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

AAWW Interview with Liao Yiwu

Jiayang Fan interviews Liao Yiwu 廖亦武, author of For a Song and a Hundred Songs, for the Asian American Writers’ Workshop. Interview translated into English by Liz Carter. Here’s an excerpt:

Do you think that you, as a Chinese writer, must take a stance on China’s government? Or do you think, as someone who writes literature, you do not necessarily need to have anything to do with politics?

The difference between myself and the dictatorship is a difference of aesthetics. I am a person who writes stories. The further removed from politics and power I am, the better. Unfortunately, they feel that a person who tells stories is guilty of subversion of state power. Furthermore, I didn’t want to express any political ideas in my writing. Like I just mentioned, political views can show up in a different way. Political correctness, in a book, is like standing on the side of reason, but one of the most basic things about being an intellectual is this: you must have doubt and you must ask questions, even for your own writing, yourself, your weaknesses. You have to keep that skepticism. Many writers, while describing politics or the Chinese Communist Party, stop asking questions of and being skeptical toward themselves. I think this is far removed from that sort of thing.

In the beginning of the book, you wrote that in a talk with Michael Day, a Canadian friend and one of the first foreigners you became close to in China, he really wanted you to participate in the protests at Tiananmen.

Yes

And then you asked, “Do you think you love China more than me?” That line really stayed with me.

That guy is more Chinese than I am.

Click the image above for the full interview.

After this, No More Mo Yan

Canadian author Alice Munro (PETER MUHLY/AFP/Getty Images)

Now that “Dissident writer Alice Munro was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature Thursday morning for her fiction critical of the Canadian regime,” the year of Mo Yan’s Nobel has ended.

So the last Mo Yan update from this blog will be a link to this interview with Liao Yiwu 廖亦武, who, upon being asked to compare himself with Mo Yan, who, ahem, “received the Nobel Peace in Literature,” said:

I don’t want to be compared to someone like Mo Yan. He is an official of the Communist Party. Whenever he makes a public appearance, he is representing the dictatorship. So my criticism is natural … Of course there is a happy medium; there are authors who criticize the realities of Chinese society without being political. But they aren’t on the side of the dictatorship. Mo Yan overdoes it.

P T Smith on Liao Yiwu’s For a Song and a Hundred Songs

At 3% P. T. Smith reviews For a Song and a Hundred Songs: A Poet’s Journey through a Chinese Prison by Liao Yiwu 廖亦武 and translated by Wenguang Huang. Smith doesn’t know family names from given names in Chinese, but that doesn’t keep him from writing a compelling review. Here’s a passage that focuses on the poetry:

The poem that lands [Liao Yiwu] in jail (“The Massacre,” published at the end of the book in an English translation by one of Yiwu’s most driven counterrevolutionary friends, Michael Day), comes as the memoir itself does: not from political or cultural goals, but from a consistent attempt to recognize humanity in both compassion and cruelty. He is unflinching in showing that compassion and cruelty are a package deal of being human. Before his arrest, he portrays himself as a selfish, distant husband, capable of violence against his wife and others. In prison, at times he plays himself the monkish hero, at other times a brute, other times simply casually mean; guards can be kind and reasonable, they also torture prisoners for fun; prisoners protect, care for, and even love each other, they also humiliate, beat, and rape each other (of all the seemingly never-ending stomach-churning difficult passages to read, the “menu” of torture and humiliation options that inmates serve each other is one of the most difficult, emphasized by its bare-bones telling). Early on, Yiwu tells us that he “never intended to be a hero, but in a country where insanity ruled, I had to take a stand. ‘Massacre’ was my art and my art was my protest.” Notably, this, one of his strongest statements on the poem, comes after showing not the insanity of those in power, but the cruelty and insanity the average, “brave and fearless” small-town Chinese are capable of.

Click on the image above for the full review.

New Cathay: Contemporary Chinese Poetry

New Cathay: Contemporary Chinese Poetry Edited by Ming Di

 

New Cathay: Contemporary Chinese Poetry

The most up-to-date anthology of contemporary Chinese poetry, translated by American poets and edited by the executive editor of the bilingual literary journal Poetry East West. Showcasing the achievement of Chinese poetry in the last twenty years, a time of tremendous literary ferment, this collection focuses on a diversity of exciting poets from the mainland, highlighting Duo Duo (laureate of the 2010 Neustadt International Prize for Literature) and Liao Yiwu (recipient of 2012 Peace Prize of the German Book Trade organization) along with not yet well-known but brilliant poets such as Zang Di and Xiao Kaiyu and younger poets Jiang Tao and Lü Yue. The anthology includes interviews with the poets and a fascinating survey of their opinions on “Ten Favorite Chinese poets” and “Ten Best-Known Western poets in China.”

Featured poets: Duo Duo, Wang Xiaoni, Bai Hua, Zhang Shuguang, Sun Wenbo, Wang Jiaxin, Liao Yiwu, Song Lin, Xiao Kaiyu, Lü De’an, Feng Yan, Yang Xiaobin, Zang Di, Ya Shi, Mai Mang, Lan Lan, Jiang Tao, Jiang Hao, Lü Yue, Hu Xudong, Yi Lai, Jiang Li, Zheng Xiaoqiong, Qiu Qixuan, and Li Shumin.

With translations by Neil Aitken, Katie Farris, Ming Di, Christopher Lupke, Tony Barnstone, Afaa Weaver, Jonathan Stalling, Nick Admussen, Eleanor Goodman, Ao Wang, Dian Li, Kerry Shawn Keys, Jennifer Kronovet, Elizabeth Reitzell, and Cody Reese.

VIiv

Liao Yiwu, Meng Huang, Maria Rosen: Performance in Stockholm

Liao Yiwu 廖亦武 reading his poem “The Massacre”, Meng Huang 孟煌 reading his “Letter to Liu Xiaobo in Prison” and Maria Rosén singing the Swedish folksong “Ballad from Roknäs”, 19th March 2013, 9 pm, Sergels Torg, Stockholm, Sweden

[from Martin Winter]

A Worldwide Reading for Li Bifeng

Ever Mo Yan

Spiegel Online interviews Mo Yan, who says “I am guilty.”

The Guardian writes that “Mo Yan dismisses ‘envious’ Nobel critics.”

Mo Yan writes that “Good Literature Should Let Readers Discover Themselves

One “Mo reason for culture promotion

The Complete Review notices Mo Yan has more than one agent with “full rights to represent him in copyright talks and any other negotiations on cooperation.

Sabina Knight on “Mo Yan’s Delicate Balancing Act.”

Martin Winter blogs about Mo Yan and Liao Yiwu 廖亦武

Chad Post on a book that didn’t make the Best Translated Book Award long list.

Charles Laughlin on “Mo Yan’s Nobel Prize for Literature: Resetting Chinese Literature” (a development of his article on “What Mo Yan’s Detractors Get Wrong“).

Perry Link at the Chinese University of Hong Kong Faculty of Law, 28 March: “A Tale of Two Nobels: Liu Xiaobo & Mo Yan” (in Chinese). Click to register.

At the Popup Chinese Sinica Podcast Alice Xin Liu, David Moser, and Brendan O’Kane talk to Kaiser Kuo about Mo Yan’s writing & reception, including a quick analysis of the three anecdotes from his literary acceptance speech. Click the link or listen here:

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DJS Translation Award for 2012

from Poetry East West 诗东西:

DJS Translation Award for 2012

News Release December 26, 2012

DJS Translation Award for 2012 will be given to the following individuals whose new translations of Chinese poetry have formed a significant part of “New Cathay: Contemporary Chinese Poetry 1990-2012” (to be published by Tupelo Press in 2013):

Nick Admussen (for translation of Ya Shi)

Christopher Lupke (for translation of Xiao Kaiyu)

Jonathan Stalling (for translation of Zheng Xiaoqiong)

Katie Farris (for co-translation of Duo Duo, Liao Yiwu, Zhang Shuguang, Feng Yan, and Hu Xudong)

Afaa Weaver (for co-translation of Sun Wenbo and Jiang Hao)

Tony Barnstone (for co-translation of Jiang Tao, Hu Xudong and Li Shumin)

Kerry Shawn Keys (for co-translation of Song Lin)

Eleanor Goodman (for co-translation of Bai Hua)

Jennifer Kronovet (for co-translation of Wang Xiaoni and Lan Lan)

Elizabeth Reitzell (for co-translation of Sun Wenbo)

Cody Reese (for co-translation of Hu Xudong)

The above translators will share the DJS Translation Award for 2012.

 

The 2011 DJS Translation Award recipient was Neil Aitken for his co-translations of poetry by Chinese poets Lü De’an, Sun Wenbo, Jiang Tao, Qin Xiaoyu, Yang Xiaobin, Zhang Zhihao, Liu Jiemin, Yu Xiang, Lü Yue, and Jiang Li.

DJS Translation Award was established by DJS Art Foundation, a private entity, to promote literary exchange between China and other countries and to encourage quality translation of poetry. DJS has supported several projects such as the multi-lingual journal Poetry East West. For more information, please visit the DJS pages on the website of Poetry East West: http://poetryeastwest.com/djs-translation-award/