Tag Archives: Josh Stenberg

Josh Stenberg’s Sun Dong on Asymptote

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Asymptote has also published poetry by Sun Dong 孙冬 as translated by Josh Stenberg. From “Wall” 墙:

Geographic change is too slow
a species goes extinct too slowly          the years roll on
everything is the opposite of the poetic
the carrot top is a little conspirator          Brodsky also drank gutter oil
that guard Micaiah can only say drily
you can cough when you’re at home

Click the image above for the full set.

Wall

Sun Dong


Geographic change is too slow
a species goes extinct too slowly          the years roll on
everything is the opposite of the poetic
the carrot top is a little conspirator          Brodsky also drank gutter oil
that guard Micaiah can only say drily
you can cough when you’re at home

– See more at: http://www.asymptotejournal.com/article.php?cat=Poetry&id=183&curr_index=8&curPage=Poetry#sthash.7NRYBtOZ.dpuf

An Impossible Present: Five Poets from Nanjing at AAWW

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Philippe Bierny 1

Nanjing is a tragic city. Its tourist spots are either places where people died or places people have been buried. Despite having been the capital during imperial China’s Six Dynasties (220-589), the city is scarred by the decline and fall of those ephemeral kingdoms. Today in Nanjing few historic landmarks remain intact, due to successive waves of destruction inflicted by Mongolian nomads, Manchu occupation, the Taiping Heavenly Army, Japanese invasion, the Civil War, and the Cultural Revolution. The city’s real history exists largely in the imagination: in myths and legends, poetry, drama, and art.

The Asian American Writers’ Workshop has published a feature of five poets from Nanjing, “An Impossible Present,” with translations by Dong Sun and Josh Stenberg, edited by Andrea Lingenfelter. Poems by Dong Sun, Huang Fan, Lu Dong, Hu Xuan, and Yu Bang. Here’s a sample from Lu Dong:

Men imitate birds
Birds imitate men’s nightmares
The greatest birds
Aim high, fly far
After a lifetime aloft
They drop from the sky
And discover that flying
Out of every kind of magic
Is the lowest trick of all.

Click the image above for the full feature.

WLT Review of Han Dong & Ouyang Jianghe

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A Phone Call from Dalian World Literature Today has published Josh Stenberg’s review of Zephyr books A Phone Call from Dalian by Han Dong 韩东, translated by Nicky Harman, and Doubled Shadows by Ouyang Jianghe 欧阳江河, translated by Austin Woerner:

Ouyang Jianghe and Han Dong … both occupy established places in what, for over thirty years, has been known as avant-garde Chinese literature. In poetic approach, they represent divergent tendencies—Ouyang cosmopolitan, clean, and heavily referential; Han craftily offhand, personal, confidently bizarre, not tetchy about grime Doubled Shadowsor sex. Where Ouyang often seems to offer an argument about the cultural currents and skirmishes of today’s China, Han’s work most often reads as a lament for the failure of attempts to bridge the spaces between people