{"id":4583,"date":"2019-06-24T20:30:53","date_gmt":"2019-06-24T12:30:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/?p=4583"},"modified":"2019-06-02T05:40:46","modified_gmt":"2019-06-01T21:40:46","slug":"sydney-review-of-books-interview-with-bonnie-mcdougall","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/?p=4583","title":{"rendered":"Sydney Review of Books interview with Bonnie McDougall"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"
Fruitful exchanges: Bonnie S. McDougall on translation<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

The Sydney Review of Books <\/a><\/em>has published an interview with Bonnie McDougall, by Jeffrey Errington, covering topics ranging from her experiences with translation and poetry and politics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The interview spends some time on her experiences getting to know Bei Dao \u5317\u5c9b, and translating his work in the eighties:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Did you meet Bei Dao at the Foreign LanguagesPress?
<\/em>I had published a book of poetry and essays by the 1930s writer He Qifang [\u4f55\u5176\u82b3<\/em>] and this book, somehow, reached Harbin in North China where a young woman read it and, in response, sent a letter to me via my publisher. When I went to China we finally met. Her journalist husband asked me, \u2018would you like to meet the best young poet in China?\u2019 This was Bei Dao, and it turned out that he was also working at the FLP, in the Esperanto office. He was obliged to study Esperanto and scour literary magazines to find writers to be translated into that language. Around 1980-81 a lot of the young men and women who were sent to factories or the countryside returned to Peking and other cities at the end of the Cultural Revolution and started to work for educational and cultural institutions such as the FLP. This included Bei Dao. It was a good job: reading through magazines and recommending works to be translated and published. As we worked in the same institution we were able to meet without attracting unwelcome attention\u2014or so we thought. After some time the FLP told my office in the English section, rather bluntly, that Bei Dao needs to stop wasting my time as I was paid a rather large salary while his was less. So they tried to put a stop to us working together. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

and<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So when you get the world of a Bei Dao poem and bring it into English is it a Chinese reality that we are getting or by being reconstructed using English words is it an English-language reality \u2014 or is it swinging back and forth?
<\/em>I think maybe swinging is one way to put it. There was not such a wide gap between educated young men and women in China and the young foreigners who flocked around them in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The young men and women who grew up in Cultural Revolution China were able to get books by foreign authors including works about foreign writing. So to some extent they were self-educated in twentieth-century English or French or German writing. So the lack of supervision was a major factor in the life of someone like Bei Dao, who for several years was working in a factory. Not surprisingly he was not a very effective factory worker as he was no good at pouring cement. He just sat in a corner and read. So they were self-educated in a way that produced a fairly good understanding of early twentieth-century British and American poetics.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Click through to read the interview in full.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Sydney Review of Books has published an interview with Bonnie McDougall, by Jeffrey Errington, covering topics ranging from her experiences with translation and poetry and politics. The interview spends some time on her experiences getting to know Bei Dao … 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":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[3],"tags":[50,429,1276,2113],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8srwF-1bV","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":960,"url":"https:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/?p=960","url_meta":{"origin":4583,"position":0},"title":"Douglas Robinson on Bonnie McDougall’s Translation Zones in Modern China","author":"Lucas Klein","date":"June 5, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"Douglas Robinson, Chair of English at Lingnan University, has reviewed Translation Zones in Modern China: Authoritarian Command versus Gift Exchange, by star Chinese literary translator Bonnie McDougall, for Modern Chinese Literature & Culture. Here's an excerpt: In one sense, the core of the book is McDougall's recollections of living in\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Links"","block_context":{"text":"Links","link":"https:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/?cat=3"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mclc.osu.edu\/rc\/pubs\/reviews\/mcdougall.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":793,"url":"https:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/?p=793","url_meta":{"origin":4583,"position":1},"title":"Interview with Dung Kai-cheung","author":"Lucas Klein","date":"March 13, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"The Hong Kong Advanced Institute for Cross-Disciplinary Studies has just posted Cris Mattison's interview with Hong Kong writer Dung Kai-cheung \u8463\u555f\u7ae0, one of the SAR's most inventive authors. His novel Atlas: The Archaeology of an Imaginary City \u5730\u5716\u96c6, which mixes fiction with documentary history to chronicle the city of Hong\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":1592,"url":"https:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/?p=1592","url_meta":{"origin":4583,"position":2},"title":"Lucas Klein on Dung Kai-cheung’s Atlas","author":"Lucas Klein","date":"January 24, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"My review of Atlas: The Archaeology of an Imaginary City, by Dung Kai-cheung \u8463\u555f\u7ae0 and translated by the author with Anders Hansson and Bonnie S. McDougall, has been posted at Rain Taxi. Here's how it begins: \"No one, wise Kublai,\u201d says Marco Polo in Italo Calvino\u2019s Invisible Cities, \u201cknows better\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":1299,"url":"https:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/?p=1299","url_meta":{"origin":4583,"position":3},"title":"Review of Bei Dao’s The Rose of Time: New and Selected Poems","author":"Lucas Klein","date":"October 18, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"Jonathan Hart reviews Bei Dao's \u5317\u5cf6 The Rose of Time: New and Selected Poems (New Directions), edited by Eliot Weinberger, speaking \"about these translations as if they were poems in English on which the reputation of the poet stands in the English-speaking world.\" He concludes that \"Bei Dao\u2019s poetry translates\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Links"","block_context":{"text":"Links","link":"https:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/?cat=3"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/hcl.harvard.edu\/harvardreview\/OnlineJournal\/HRO_7\/reviews\/Dao_lg.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":1920,"url":"https:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/?p=1920","url_meta":{"origin":4583,"position":4},"title":"Sebastian Veg: Putting Hong Kong’s New Cultural Activism on the Literary Map","author":"Lucas Klein","date":"May 15, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"Sebastian Veg's review essay of City at the End of Time: Poems by Leung Ping-Kwan \u6881\u79c9\u921e (edited by Esther Cheung) and Dung Kai-cheung\u2019s\u00a0\u8463\u555f\u7ae0\u00a0Atlas: The Archaeology of an Imaginary City (translated by the author with Bonnie McDougall and Anders Hansson), titled \"Putting Hong Kong's New Cultural Activism on the Literary Map,\"\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":4206,"url":"https:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/?p=4206","url_meta":{"origin":4583,"position":5},"title":"Kapoor on Bei Dao as “tranquil bard of protest”","author":"Lucas Klein","date":"August 10, 2018","format":false,"excerpt":"Writing for Scroll.in, Manan Kapoor writes about how \"As he turns 69, Chinese poet Bei Dao remains the tranquil bard of protest, even in exile.\" The piece is full of imprecisions--it refers to Bei Dao as \"Dao\" throughout, misattributes poems translated by Bonnie McDougall, and spells his current translator Eliot\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Links"","block_context":{"text":"Links","link":"https:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/?cat=3"},"img":{"alt_text":"As he turns 69, Chinese poet Bei Dao remains the tranquil bard of protest, even in exile","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/d1u4oo4rb13yy8.cloudfront.net\/article\/zfuoqzflen-1533195510.jpeg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4583"}],"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=4583"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4583\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4588,"href":"https:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4583\/revisions\/4588"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4583"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4583"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4583"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}