun” 阳光中的向日葵 as translated by Jonathan Stalling and Huang Yibing (and forthcoming in my October Dedications from Zephyr and Chinese University Press)–in light of recent political protests.
Admussen writes:
One cannot always feel the mark of past violence in poems written later, during a time of relative peace, but such feeling is evident in the work of the poet Mang Ke, who lived and wrote through that intense moment of transition when the organized and disorganized political violence of Maoist China gave way to the uncertain openness of the early Deng era … It is possible to read this complex tableau through familiar psychological categories: PTSD, the epidemiology of violence, the mirror neuron. But I prefer to understand the poem as an aesthetic rather than deterministic reaction: we make decisions about how to construct our lives around the violence in our history. The stories we tell and the relationships we draw are like works of art, escapist, realist, obscure, lyrical, or haunted, all tethered to but not defined by the experience of the creation of pain in others.
And on Ashbery, he sees “some small proportion of Ashbery’s late poems as having a thereness-but-not-presence, an abstract understanding of a distant and unsensual truth.”
Click the image above for the full essay.
Lost Wax: Translation Through the Void
TinFish Press announces the publication of Lost Wax: Translation Through the Void, by Jonathan Stalling.
The book presents Stalling’s sequence of poems about his wife Amy’s work as a sculptor. These poems are translated into Chinese and back into English by members of a “workshop” of eight fellow translators–Zhou Yu, Yao Benbiao, Nick Admussen, Jami Proctor-Xu, Jennifer Feeley, Eleanor Goodman, Lucas Klein, and Andrea Lingenfelter–then re-amalgamated by Stalling into a new final. Each poem is then presented in a) the original; b) the Chinese; c) the new English version. An additional workshop page illustrates choices made by translators on both sides of the English/Chinese divide.
The clay is the past
The wax inherits
As its own
The conditions, but not the only source
Of her arising陶泥成为过去
石蜡也有了自己的
传承，
条件，不仅仅是她
出现 的唯一来源。Clay becomes the past
Paraffin has its own
Inheritance
This condition is not her only
Source of coming into being
Click on the image for more, including ordering information.
A New Golden Age for Chinese Poetry?
PRI has published an article on the thriving contemporary Chinese poetry scene. Here’s a taste:
As in other spheres, the Internet has proven a huge democratizing force in the world of Chinese poetry, leveling the playing field for migrant workers and millionaires alike. But love of verse was already there. Chinese poetry has 2,000 years of tradition at its back. Parents read it to their babies. Kids study it in school. But the thing is, most Chinese believe poetry peaked in the Tang Dynasty. That ended more than 1100 years ago. So for today’s poets, their chosen art form’s exalted status can feel like a double-edged sword.
The article quotes Heather Inwood, Huang Yibing 黄亦兵 (Mai Mang 麦芒), Mindy Zhang 明迪, and Jonathan Stalling. Click here for the full article.
2015 Newman Young Poets Awards
This year five $500 prizes will be awarded to Oklahoma K-16 students or classes (Elementary, Middle, High School, and adult, plus Chinese). Winning English language poems must follow the rules of Classical Chinese Poetry! The competition only runs for one month so do not delay (January 25 – February 25, 2015). Winners will be invited to the University of Oklahoma to receive their $500 award at the Newman Prize for Chinese Literature awards banquet on March 6, 2015.
For more, click here.
Wolfgang Kubin interviewed at CLT
In the new Chinese Literature Today, editor Jonathan Stalling interviews Wolfgang Kubin about his life and the poets and poetry he’s known.
Zhang Zao and Ouyang Jianghe wanted pure poetry and new vocabulary, whereas the vocabulary of Bei Dao before ’89 is quite conventional and comes close to what the Spanish poets of the ’30s and ’40s made use of. Bei Dao writes short poetry, but the so-called post hermetic poets prefer the longer form and their outlook is quite different. They are not politically naïve anymore; they do know how complicated a society can be. The poetry of Bei Dao or the poetry of the ’80s, however, always believes in a future that will be good and that will be coming tomorrow. You won’t find this kind of naiveté in Ouyang Jianghe … Zhai Yongming’s starting point is so-called hermetic poetry, and her first cycle about women is so complicated that it drives you crazy as a translator. I translated her work into German and published a book of it very early. I translated much more of her poetry, and actually I should have produced another book, but she’s very modest and always asks me to translate others before editing a new volume of her poetry. But before long she left this kind of hermetic poetry. During her second phase, she dealt with a history of women in her mother’s generation in China before and after ’49. She chose a very plain language and she preferred the long poem. The poetry of her second phase is very easy to translate into a foreign language; it’s not complicated at all. During her third phase, when she started criticizing men, when she started making fun of male protagonists, then her language changed again—it was not hermetic, it was not plain, it was something in-between. Nowadays she prefers a very plain language for social critique. This is her fourth phase, so she’s the only Chinese poet about whom we can say that she went through three, no, four phases of different kinds of poetry. Bei Dao has only two phases; Yang Lian, I think you would say he has one phase and has never changed. P. K. Leung the Hong Kong poet—in some respects he’s always good, always the same. Zhang Zao, the same. Ouyang Jianghe has made changes, perhaps with his last long poem. Xi Chuan, he’s riper now, so he’s different, but concerning his form, I do not see much difference. He’s now more philosophical and he’s more sophisticated, he has humor, he makes fun.
Click on the image for the full piece.
Jonathan Stalling’s translingual synesthesia of Rimbaud’s Bateau Ivre
I raced, stained by the moon’s electric
爱 日北四大， 四大北那大 八爱 浊舌呀 么 马乌乌那’四 弟拉也吃丝卡
fragments, timbers crazed, black sea-
发日言言哥马么那台四， 台丝丝马八么儿四 卡日北浊四 大， 八拉言卡 四弟
horses as my escort, July’s battering me—
哈够日四么浊四 言浊四 马爱 也四卡啊日台，扎乌乌拉爱’ 浊四 八言台么儿冰 马弟—
So begins Jonathan Stalling’s version of Arthur Rimbaud’s Le Bateau ivre for the twentieth anniversary of Drunken Boat, which he explains,
In this reworking of Rimbaud’s “The Drunken Boat,” I wanted to set the poem adrift through a disordering of the senses corresponding to systems of writing (alphabets, syllabaries, or logographies) which create the conceptual foundation for imagining languages as irrevocably separate from one another. I believe that we can access forms of linguistic synesthesia that will free us to see different writing systems not as walls between but bridges into other languages … Unlike the system I used in my book Yingelishi, the script below sequences English speech sounds at the level of phonemes (individual sounds) rather than morphemes (in the case of Chinese full syllables). In short, this poem is English, just not through the same Romanized senses.
And read Anna Rosenwong‘s excellent essay, which starts with Eliot Weinberger and Octavio Paz on Wang Wei 王維, and goes on to explain the feature:
The project’s irreverence—anthropophagism— is made possible by this journal’s sense of “Le bateau ivre,” of Rimbaud, of French symbolist poetry, even of the French language, as too well-respected, too established to tarnish or appropriate in a problematic way. Working with classic texts, one feels she is at liberty to be a punk. Framing is likewise an enabler: in an envelope-pushing journal and section such as this, introduced by this hedging editorial note, the boats are clearly marked as a kind of risky play, their transgression a testament to the aura of the original.
Follow the links for the sites in question.
Chaves’s Wang Hongdu wins Stryk Prize
At last week’s ALTA conference, Jonathan Chaves was announced as the winner of this year’s Lucien Stryk Prize for his translation of Wang Hongdu 汪洪度, Every Rock a Universe—The Yellow Mountains and Chinese Travel Writing (Floating World Editions, 2013). The judges were Jonathan Stalling, Janet Kim Ha, and Rainer Schulte.
Here’s a description of the work:
The Yellow Mountains (Huangshan) of China’s Anhui Province have been famous for centuries as a place of scenic beauty and inspiration, and remain a hugely popular tourist destination today. A “golden age” of Yellow Mountains travel came in the seventeenth century, when they became a refuge for loyalists protesting the new Qing Dynasty, among them poet and artist Wang Hongdu (1646–1721/1722), who dedicated himself to traveling to each and every peak and site and recording his impressions. Unfortunately, his resulting masterpiece of Chinese travel writing was not printed until 1775 and has since remained obscure and available only in Chinese.
Click the image for more information.