Tag Archives: Matt Turner

Translating Asian Languages: Prejudices and Privileges — International Zoom Meeting

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Translating Asian Languages: Prejudices & Privileges

TRANSLATING ASIAN LANGUAGES: PREJUDICES & PRIVILEGES
Date: Wednesday 15 April 2020
Time: 8:00-9:30 p.m. (GMT+8)
Platform: ZOOM
(Meeting ID: 514 122 177)
Languages: English
Speakers: Lucas Klein, Grace Ting, and Matt Turner
Moderator: Tammy Lai-Ming Ho

‘Every translation sparks / another translation.’ In the discussion “Translating Asian Languages: Prejudices and Privileges”, Lucas Klein (Cha‘s Translation Editor), Matt Turner and Grace Ting will talk about the issues pertaining to the translation of Asian literary texts.

They will ponder, among other questions, the following: What are the prejudices, if any, faced by translators of Asian texts? What are the potential privileges some translators may have? Are ‘academic translators’ more privileged? If yes, in what ways? Why are certain Asian languages/writers/texts translated but others are left out? Who make translation decisions? Under what circumstances do we see translators occupying a more visible position than the writers they translate? Is it ever possible to have too many translators translating a particular genre of texts? The three speakers will also read from either their own translations or those of others. There will also be a Q&A session. This discussion will take place via. ZOOM and people from all over the world are welcome to tune in. Moderated by Cha’s co-editor Tammy Ho.

If you would like to participate in a Cha reading, or if there are topics you would like to suggest, please write to us (t@asiancha.com)! Here is the list:

Chinese Literature Today free for Women in Translation Month

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Chinese Literature Today, free for Women in Translation month

The current issue of Chinese Literature Today is free throughout August for Women in Translation month.

The main feature of the issue is of Newman Prize Laureate, the Hong Kong writer Xi Xi 西西, with introductions, appreciations, interviews, and new translations by Jennifer Feeley, Tammy Ho, Ho Fuk Yan 何福仁, Steve Bradbury, Wei Yang Menkus, and others.

The issue also features an appreciation of scholar Maghiel van Crevel, of Leiden University, with an interview with Jonathan Stalling and an appreciation by Nick Admussen, as well as an article by van Crevel about migrant worker poetry in China.

There is also a suite of contemporary Chinese poetry, by Wang Jiaxin 王家新 (translated by Diana Shi & George O’Connell), Che Qianzi 车前子 (translated by Yang Liping & Jeffrey Twitchell-Waas), Li Dewu 李德武 (translated by Jenny Chen & Jeffrey Twitchell-Waas), Hu Jiujiu 胡赳赳 (translated by Matt Turner & Haiying Weng), Mi Jialu 米家路 (with translations by Lucas Klein, Michael Day, and Matt Turner & Haiying Weng), Huang Chunming 黃春明 (translated by Tze-lan Sang), and Chen Li 陳黎(translated by Elaine Wong).

Click here to read for free!

Turner on Wai-lim Yip’s Arrivals and Departures

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The newest issue of Seedings includes Matt Turner’s review of Arrivals and Departures: Poems, Memoir, and Chronology, the selected English language poetry of Wai-lim Yip 葉維廉.

Turner writes of how Yip’s “aesthetic horizon” draws off, but differs from, Chinese poetics:

But how exactly does this aesthetic horizon represent itself? For Yip, by superimposing an understanding of the Chinese  language over what are considered Western modernist techniques. The Chinese tradition from the early shamanic songs all the way to the present day is framed by poets and the state alike as a tradition of the creation and control of language. In contrast to his contemporary François Cheng, the French structuralist who theorized that Chinese poetry was more or less symbolic of (Daoist) cosmic orders, leaving real-world relations unaffected, Yip sees verbalization as a decisive factor in poetry. Language performs actions in the world; it is decisive in shaping human relationships. And here he borrows from Ezra Pound, who theorized that the Chinese language, when properly used, was a demonstration of Confucian social values — a stance not far from Confucius’, who saw the function of naming as giving correct proportion to human interactions. Incorrect naming would result in an inability to perform concrete tasks.

So it will not be surprising that Yip is not interested in the stereotypically Chinese features of poetry: moons, drinking, gauze curtains and so on. By incorporating English into his poetics, the “indigenous” is given a different, artificial voice. The slippery language of his poetry demonstrates that modernist techniques of verbal layering and oblique reference alongside the traditional Chinese techniques of figurative distance and subjective alienation are nearly the same techniques, but yield surprising effects.

Click the image above to link to the review, or download the .pdf here.

Klein’s Duo Duo in Asian Cha

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The new issue of Cha: An Asian Literary Journal is now live, and with it my translations of two new poems by Duo Duo 多多, “A Fine Breeze Comes” 好风来 and “Light Coming from Before, Sing: Leave” 从前来的光，唱：离去.

tomorrow’s already past
already offered
the past is still unknown
already spokenthe limit belongs to you
nobody can have that name

明天已经过去
已经给予
过去仍是未知的
已经说出 止境属于你
无人能有那名

Also in the issue are Bonnie McDougall’s translations of poems by Ng Mei-kwan 吳美筠, Jennifer Feeley’s translation of fiction by Xi Xi 西西, fiction by Eileen Chang 張愛玲 translated by Jane Weizhen Pan & Martin Merz, and Matt Turner reviewing Paul French and Kaitlin Solimine and Eleanor Goodman reviewing Richard Berengarten.
Click the image above to get to the issue.

Matt Turner Introduces Asia’s Proletarian Lit

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In a piece titled “We Are Revolution” for Bookforum, Matt Turner introduces Asia’s Proletarian Literature. He writes:

During the last election cycle, the American working class got a lot of airplay. Donald Trump’s rhetoric was a throwback to a different era of politics and a different economy. Talk of American workers often included overt and coded criticism of China, which was portrayed as a villainous and devious nation that had stolen jobs from deserving Americans. Of course, the Asian workers (many of whom are not Chinese) who were supposedly responsible for America’s declining fortunes were never mentioned.

In the past, American labor movements produced literature that was both popular and politically effective. Books like The Jungle exposed working conditions and pressed for egalitarian politics. It may feel dated today, but it raises an interesting question: What would popular working class literature look like in another context? What if The Jungle were written in an iPhone factory?

Covering poetry and fiction from China, Taiwan, Japan, Korea, Indonesia, India, and the Philippines, for Chinese poetry he highlights the anthology of workers’ poetry, Iron Moon, translated by Eleanor Goodman. He says:

Considering that these worker-poets often have very little formal education (and not a lot of time on their hands), the high quality of the work here points to one obvious conclusion: There are a lot of good poets in China. More notable, however, is that they exist outside of China’s professional system of writers, just as their jobs put them outside of the usual trajectories of professional advancement. A lot of us could learn something from these individuals about solidarity—as well as about writing.

Click on the image for his full list.

 

Turner on Cheng and Métail from Calligrams

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Cha has published Matt Turner’s review of two French studies of Chinese poetry, Michèle Métail’s Wild Geese Returning: Chinese Reversible Poems, translated by Jody Gladding, and the re-release of François Cheng’s Chinese Poetic Writing, translated from by Donald A. Riggs with classical Chinese poems translated by Jerome P. Seaton, released as part of the Calligrams series by New York Review Books and Chinese University Press.

Turner explains:

NYRB’s Calligrams series publishes titles relating to traditional Chinese literature and Euro-American modernism, calling to mind Guillaume Apollinaire’s book of visual poetry, Calligrammes (1918), and Ernest Fenollosa’s essay on the Chinese written language, “The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry” (1919). It should also call to mind Ezra Pound, who saw in Chinese literature the tools to “make it new.”

About the books, he writes that Cheng, “a Chinese-French structuralist who trained with Roland Barthes and Jacques Lacan—offers

that the Chinese written language has an emptiness or void at its heart; its written language demonstrates the shifting relationships of person to world, expressing ontological truths … Cheng states that these relationships translate into poetic images … Subject and object become a matter of language, in which the terms serve to reflect each other—not signifying themselves, but projecting outwards as a comprehensive image … Another way of saying this is that the poet and the poem do not unite, but refract each other.

As for Michèle Métail, “French sinologist and OuLiPo member,” her study of “reversible poems,” which “can be written in grids, in which all directions yield different readings or narratives; written in circles that have no discernible starting or ending points or be poems that, although written conventionally, can be read backwards, like palindromes”—reading one poem discussed by Métail, Turner writes:

The message is clear: lust is bad. Yet one has the sense that in a similar poem one could continue the permutations and end up with something very different. Perhaps that’s because of the “void” at the heart of the Chinese written language as much as the form of huiwenshi. The fine line between the “inside” of the poem and the “outside” of the poem functions as an image that refracts the world. So the question this poses is if this theory applies to literature in English today, to Chinese-language literature today, and if the theory can be implemented as a writing method, or only read backwards?

Click on the image above for the full review.

Turner on Bei Dao & Weinberger at Columbia

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To promote City Gate, Open Up, Bei Dao 北岛 appeared with Eliot Weinberger at Columbia University on September 26. Matt Turner was in the audience, and here he gives his report on the evening:

We sat down in a very bright, medium-sized lecture hall that looked like it was modeled after a circa-1985 computer case. It filled up quickly with Chinese students. As much as their elders may complain about the ’90s generation, here they were—listening, taking notes, and asking questions. I looked around and noticed a couple of local poets in the audience. Bei Dao and Eliot Weinberger (along with an interpreter for Bei Dao whose name I didn’t catch) were introduced, read passages from his recent memoir, City Gate, Open Up, and launched into a discussion about the organization of the book (it was written in installments for a financial magazine) and the difficulty remembering the details necessary for its writing (photographs were needed).

Weinberger would ask a question in English, Bei Dao would look at him and say something brief in English—and then look at the interpreter for a translation of Weinberger’s comments. Bei Dao would reply in Chinese, Weinberger would look at the interpreter, and so on… Given that it was not billed as a Chinese-language event, the English was necessary—even if 95% of the audience understood Chinese.

The conversation had a number of moments like this:

Bei Dao (in English): I will tell you how my parents met, and how they made me.

Weinberger: You’ll tell me how they made meat?!?

This lightened the mood of the talk, which focused on Bei Dao’s childhood and youth during the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. And Bei Dao made dark jokes about not having enough to eat and about missing exams because the schools were closed. To deflect some of the more pointed questions about Chinese history, he repeatedly insisted that the history of China during the period in question was tai fuza: too complex for easy summary or simple statement of fact. Bei Dao did not discuss the traumas of the Cultural Revolution (he goes into detail in his book), but emphasized the free travel for students unbound by the demands of a structured education. The period opened the door for its survivors to discover and reinvent themselves.

One person asked (paraphrasing): What do you think of the poetry written in China today, and what is your relationship to it.

Bei Dao: Tai fuza! Next!

Another person asked (paraphrasing): When you wrote your book, did you try to reconstruct the city you grew up in, or did you try to make it into a new home?

Bei Dao (paraphrasing): It would be impossible to reconstruct the city, as it’s changed beyond recognition. And whenever I travel through China I notice the cities now all look the same, which is the problem of modernization in China.

He also said: When I’m at home, I feel lonely. When I travel, even back to Beijing, I feel the same. This is the basic contradiction of being a poet…

Afterwards, I was nervous about talking with Bei Dao. When we met, I forgot all the Chinese I had just rehearsed in my mind. I gave him a magazine with my review of him memoir in it. He seemed very happy about this, and signed my book. We stumbled through. Next!

–Matt Turner

Turner on Bei Dao’s City Gate, Open Up

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The World of Chinese has run Matt Turner’s informative review of Bei Dao’s City Gate, Open Up, “Goodbye, Beijing.”

Turner begins with pennamed Bei Dao’s birth and name:

Construction worker, underground publisher, and acclaimed poet, Zhao Zhenkai (赵振开) was born, in his own words, in 1949, “as Chairman Mao declared the birth of the People’s Republic of China from the rostrum in Tian’anmen Square…in [a] cradle no more than a thousand yards away.”

In the 1970s, he would accrue near-celebrity status for his pseudonymous poetry, which was wild and defiant—and unlike anything in circulation at the time. His fame brought enemies, however, and attacks by official censors. Zhao’s pen name, Bei Dao (北岛, “Northern Island”), reflected such conflicted feelings: love for his northern home, as well as desire to be free of others’ impositions.

The book is “written in dreamlike vignettes,” Turner says, and “translated with little poetic license by Jeffrey Yang.”

Click on the image above for the review in full.

Klein’s Ouyang Jianghe in Seedings

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Issue three of the literary journal Seedings, edited by Jerrold Shiroma, is now out, featuring sections of my translation of “Taj Mahal Tears” 泰姬陵之泪 by Ouyang Jianghe 欧阳江河–alongside new work by Will Alexander, Marry Oppen, Matt Turner, Elizabeth Willis, Osip Mandelstam, Michael Palmer, and more!

Poetry does not have an identity of its own, its prajñā and insight
are polyphonic, beginning in two, exerted from other objects.
…………….The gods and the departed face off
like the narcissus, intoning the original poem’s splendor
and its fragrance. Tears extract themselves from polysemy,
elapsing and simultaneously creating their boundaries
……………. and plasticity,
because the tears of poetry’s minstrelsy flow from a statue,
within which flow the materials of consciousness,
e.g., the crystals in the nightingale’s throat,
…………….those tiny metals.
But in rural India, why is the peacock’s cry choked up,
why does the history of words again become a history of dust?

诗歌并无自己的身份，它的彻悟和洞见
是复调的，始于二的，是其他事物施加的。
             神与亡灵的对视
水仙般，支吾着一个元诗歌的婀娜
和芬芳。眼泪从词的多义抽身出来，
它一边流逝，一边创造自己的边界
              和可塑性，
因为诗歌的行吟的泪水是雕像流出的，
里面流动着一些知觉的材料，
比如，夜莺深喉里的那些水晶，
               那些小金属。
但在乡村印度，为什么孔雀的叫声如此哽咽，
为什么词的历史会再次成为尘埃的历史？

Click the image above to download the full .pdf of the issue.