Tag Archives: Michael Gray

Announcing the Ancient Asia issue of Cha

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Announcing the Ancient Asia Issue of Cha (December 2013), featuring new translations of Chinese poetry by Xi Chuan, Tao Yuanming 陶淵明, Du Fu 杜甫, He Qifang 何其芳, Xiao Kaiyu 肖开愚, Liu Yong 柳永, the Shijing 詩經, Laozi 老子, Du Mu 杜牧, and Li Shangyin 李商隱, and new work by Eliot Weinberger, Matthew Turner, Eleanor Goodman, Sharmistha Mohanty, and Jonathan Stalling. The full list of contributors:

Translation: Lucas Klein, A.K. Ramanjuan, Reid Mitchell, George Life, Canaan Morse, Michael Gray, Christopher Lupke, Dulal Al Monsur, Nicholas Francis, Michael Farman, Michael O’Hara, Eleanor Goodman, Chloe Garcia Roberts

Poetry: Eliot Weinberger, Matthew Turner, W.F. Lantry, Aditi Rao, Stuart Christie, Luca L., Xiao Pinpin, Kate Rogers, Pey Pey Oh, DeWitt Clinton, Elizabeth Schultz, Stephanie V Sears, Joshua Burns, James Shea, Sean Prentiss, Steven Schroeder, Marjorie Evasco, Arjun Rajendran, Pui Ying Wong, Julia Gordon-Bramer, June Nandy, Janice Ko Luo, Stuart Greenhouse, Barbara Boches, Cathy Bryant, Justin Hill, Eleanor Goodman

Fiction: John Givens,  Xie Shi Min, Sharmistha Mohanty, Zhou Tingfeng, Khanh Ha

Articles: Jonathan Stalling, Michael Tsang

Creative non-fiction: Pavle Radonic

Photography & art: Alvin Pang (cover artist), Adam Aitken

Click the image above to access the full issue.

A Normal Interview with Xi Chuan & Lucas Klein

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the Normal School - a literary magazineEditorial Intern Michael Gray asks Chinese poet Xi Chuan and his translator Lucas Klein tough questions concerning process, navigating translation, and the relationship between literature and reality. Lucas Klein performed the English translation of Xi Chuan’s book Notes on the Mosquito: Selected Poems (2012).

For Xi Chuan: What elements of your original text do you find are most altered in the process of translation?

XC: In my own writing, especially recently, I’m often very blunt, but bluntness can be very hard to translate. I’ve done a lot of translations myself, and in my experience imagery is relatively easy to translate; with musicality, or particularly rhythm, though it’s hard to match the translation perfectly with the original, it’s still possible to find comparable solutions. But with ideas expressed bluntly it’s easy to lose the poetry. Bluntness is a quality of late Borges, because in his early years he was playing with the Baroque. It’s also a notion of expression Milosz was fond of, coming from Eastern Europe. These two stepped outside the bounds of lyrical poetry.

See the full interview here.