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Tag Archives: Lucas Klein
Schuchat reviews Klein’s Duo Duo & Lingenfelter’s Wang Yin
Writing for The Poetry Project, Simon Schuchat has reviewed two books of contemporary Chinese poetry in English translation that came out last year, Duo Duo’ 多多 Words as Grain: New and Selected Poems, translated by Lucas Klein, and by Wang Yin’s 王寅 Ghosts City Sea, translated by Andrea Lingenfelter.
He writes:
Here are two new translations of important and wonderful Chinese poets, by two of the finest contemporary translators of Chinese literature. A northerner and a southerner. One was already adolescent during the Cultural Revolution, the other a primary school student … These two poets speak to the reader, without the formality of direct address in classical poetry, but without losing the paratactic and indeterminate potential of the classical tradition. That acknowledged, both Lucas Klein and Andrea Lingenfelter, consistently achieve the impossible and bring the poetry into English. They recreate voices for the poets themselves, which do not resemble their invisible interpreters.
About Duo Duo in particular, Schuchat says:
his poetry is more than the exile’s lament, and beyond either the hopes of the early reform era or their subsequent crushing first by armed force and then by raging capital. Surrealist poetry, loosely speaking, seeks to produce or transmit an emotional message that resists paraphrase or explanation, jumping over logical connections.
Click the image above for the review in full.
Xi Chuan’s Bloom & and Other Poems reviewed at Poetry Foundation
Xi Chuan’s newest, his second book in English, Bloom and Other Poems, has only been out for a matter of days, but already it’s received its first review!
Heather Green at the Poetry Foundation writes:
[Xi] Chuan’s poetry speaks, in Lucas Klein’s translation, in a vital, brash, and, at times, comic voice, paradoxically both cynical and idealistic. The collection opens with the long title poem, “Bloom,” a lush meditation that exhorts the addressee to:
bloom barbaric blossoms bloom unbearable blossoms
bloom the deviant the unreasonable the illogical
The poem’s “bloom” describes both a sexual unfolding—“I want to witness your nipples blooming your belly button blooming your toes blooming”—as well as a broader, and, in the poem’s terms, necessary, existential flourishing.
She also mentions how Xi Chuan “writes with pathos about life’s contraction in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic … joking about people putting facemasks on pets … before swerving into a more serious mode”:
There have been Chinese people getting beaten up on Sydney streets for wearing facemasks, or ordered to remove their facemasks by the police in Berlin. How can the naked mouths of Sydney and Berlin understand? This is our way of life and means of existence!
“The thrill of this collection arises from [Xi] Chuan’s charismatic voice,” Green concludes, “vividly rendered by Klein, and the unexpected turns from the intellectual to the sensual, from the absurd to the dead-serious.”
Click the image above to read the review in full.
Bloom & Other Poems, by Xi Chuan
Bloom & and Other Poems, by Xi Chuan, translated by Lucas Klein
A rhapsodic meditation on the dreams and defeats, disparities and excesses, mythologies and absurdities of contemporary life
Klein on Nappi’s Translating Early Modern China: Illegible Cities
Last month MCLC published my review of Translating Early Modern China: Illegible Cities (Oxford UP) by Carla Nappi, a study of translation and multilingualism in late imperial China.
I write:
Illegible Cities is an important work of history, arguing against the temptation in Sinology to reduce pre-twentieth-century China to what occurred in one language alone (“Sinology means the study of Chinese civilization as a coherent whole,” wrote Frederick Mote in 1964, and “language study is the only pass leading through the Great Wall and into the chung-yuan” [中原]); more than that, it is an experimental joy of a read, a fun, challenging, exciting, only occasionally frustrating, book that not only makes a point, but constructs it. Illegible Cities “attempts to use translation,” Nappi writes, “as a way to reconsider what language is, what languages are, and to begin to historically contextualize what we think of constituting a ‘language.’ Languages, here, are forms of practice that are constantly being invented and enacted.” And so is this book: a form of practice in constant process of being invented and enacted.
Click on the image to read the review in full.
Horton Reviews Mang Ke’s October Dedications
October Dedications, the selected poems of Mang Ke 芒克 (Chinese UP & Zephyr), translated by Lucas Klein with Jonathan Stalling and Yibing Huang, has been reviewed in Cha by Harrison Horton. Horton writes:
In his “Translator’s Forward” to October Dedications, Lucas Klein points us to a similar phenomenon in the poetry of Mang Ke, stating that his work “must have been read as shockingly direct and heterodox at the time” (x). That a poem describing sunlight could be, in fact, about sunlight and not Mao Zedong was a courageous act of defiance that helped lay the foundation for schools of poetry to come afterwards. In this way, the seemingly simple contrasts with a backdrop of works that still emulated the writings from the previous era.
The review ends:
Mang Ke’s work stands up on its own and stands out against many of the poems produced in the early Opening Up period and later. October Dedications makes it possible, finally, for English language readers to appreciate Mang Ke’s work and correctly place him among other notable poets coming out of his era and afterwards. Click on the image for the review in full.
Duo Duo’s Words as Grain Nominated for PEN Award for Poetry in Translation
Last month PEN announced the longlists for its 2021 awards–and Words as Grain: New and Selected Poems of Duo Duo 多多 (Yale University Press) is in the running for the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation! Click here to see all the longlisted nominees.
Caro Carter, Michael Favala Goldman, Parisa Saranj are the other judges. Among the excellent books of poetry in translation also on the longlist, in Chinese poetry in translation there is also I Name Him Me: Selected Poems of Ma Yan, translated by Stephen Nashef (Ugly Duckling Presse).
John Bradley on Duo Duo’s Words as Grain
The current print issue of Rain Taxi features John Bradley’s review of my translation Words as Grain: New and Selected Poems of Duo Duo 多多 (Yale University Press).
Bradley writes:
Klein does a superb job of keeping the English translations as clear as possible, and when compared to others who have attempted the rigorous challenges of Duo Duo, Klein is more succinct, concise, and poetic. Words as Grain offers Zen koan-like poems that call for rereading and contemplation.
Since it’s in the print issue, here’s a photo of the whole review:
Liang Luo on Duo Duo’s Words as Grain
Over at Cha, Liang Luo’s review of my translation Words as Grain: New and Selected Poems of Duo Duo 多多 (Yale University Press) has been published.
She explains:
Written by one of the most celebrated contemporary Chinese poets Duo Duo 多多 (1951- ) and translated and edited by the award-winning translator Lucas Klein, Words as Grain 词如谷粒 moves from Duo Duo’s most recent poems back to his earliest ones, with four sections, each forming a period of his life’s journeys and taking its title from one of his poems of that period. “The Force of Forging Words (2004-2018)” collects every single poem written upon Duo Duo’s return to China from 15 years of exile abroad. “Amsterdam’s River (1989-2004)” includes selected poems written during the period of his exile, mainly in the Netherlands. “Delusion is the Master of Reality (1982-1988)” highlights selected poems written during China’s “reform and opening up” period of the 1980s. “Instruction (1972-1976),” the last of the four sections, features some of Duo Duo’s earliest collected poems written in his twenties during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976).
As for her reading of Duo Duo’s poetry, she elaborates:
In this context, “words as grain” emerges in vivid configurations and comes alive as a central metaphor for the forging and remaking of poetry and life, which involves planting seeds, picking weeds, and harvesting grain in the fields, among many more layers of a complex web of meanings. In his poetry over four decades, Duo Duo connects grain, weeds, and fields in his musings on life and death, lonesomeness and expression, speeches and silence, and emptiness and harvest …
Lucas Klein, in his translator’s introduction, asks to what degree contextualisation is useful in reading Duo Duo’s poetry (or any poetry), and arranges his selections and translations to move from present into the past, as he considers the recent poems less culturally situated, hence more accessible, than older poems for the non-Chinese reader …
Klein finds the questions—whether the poems are best read as tied to their contexts or as independent works of the imagination—are the same ones we must ask of translations: whether they are best approached as if tethered to the texts they are representing, or can they take on lives of their own in a new language? He hopes to answer yes to both questions in both cases (xxiii). On the one hand, Klein believes in the potential of poems in translation to take on lives of their own, on the other hand, he also demands accuracy. His goal as both translator and compiler of the poems included in this collection, according to the translator’s introduction, “is to let Duo Duo’s style come through” (xxiv).
As readers, we are fortunate to have Klein’s meticulous work and expert guidance in translating and compiling this excellent volume of Duo Duo’s poems, in close dialogue with and filling important gaps in previous translations and scholarly studies.
Thanks, Luo Liang and Cha for the great review!
Click the image above to read the review in full.
The introduction is also available for download as a .pdf file on Cha.
Drew Calvert on Duo Duo’s Words as Grain
Asymptote has published Drew Calvert’s excellent review of Words as Grain: New and Selected Poems by Duo Duo 多多 (Yale University Press).
Here’s an excerpt:
That bounty is now on full display in English, thanks to Lucas Klein, the translator of Words as Grain: The Poetry of Duo Duo, published by Yale University Press. The volume opens with new work—Duo Duo’s poems last appeared in English twenty years ago, while he was still living abroad—and moves in reverse chronology back to the Cultural Revolution years, which he spent in rural Hebei Province along with other “Misties.” Klein’s introduction helpfully sketches the politics of modern China throughout the poet’s life, but the poems themselves are more concerned with a personal cosmology of memory, desire, and stillness. Many contain explicitly Buddhist references and idioms—“sūtra rivers,” non-self, the “quietude of original dwellings rhetoric abandoned”—as if the poet is forging a new grammar of devotion from his own broken syntax, straying from classical prosody and imagery in a way that recalls—at least for some English readers—the modernists who strayed from Tennyson’s finely cadenced rhetoric into avant-garde mysticism. One might call it modernist Zen: a hunger for unmediated divinity and a deep suspicion of language, with its stale cliches, as a pathway to enlightenment. Ultimately, the impression one gets from the full arc of Duo Duo’s career is that of a poet enraptured by the metaphysics of writing itself.
Click on the image to read the piece in full.
Thanks, Drew Calvert and Asymptote for the great review!