China/France | Chinese | Poetry
November, 2019Song Lin is the most open and self-effacing Chinese-language poet I have ever met. He suffered for democratic causes, and after two years of imprisonment, migrated to France, “flee[ing] with beautiful wounds.” This was something he stood up for and he simply did what he had to do, and then literally, with light-handed humor, moved on. He asked for no laurels for his civil disobedience. Once overseas, he did not dwell on nostalgia and his chosen isolation, rather, “the fugue marches on,” displacing alienation with an “encyclopedia of the sky.” He looked up and forward. Symbolist and Surrealist touches are increasingly evident in his poems, and forms like the couplet enter his repertoire, as he “turns sorrow into craft.” He did not look back and assume an “exile” label. In fact, he has no labels. His labels, or rather, labors, are words; his true struggle, “the tribulation of a word, until it spits you out.” The natural world is turned to; museums are visited; the circus becomes a gaze on the poetic craft; words become sperm whales; the bell is tolled in the ear; there is fainting; and there is fainting again. The agony of a poet wandering in words and worlds strikes:
the fallen, lifted by our hands, leaking through our fingers
that once belonged to the stars are sands that boil like tears
What better description is there for a poet that blows wounds into wonders! This dazzling, he leaves to these lines of gold. He lets others shine. Through his poetry editorship at the important literary magazine Jintian (Today), he has been bringing foreign and unsung works to Chinese readers. He was an early advocate for classical Chinese and translation. He champions underrepresented masters, aspiring young writers, and everybody else, except himself. “Strangled / by the umbilical cord,” he takes seriously where Chinese poetry came from, and cares even more about where it is going. In SONG Lin’s poems, the strange becomes stranger, the familiar turns familiar again, the quiet becomes quieter and explodes. With understated restraint and exploratory openness, this is a poetry that strikes and burns. It is perhaps safe to say SONG Lin is the last centaur of contemporary Chinese avant-gardists, a rare poet that straddles the liminal space of words and wounds.
- Dong Li
Since Chinese nouns don’t indicate quantity, the title of this book could be translated as My Mother’s Parasite or My Mother’s Parasites. So as I translated Wei-Yun Lin’s memoir, a meditation on life, growth and interdependence, I kept asking myself, "Parasite or parasites?"
It isn’t really a question of quantity—there are a lot of parasites in the book. Wei-Yun’s mother is a distinguished scholar of parasitology, which, yes, means she is as smart and eccentric as you might imagine. One of the book’s main elements, and great pleasures, is Wei-Yun’s nuanced and funny insights into her loving, complex relationship with her mom.
Singular “parasite” seems more emphatic: My Mother’s PARASITE. It also suggests the concept of being parasitical rather than the creepy crawlies themselves. And “What makes something a parasite?” is a question the book seeks to answer. The straightforward answer is that, for at least part of their life cycle, parasites derive nutrients from other creatures at their expense. But the book leads us to wonder: Doesn’t everything, maybe even especially humans, more or less live off of other creatures—particularly our mothers? Are we harming them? Do we give them anything in return? (And the questions we all cry from the rooftops.) Do we ever stop relying on our mothers for nutrients? Do we ever stop asking them to make sacrifices for us?
Are we all our mothers’ parasites?!?
In the end I asked Wei-Yun what she thought—parasite or parasites? And she said “parasites,” so I went with that. But, as a translator, I love that this difference between Chinese and English allowed me, above and beyond the richness of Wei-Yun’s narrative, to ask these questions and conjecture these possibilities.
- Emily Goedde
Born in rural Shandong in 1973, the national award-winning poet, essayist, literary critic, and editor Duo Yu co-founded the prominent “Lower Body” Movement based in Beijing during the early 2000s. Among his multiple books of poetry and prose are Meanings Annoy Us (2004), Chasing Butterflies (2009), and The Last Darkness (2013).
Ya Hsien wrote “Chicago” in 1959, along with several other “city poems” that reflect his backlash against the unrelenting ascent of industrialization. Through disjointing, violent, and often surreal imagery, Ya Hsien captures a dystopian vision of a Chicago that has been rendered “coarse” and “illiterate” by the steel heart of modernity. This is a poem that is framed by desolation, a poem about a city where love and poetry have become a matter of pressing buttons.
While translating “Chicago,” I mostly struggled with relaying the semantic meaning of particular words and phrases while trying to preserve the aural and thematic qualities of the poem. I often compromised on a semantic level by introducing new words into the poem. For example, I translated “橋” (bridge) as “station” so that it could rhyme with “desolation,” the way “文化” (culture) end-rhymes with “橋下” (below the bridge) in the original couplet. I also used “aromatic” to rhyme with “mathematics” to compensate for the end-rhyme between 星光 (xing guang, starlight) and 芬芳 (fen fang, fragrance) that is lost in my translation.
On a more thematic level--to retain the sense of ferocity conveyed by “狼” (wolf) in “狼狽” (a situation that is embarrassing, awkward, and perhaps even pathetic), I described the whistle of the steam engine as a “wolf whistle” to keep the “wolf” in the poem. This predator joins the other violent images in the poem (autumn being “electrolyzed,” the tender hands of angels “snapped off”) to represent Ya Hsien’s portrayal of a harshly industrializing city.
Ya Hsien had not been to Chicago prior to writing this poem, but he need not have; “Chicago” reimagines the heartbeat of the city with such strong sensory detail that it is as if Ya Hsien were imagining a new Chicago for us, one that is interlocked with his past, evolving in the present, and set in the future.
- May Huang
China | Chinese | Poetry (excerpts)
September, 2017Yu Xiang is a key figure of the post-'70s Chinese poets. Laureate of several major literary prizes in China, she is the author of multiple collections, including Surging toward Them (Chongqing University Press, 2015) and Poem in a Pocket (Shandong Literature and Arts, 2016). Her first bilingual volume I Can Almost See the Clouds of Dust (Zephyr/The Chinese University Press, 2013; translated by Fiona Sze-Lorrain) was longlisted for the 2014 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. As a visual artist, she has exhibited oil paintings at various venues. A new bilingual chapbook Trace (in Sze-Lorrain’s translation) is forthcoming in 2017.
Chinese | Novel (excerpt) | Taiwan
February, 2017Based on the experiences of Luo Yijun’s immediate and extended families in Taiwan and China, Moon Descendants relates a story spanning four generations. A large part of the narrative pivots on Luo’s father, who joined hundreds of thousands of Chinese men in fleeing China to Taiwan after the Nationalist Party’s defeat in the Chinese Civil War in 1949. What seemed to be a temporary retreat became a permanent exile, with a ban on traveling between China and Taiwan in place for the following half-century.
As in most writings of exile, memories play a significant role in Moon Descendants. How do memories intervene in an estranged life? How do memories construct time and how does time change memory? In Moon Descendants, narrative time is shuffled by the memories not only of Luo’s father but also of the author-narrator and other characters. The chapters are arranged as if they were a hand of playing cards. According to Luo, the conception of the story came from the imaginative practice of freezing time in fiction, i.e. stopping the time of a decisive moment, prying open the seam of the suspended time, and wriggling into an elaborate, spectacle-filled instant. In this way, Luo presents remembrances as different clocks of the narrative present, turned on and off by memories. These clocks make the time they mark circular like clock faces (as another part of the story portrays). The circular times sometimes intersect with one another, forming overlapping portions that, far from being in sync, trap the narrative present in conflicting arcs and movements of the past.
The translated excerpt is the sixteenth of the novel’s twenty-one chapters, a self-contained piece titled “The Flood” that explores the twists and turns behind the union of the narrator’s parents, with his mother coming from a lineage of adoptive daughters and his father leaving behind a wife in China. In the second half of the excerpt, these two lines of development merge—or submerge—in a flood caused by one of the biggest typhoons to hit Taiwan. Inundating the whole of Taipei and turning streets and alleys into waterways, the flood creates a transient world for the family’s history to rise to the surface of the water. Its effect is not so much to straighten things up as it is to flatten time momentarily and break down the border between past and present.
- Elaine Wong
I met Zhu Zhu for the first time two years ago when he came to the US for a joint residency with me in Vermont. We established our trust over a long trans-Pacific phone call that lasted an entire night. Then it dawned on us that such trust could be extended to a book. Since then, I have read every poem he has written and selected with him a collection that encapsulates what this distinguished poet has achieved in the past decade.
This past decade has seen a Chinese economic boom, and many poets have abandoned poetry for lucrative businesses. Zhu Zhu took to the arts and makes a living by writing art criticism and curating art exhibitions in China and overseas. He has made a name for himself in the new field. It was the literariness of his words that first drew attention from a group of well-known artists. His art criticism does not distract Zhu Zhu from his poetry, however. Instead, it heightens his sensibility to the diverse emotional modes of expression inherent in artistic composition.
Though revered in poetry circles, Zhu Zhu remains on the periphery and his work in the art world gives him certain advantages in keeping his distance from the occasional riots within poetry circles. Zhu Zhu writes quietly. His paced poems weave slowly through personal and larger histories. The poems do not surprise for surprise’s sake; rather, they give the reader a painterly view at each and every turn. His smooth lines unfold like a scroll of painting and accrue meaning. Zhu Zhu’s poetry illuminates and sets the reader adrift in meditations, yet the poems are sharp as crystals that cut into the interiority of the mind.
- Dong Li
Born and raised in Hualien on the east coast of Taiwan, Amang ( 阿芒 ) is the author of two volumes of verse: On/Off: Selected Poems of Amang, 1995—2002 (2003) and No Daddy (2008). Her work has appeared in various print and online journals. An avid blogger and mountaineer, Amang makes video documentaries and video poetry. Her bilingual collection, Chariots of Women (translated by Fiona Sze-Lorrain) is forthcoming from Fembooks in Taipei.
The acclaimed Taiwanese writer Chen Li is best known for his poetry, and is regarded as one of the most innovative and exciting poets writing in Chinese today. Less known, however, is the fact that he is also a prolific essayist, and has published seven collections of essays in addition to his fourteen books of poetry. Although his poems have been translated into English and some other languages, his essays are largely unknown to non-Chinese readers. His essays—both lyric and personal—exude no less elegant and artful poetics than his poetry. In Voice Clocks, his exquisite and tantalizing essay that was selected to be included in the standard textbook for junior high school students across Taiwan, the fluidity and musicality of his language—accessible, effortless, yet enchanting—is on full display. He’s a master at capturing and distilling the poetic grace from the most mundane aspects of everyday life. As Chen Li once observed, “Any time you look at something from a different perspective, you will see it in a whole new light.” Reading his writing, this essay in particular, one can’t help taking another look at the inevitable earthly tedium of our existence through his imaginative lens, and savoring its innate beauty. Hualien, Chen Li’s beloved hometown on the mountainous east coast of Taiwan, has been the central locale of his writing. His deep love and pride for his native land, as reflected in this piece, are palpable. The main challenge, as well as joy, of translating this essay was to seek to render its incredible euphony into English while at the same time retaining the rich flavors of Taiwanese culture.
- Ting Wang
Not long ago, a few poems surfaced from the Dun Huang archives--five short poems that are attributed to Xuanzang. Prior to the rediscovery of these poems, Xuanzang's literary reputation primarily rested on his status as a hero of legend in the pages of Journey to the West, where his pilgrimage to India provides the narrative thread for Wu Cheng En's great epic tale. Xuanzang has also been highly regarded as an author in his own right. In the seventh-century travel narrative entitled The Great Tang Record of the Western Territories, he provides a no less remarkable account of his journey traversing countless mountain passes, encountering peoples of more than a hundred different tribal nations, finding holy scriptures, and visiting stupas that glowed with mysterious light all along the way.
The rediscovery of these five poems rounds out our picture of Xuanzang as a poet, too. We now can understand Xuanzang's journey as real, legendary, and metaphorical all at the same time, an inner and outer voyage for enlightenment that's fully described in these lines.
The Brooklyn Rail welcomes you to our web-exclusive section InTranslation, where we feature unpublished translations of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and dramatic writing. Published since April 2007, InTranslation is a venue for outstanding work in translation and a resource for translators, authors, editors, and publishers seeking to collaborate.
We seek exceptional unpublished English translations from all languages.
Fiction, Nonfiction, and Poetry: Manuscripts of no longer than 20 pages (double-spaced).
Plays: Manuscripts of no longer than 30 pages (in left-justified format).