{"id":1878,"date":"2013-04-25T09:30:04","date_gmt":"2013-04-25T01:30:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/?p=1878"},"modified":"2013-04-25T09:31:42","modified_gmt":"2013-04-25T01:31:42","slug":"why-notes-on-the-mosquito-should-win-best-translated-book-award-2013","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/?p=1878","title":{"rendered":"Why Notes on the Mosquito Should Win Best Translated Book Award 2013"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a><\/div>\n

This week the 3% blog <\/a>is highlighting all 6 BTBA Poetry Finalists <\/a>one by one, building up to next Friday\u2019s announcement of the winners. This review of Notes on the Mosquito <\/em><\/a>is by BTBA poetry judge Jennifer Kronovet<\/a>. It begins:<\/p>\n

When I had the chance to meet the Chinese poet Xi Chuan at a conference on translation in Beijing, I asked him about the choice to write prose poems. Prose poems make up approximately half of Notes on the Mosquito<\/em>, his selected work translated by Lucas Klein. He responded that years ago, an artist asked if he would write a poem in relation to a photograph of someone washing with a plastic wash basin. He told this artist that he did not know how to write about plastic basins, only wooden ones. Prose was a way for Xi Chuan\u2019s poems to step outside of the imagery and language of traditional Chinese poetry and reenter with a different idiom and perspective. Xi Chuan\u2019s prose poems are nodes of intense and felt thinking in relation to China\u2019s present, expressed in a voice that is starkly contemporary and layered with history. Form and voice in Xi Chuan\u2019s work feel like rooms where impossible thinking explains everything. In one poem he writes:<\/p>\n

“In a crowd of people some people are not people, just as in a flock of eagles some eagles are not eagles; some eagles are forced to wander through alleyways, some people are forced to fly in the sky.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Read the whole review by clicking here <\/a>or the image above.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This week the 3% blog is highlighting all 6 BTBA Poetry Finalists one by one, building up to next Friday\u2019s announcement of the winners. This review of Notes on the Mosquito is by BTBA poetry judge Jennifer Kronovet. It begins: … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[814,7],"tags":[895,462,1654],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8srwF-ui","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":3336,"url":"https:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/?p=3336","url_meta":{"origin":1878,"position":0},"title":"Haysom’s Hermits and butterflies: nature writing in China","author":"Lucas Klein","date":"December 28, 2015","format":false,"excerpt":"Pathlight managing editor Dave Haysom's \"Hermits and butterflies: the resurgence of nature writing in China\" has been published on China Dialogue, covering the range of contemporary Chinese literature--and even mentioning Xi Chuan: Their rural existence was no idyll, and it ended in tragedy: in 1993 Gu Cheng killed Xie Ye\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Links"","block_context":{"text":"Links","link":"https:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/?cat=3"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":4298,"url":"https:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/?p=4298","url_meta":{"origin":1878,"position":1},"title":"Lucas Klein Talking Translation with Leeds Centre for New Chinese Writing","author":"Lucas Klein","date":"November 9, 2018","format":false,"excerpt":"As a follow-up to Xi Chuan's being October 2018 author-of-the-month at the Leeds Centre for New Chinese Writing, the Centre is now hosting a Talking Translation interview with me! They ask, and I answer: Do you have any advice for readers new to Xi Chuan about where best to begin\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Links"","block_context":{"text":"Links","link":"https:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/?cat=3"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1,"url":"https:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/?p=1","url_meta":{"origin":1878,"position":2},"title":"Hello world!","author":"Lucas Klein","date":"September 25, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"Welcome! This blog is devoted to the poetry of contemporary Chinese poet Xi Chuan \u897f\u5ddd in promotion of his selected poems, forthcoming from New Directions in 2012 under the title Notes on the Mosquito. The Notes on the Mosquito blog will feature information and links to news, events, and translations\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Xi Chuan"","block_context":{"text":"Xi Chuan","link":"https:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/?cat=7"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":2443,"url":"https:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/?p=2443","url_meta":{"origin":1878,"position":3},"title":"New Issue of CLEAR","author":"Lucas Klein","date":"March 12, 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"The new issue of Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews (CLEAR) is hitting the shelves (or stacks), along with it my article \u201cIndic Echoes: Form, Content, and World Literature in Tang Dynasty Regulated Verse,\u201d Charles Laughlin's \u201cNew Translators & Contemporary Chinese Literature in English,\u201d my review of Jonathan Stalling's Shi Zhi\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Links"","block_context":{"text":"Links","link":"https:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/?cat=3"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1370,"url":"https:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/?p=1370","url_meta":{"origin":1878,"position":4},"title":"Bookslut Reviews Notes on the Mosquito","author":"Lucas Klein","date":"November 12, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"The online literary journal Bookslut has posted Greer Mansfield's excellent review of my translation of Xi Chuan titled \"Notes on Xi Chuan\u2019s Notes on the Mosquito: Selected Poems.\" Here's an excerpt: Xi Chuan has translated Borges and even written a poem about him, but these prose poems bring to mind\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Links"","block_context":{"text":"Links","link":"https:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/?cat=3"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1725,"url":"https:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/?p=1725","url_meta":{"origin":1878,"position":5},"title":"Xi Chuan at Harvard","author":"Lucas Klein","date":"March 8, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"Event Title: Notes on the Mosquito \u2013 Poetry Reading and Talk by Xi Chuan \u897f\u5ddd Speaker: Xi Chuan Moderators: David Der-wei Wang, Lucas Klein Friday March 8, 2013 12:00-1:30pm Common room, 2 Divinity Ave.? Sponsored by the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations and the CCK Foundation Inter-University Center\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Readings"","block_context":{"text":"Readings","link":"https:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/?cat=9"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/harvardealc.org\/images\/2Div-outside.png?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1878"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1878"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1878\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1888,"href":"https:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1878\/revisions\/1888"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1878"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1878"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1878"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}