Lucas Klein | Arizona State University (original) (raw)
Papers by Lucas Klein
Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, 2024
Whereas sinology, or the study of Chinese literature in English, has often been identifiable by a... more Whereas sinology, or the study of Chinese literature in English, has often been identifiable by a Chinese culturism, or belief in Chinese civilization as a coherent whole united by its writing system, this review article looks at five books that could be described as participating in a "translational turn" in Chinese literary studies. Yet even as they make powerful arguments against the fundamental unity and cohesiveness of a diachronic Chinese cultural-political identity in their translingual and translational approaches to scholarship, the books-Carla Nappi's Translating Early Modern China (2021), Haun Saussy's The Making of Barbarians (2022), Tze-Yin Teo's If Babel Had A Form (2022), Yunte Huang's Chinese Whispers (2022), and Nan Z. Da's Intransitive Encounter (2018)-risk taking for granted the longevity of China's participation in globalization and its economic integration with the United States. In light of current changes to the relationship between China, the US, and the world order, this review article reads these books while attempting to think through the gains and pitfalls of the translational turn in Chinese literary studies.
PMLA, 2023
What is the international literary history behind Xi Chuan's Chinese prose poems, and what is the... more What is the international literary history behind Xi Chuan's Chinese prose poems, and what is the literary history behind translating them into English as prose poems? Did Hegel's belief that poetry can be “translated into other languages without essential detriment to its value” contribute to the birth of prose poetry, through a synthesis with poetic form? If so, what does this notion say about Hegel's idea that China lies “outside the World's History”? In the light of the historical association between China and prose poetry in the literary history of French (Judith Gautier, Victor Segalen, Henri Michaux) and English (Allen Upward, Nathaniel Tarn, Ron Silliman, Bob Perelman, Joan Retallack, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Tammy Lai-Ming Ho, Sarah Howe, Ken Chen, Cathy Park Hong, Eleanor Goodman, Jennifer Kronovet, and Nick Admussen), I discuss prose poetry as an outcome of what Joyelle McSweeney and Johannes Göransson call a translational “deformation zone,” to argue that translating Chinese prose poetry demonstrates China to be inside, not outside, the history of the world.
The Bloomsbury Handbook of Modern Chinese Literature in Translation, 2023
This Handbook explores the many paths taken by Chinese and other literatures as they have been tr... more This Handbook explores the many paths taken by Chinese and other literatures as they have been transmitted, reinterpreted, reinvented, and disseminated through translation. Targeting undergraduate and postgraduate students and scholarly readers of translation studies and Chinese, world, and comparative literatures, the Handbook measures an array of methodologies and theoretical propositions to present stories of literary encounters. A total of thirty-four critical-descriptive essays detail how translation crosses over time and space and operates within overt or covert aims and purposes, in the form of text selection, intertextual relationships, elective affinities, adaptations, pseudotranslations, and self-translations. Altogether these thirty-four excursions in translation from and into Chinese map the “significant geography” (Laachir, Marzagora, and Orsini 2018, 3) of Chinese literature, testifying to translation as a source of inexhaustible richness of information on geographical, historical, and cultural variations.
The Bloomsbury Handbook of Modern Chinese Literature in Translation, 2023
Investigating the relationship between Chineseness and modern Chinese literature written for and ... more Investigating the relationship between Chineseness and modern Chinese literature written for and from translation, this chapter goes beyond the modern: tackling a single topic of translation to connect writers from classical, modern, and contemporary times, the chapter questions the critique of literary works perceived as being created for translation into other languages as less “Chinese,” arguing against any a priori essence of Chineseness. It also points out the possibly alarming effects that the PRC’s inward-turning policies could have on translation, a worry shared by many contemporary translators of modern Chinese literature.
Prism: Theory and Modern Chinese Literature, 2023
How are the migration of people and of poetry, through literary translation and translational lit... more How are the migration of people and of poetry, through literary translation and translational literature, linked or alike? What can the poetry of migration teach about the translation of form in poetry? What is the role of the text in under stand ing the pol i tics of poetry in politicized con texts? Island: Poetry and History of Chinese Immigrants on Angel Island, 1910-1940 is an important collection and translation of poems etched in the walls of the Angel Island detention center. Though the Angel Island poems were mostly com posed after the 1919 vernacular revolution in Chinese literature, they were writ ten in classical Chinese and premodern forms. Island translates them into stiff free verse academic English, asking English language readers to imaginatively project poetic beauty onto the originals. Other translations, such as Teow Lim Goh's Islanders (2016) and Jeffrey Thomas Leong's Wild Geese Sorrow (2018), render the poems with more attention to the dominant styles of contemporary American poetry. This article argues for a retranslation of the Angel Island poems-not into free verse but with formalist attention to meter and rhyme in English. Such translations could blur the dichotomy between the former's target-oriented poetics and the latter's source-oriented translations and also offer a stronger migration into English for the poetry of these migrants.
Journal of Chinese Literature and Culture, 2022
In Of Grammatology Jacques Derrida describes the “necessary decentering” that took place in Weste... more In Of Grammatology Jacques Derrida describes the “necessary decentering” that took place in Western philosophy following “the becoming-legible of non-Western scripts,” when the European intellectual tradition was forced to confront its civilizational others. Derrida positions himself as contributing to this decentering, displacing the value-laden binary opposition central to structuralism. But as Derrida explained, the “first decentering limits itself ” by “recenter[ing] itself upon” what he calls “the ‘Chinese’ prejudice: all the philosophical projects of a universal script and of a universal language [which] encouraged seeing in the recently discovered Chinese script a model of the philosophical language thus removed from history.” How has the approach to Chinese language and literature of that decentering known as poststructuralism limited itself or recentered itself, and how has sinology responded to the influence of poststructuralism? Insofar as the Chinese term for the Sinae (China) at the root of sinology is itself “middle” or “central” (中), how susceptible to decentering can sinology be? This article begins with a survey of poststructuralist writings about China by renowned post-structuralists, alongside responses to their work by sinologists and comparatists, arguing that poststructuralist writings tend to recenter themselves on a binary opposition between China and the West. The author then addresses the influence of poststructuralism on Chinese literary studies, to argue that the most successful poststructural decentering occurs in sinology when sinologists disseminate their decentering through a dissipated poststructuralism.
Sino-Platonic Papers, 2021
Contributions in any of the major scholarly languages of the world, including romanized modern st... more Contributions in any of the major scholarly languages of the world, including romanized modern standard Mandarin and Japanese, are acceptable. In special circumstances, papers written in one of the Sinitic topolects (fangyan) may be considered for publication. Although the chief focus of Sino-Platonic Papers is on the intercultural relations of China with other peoples, challenging and creative studies on a wide variety of philological subjects will be entertained. This series is not the place for safe, sober, and stodgy presentations. Sino-Platonic Papers prefers lively work that, while taking reasonable risks to advance the field, capitalizes on brilliant new insights into the development of civilization. Submissions are regularly sent out for peer review, and extensive editorial suggestions for revision may be offered. Sino-Platonic Papers emphasizes substance over form. We do, however, strongly recommend that prospective authors consult our style guidelines at www.sino-platonic.org/stylesheet.doc. Manuscripts should be submitted as electronic files in Microsoft Word format. You may wish to use our sample document template, available here: www.sino-platonic.org/spp.dot. All issues of Sino-Platonic Papers are free in PDF form. Issues 1-170, however, will continue to be available in paper copies until our stock runs out. Please note: When the editor goes on an expedition or research trip, all operations may cease for up to three months at a time.
Prism: Theory and Modern Chinese Literature, 2021
Examining how contemporary poets raised in China are looking at classical Chinese poetry from the... more Examining how contemporary poets raised in China are looking at classical Chinese poetry from the Tang--in particular, the poetry and the figure of Li Bai 李白 (701-762)--this article questions the epistemological divide, common to scholarship, between premodern and modern Chinese poetry. The texts come from Shenqing shi 深情史 (Histories of Affection) by Liu Liduo 劉麗朵 (1979-); The Banished Immortal, Chinese American poet and novelist Ha Jin's 哈金 (1956-) biography of Li Bai; the book-length poem-sequence Tang 唐, by Yi Sha 伊沙 (1966-); and poet Xi Chuan's 西川 (1963-) scholarly book Tang shi de dufa 唐詩的讀法 (Reading Tang Poetry). The author con tends not only that these writers' dealings with Tang poetry make it part of a still living tradition but also that such engagement offers a way to under stand the dynamic, rather than static, canonicity of Tang poetry.
Chinese Poetry and Translation: Rights and Wrongs, 2019
This essay starts from the premise that a poem is a translational process: always, not just once ... more This essay starts from the premise that a poem is a translational process: always, not just once it has been translated in the conventional sense. From there, the author complicates and reorients the authenticity claims that have been built into the discourse around both the ancient Shijing and Chinese migrant worker poetry today. He argues that these two poetries’ many moments of intralingual, interlingual, and cultural translation constitute and reiterate each other – and that the recognition of this should place proper attention on the work and the art involved in each.
Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese, 2017
Are classical Chinese and modern Chinese one language, or two? Is translating classical Chinese p... more Are classical Chinese and modern Chinese one language, or two? Is translating classical Chinese poetry the same as or different from translating modern Chinese poetry? I have earlier argued that modern Chinese poetry is in some ways a translation of premodern Chinese poetics through the filter of international poetics—but if this is the case, then should translation of classical and modern poetry into English be more similar than they are? Looking at Lydia Liu’s notion of the “supersign” alongside my experiences translating contemporary poets Ouyang Jianghe and Xi Chuan as well as Tang dynasty poet Li Shangyin, I discuss what I call “weak interpretations” and “strong interpretations” and how they play out in the translational alignment of classical and modern Chinese poetry with poetry in English today.
Genre, 2018
According to Rey Chow, the “inscrutable Chinese” is “the cross-ethnic stereotype par excellence.”... more According to Rey Chow, the “inscrutable Chinese” is “the cross-ethnic stereotype par excellence.” How does this stereotype play out in modern and contemporary American poetry’s tradition of representing China and Chinese literature? For poet and Asian American studies professor Timothy Yu, whose One Hundred Chinese Silences (2016) comprises parodic rewritings of poems that try to engage with the Chinese aesthetic, the representation of China in American poetry amounts to an “orientalist tradition” that “sees China as a source of unchanging aesthetic traits fixed in a remote past,” offering stereotypes of Asians as “silent, reticent, passive, yet also exotic, mysterious, objects of aesthetic contemplation.” But is Yu’s project not at the same time reinscribing a kind of Chinese inscrutability, presenting China as perennially unknowable in its critique of so many efforts to make Chinese culture known? Understanding translation through Judith Butler’s “performativity,” the article looks critically both at Yu’s poems and the texts he parodies, in particular those by Gary Snyder and Ezra Pound, in the context of works by John Ashbery, the Language poets, Jonathan Stalling, and Eliot Weinberger, to argue that Yu’s work represents a translation anxiety and pleads for more translations into English, including into American poetry.
Mo Yan's 2012 Nobel Prize for Literature quickly turned into the most controversial international... more Mo Yan's 2012 Nobel Prize for Literature quickly turned into the most controversial international literary prize of recent memory. The controversy took place largely in English, and largely on the American internet, where as much as Mo Yan was honored as being an important literary voice from a country whose contemporary cultural products are often neglected, he was criticized for supporting the Chinese Communist Party and its government. Defenders have pointed out that the politics in his fiction are neither as simple nor as straightforward as his party membership might otherwise indicate, but critics have said he writes a "daft hilarity" in a "diseased language," calling his works in translation "superior to the original in their aesthetic unity and sureness." Taking a detailed look at the controversy and debate, I examine the theoretical assumptions and stakes at work in the reading of Mo Yan and his Nobel, with attention to their ideological underpinnings, followed with a discussion on the importance of considering translation and the relationship between literary reading and politics. I close with a look toward a broadly applicable model of internationalist reading I call translational.
Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, 2018
Is Hong Kong poetry Chinese poetry, poetry in Chinese, Sinophone poetry, or something else? For t... more Is Hong Kong poetry Chinese poetry, poetry in Chinese, Sinophone poetry, or something else? For that matter, what is the relationship between Sinophone literature and Chinese literature? Scholars have often called on Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s notion of “minor literature” to explain, expand, and expound upon the concept of the Sinophone. But if the proper –phone of Hong Kong literature is not Mandarin but Cantonese, then D & G’s specification that a “minor literature doesn’t come from a minor language” but is instead what “a minority constructs within a major language” should both raise doubts about the applicability of the Sinophone designation to writing from Hong Kong and open up new possibilities for thinking about a Sinophone literature written by non-minority writers from mainland China. To that end, this paper reads the recent work of Hong Kong-based poet Cao Shuying 曹疏影 (b. 1979), a woman raised in Harbin who writes in Mandarin, and her husband, Liu Waitong (Liao Weitang) 廖偉棠 (b. 1975), who grew up in Zhuhai, writes in both Mandarin and Cantonese, and has gained prominence in Hong Kong as a cultural commentator and public intellectual. Looking in particular at Liu’s poem “Over the Counter-Revolution” 鳩嗚之詩, written in the aftermath of the 2014 Umbrella Movement, and Cao’s 2012 poem “Hong Kong” 香港 (from which the title of this paper is derived), it discusses how their engagements and positioning vis-à-vis the broader circles of Hong Kong and mainland poetry and their dialogues with the traditions of Chinese literature offer answers and visions for the Sinophone status of Hong Kong writing and the possibility of a minor mainland literature that could satisfy the Sinophone. The paper ends with a consideration of the Sinophone vis-à-vis another of Deleuze and Guattari’s influential concepts, the rhizome.
Reading China Against the Grain: Imagining Communities, 2020
A new literary history of Modern China, 2017
On underground poetry in 1970s China.
Metamorphoses: a journal of literary translation, 2018
Are Chinese steamed buns, or mantou 饅頭, "just bread"? What can we understand about translation an... more Are Chinese steamed buns, or mantou 饅頭, "just bread"? What can we understand about translation and its relationship to power by investigating this claim?
Chinese Poetic Modernisms, 2019
阅读诗歌以及中国诗歌也许能够帮助理解或解决现代主义和世界文学本身固有的矛盾。如果文学现代主义确如艾略特·温伯格所言，倾向于发现从前未予关注的作品，并以“国际风格”无明显地域性的普遍主义为显著特征... more 阅读诗歌以及中国诗歌也许能够帮助理解或解决现代主义和世界文学本身固有的矛盾。如果文学现代主义确如艾略特·温伯格所言，倾向于发现从前未予关注的作品，并以“国际风格”无明显地域性的普遍主义为显著特征，那么用非西方语言创作的所谓现代主义诗歌并非代表着在西方文化逻辑驱动下对地方文化的消除，而是代表着当地文化重新发掘各自自我的过去以应对西方伦理及美学。２０世纪８０年代，中国当代诗人西川以“后朦胧”抒情诗人姿态步入诗坛，后来发展到以散文诗形式持续探究古文化奥秘。通过细读西川诗文，可以探索现代主义确定性特征的方方面面，并将它们彼此联系；可考查在文学研究、尤其中国现代文学研究中占主导地位的世界文学理论流派；最后，将西川诗与中西美学的双重关系为参照，可探究翻译其诗的特别之处。
World Literature Today, May 2014
Burton Watson has proven himself one of the best translators of classical Asian literature. Throu... more Burton Watson has proven himself one of the best translators of classical Asian literature. Through background information about Watson's life and close reading of his poetry translations, the following essay highlights the intricacies of his artistry and demonstrates the genius of his translations in reconciling the perceived rift between poetry and scholarship.
Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, 2024
Whereas sinology, or the study of Chinese literature in English, has often been identifiable by a... more Whereas sinology, or the study of Chinese literature in English, has often been identifiable by a Chinese culturism, or belief in Chinese civilization as a coherent whole united by its writing system, this review article looks at five books that could be described as participating in a "translational turn" in Chinese literary studies. Yet even as they make powerful arguments against the fundamental unity and cohesiveness of a diachronic Chinese cultural-political identity in their translingual and translational approaches to scholarship, the books-Carla Nappi's Translating Early Modern China (2021), Haun Saussy's The Making of Barbarians (2022), Tze-Yin Teo's If Babel Had A Form (2022), Yunte Huang's Chinese Whispers (2022), and Nan Z. Da's Intransitive Encounter (2018)-risk taking for granted the longevity of China's participation in globalization and its economic integration with the United States. In light of current changes to the relationship between China, the US, and the world order, this review article reads these books while attempting to think through the gains and pitfalls of the translational turn in Chinese literary studies.
PMLA, 2023
What is the international literary history behind Xi Chuan's Chinese prose poems, and what is the... more What is the international literary history behind Xi Chuan's Chinese prose poems, and what is the literary history behind translating them into English as prose poems? Did Hegel's belief that poetry can be “translated into other languages without essential detriment to its value” contribute to the birth of prose poetry, through a synthesis with poetic form? If so, what does this notion say about Hegel's idea that China lies “outside the World's History”? In the light of the historical association between China and prose poetry in the literary history of French (Judith Gautier, Victor Segalen, Henri Michaux) and English (Allen Upward, Nathaniel Tarn, Ron Silliman, Bob Perelman, Joan Retallack, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Tammy Lai-Ming Ho, Sarah Howe, Ken Chen, Cathy Park Hong, Eleanor Goodman, Jennifer Kronovet, and Nick Admussen), I discuss prose poetry as an outcome of what Joyelle McSweeney and Johannes Göransson call a translational “deformation zone,” to argue that translating Chinese prose poetry demonstrates China to be inside, not outside, the history of the world.
The Bloomsbury Handbook of Modern Chinese Literature in Translation, 2023
This Handbook explores the many paths taken by Chinese and other literatures as they have been tr... more This Handbook explores the many paths taken by Chinese and other literatures as they have been transmitted, reinterpreted, reinvented, and disseminated through translation. Targeting undergraduate and postgraduate students and scholarly readers of translation studies and Chinese, world, and comparative literatures, the Handbook measures an array of methodologies and theoretical propositions to present stories of literary encounters. A total of thirty-four critical-descriptive essays detail how translation crosses over time and space and operates within overt or covert aims and purposes, in the form of text selection, intertextual relationships, elective affinities, adaptations, pseudotranslations, and self-translations. Altogether these thirty-four excursions in translation from and into Chinese map the “significant geography” (Laachir, Marzagora, and Orsini 2018, 3) of Chinese literature, testifying to translation as a source of inexhaustible richness of information on geographical, historical, and cultural variations.
The Bloomsbury Handbook of Modern Chinese Literature in Translation, 2023
Investigating the relationship between Chineseness and modern Chinese literature written for and ... more Investigating the relationship between Chineseness and modern Chinese literature written for and from translation, this chapter goes beyond the modern: tackling a single topic of translation to connect writers from classical, modern, and contemporary times, the chapter questions the critique of literary works perceived as being created for translation into other languages as less “Chinese,” arguing against any a priori essence of Chineseness. It also points out the possibly alarming effects that the PRC’s inward-turning policies could have on translation, a worry shared by many contemporary translators of modern Chinese literature.
Prism: Theory and Modern Chinese Literature, 2023
How are the migration of people and of poetry, through literary translation and translational lit... more How are the migration of people and of poetry, through literary translation and translational literature, linked or alike? What can the poetry of migration teach about the translation of form in poetry? What is the role of the text in under stand ing the pol i tics of poetry in politicized con texts? Island: Poetry and History of Chinese Immigrants on Angel Island, 1910-1940 is an important collection and translation of poems etched in the walls of the Angel Island detention center. Though the Angel Island poems were mostly com posed after the 1919 vernacular revolution in Chinese literature, they were writ ten in classical Chinese and premodern forms. Island translates them into stiff free verse academic English, asking English language readers to imaginatively project poetic beauty onto the originals. Other translations, such as Teow Lim Goh's Islanders (2016) and Jeffrey Thomas Leong's Wild Geese Sorrow (2018), render the poems with more attention to the dominant styles of contemporary American poetry. This article argues for a retranslation of the Angel Island poems-not into free verse but with formalist attention to meter and rhyme in English. Such translations could blur the dichotomy between the former's target-oriented poetics and the latter's source-oriented translations and also offer a stronger migration into English for the poetry of these migrants.
Journal of Chinese Literature and Culture, 2022
In Of Grammatology Jacques Derrida describes the “necessary decentering” that took place in Weste... more In Of Grammatology Jacques Derrida describes the “necessary decentering” that took place in Western philosophy following “the becoming-legible of non-Western scripts,” when the European intellectual tradition was forced to confront its civilizational others. Derrida positions himself as contributing to this decentering, displacing the value-laden binary opposition central to structuralism. But as Derrida explained, the “first decentering limits itself ” by “recenter[ing] itself upon” what he calls “the ‘Chinese’ prejudice: all the philosophical projects of a universal script and of a universal language [which] encouraged seeing in the recently discovered Chinese script a model of the philosophical language thus removed from history.” How has the approach to Chinese language and literature of that decentering known as poststructuralism limited itself or recentered itself, and how has sinology responded to the influence of poststructuralism? Insofar as the Chinese term for the Sinae (China) at the root of sinology is itself “middle” or “central” (中), how susceptible to decentering can sinology be? This article begins with a survey of poststructuralist writings about China by renowned post-structuralists, alongside responses to their work by sinologists and comparatists, arguing that poststructuralist writings tend to recenter themselves on a binary opposition between China and the West. The author then addresses the influence of poststructuralism on Chinese literary studies, to argue that the most successful poststructural decentering occurs in sinology when sinologists disseminate their decentering through a dissipated poststructuralism.
Sino-Platonic Papers, 2021
Contributions in any of the major scholarly languages of the world, including romanized modern st... more Contributions in any of the major scholarly languages of the world, including romanized modern standard Mandarin and Japanese, are acceptable. In special circumstances, papers written in one of the Sinitic topolects (fangyan) may be considered for publication. Although the chief focus of Sino-Platonic Papers is on the intercultural relations of China with other peoples, challenging and creative studies on a wide variety of philological subjects will be entertained. This series is not the place for safe, sober, and stodgy presentations. Sino-Platonic Papers prefers lively work that, while taking reasonable risks to advance the field, capitalizes on brilliant new insights into the development of civilization. Submissions are regularly sent out for peer review, and extensive editorial suggestions for revision may be offered. Sino-Platonic Papers emphasizes substance over form. We do, however, strongly recommend that prospective authors consult our style guidelines at www.sino-platonic.org/stylesheet.doc. Manuscripts should be submitted as electronic files in Microsoft Word format. You may wish to use our sample document template, available here: www.sino-platonic.org/spp.dot. All issues of Sino-Platonic Papers are free in PDF form. Issues 1-170, however, will continue to be available in paper copies until our stock runs out. Please note: When the editor goes on an expedition or research trip, all operations may cease for up to three months at a time.
Prism: Theory and Modern Chinese Literature, 2021
Examining how contemporary poets raised in China are looking at classical Chinese poetry from the... more Examining how contemporary poets raised in China are looking at classical Chinese poetry from the Tang--in particular, the poetry and the figure of Li Bai 李白 (701-762)--this article questions the epistemological divide, common to scholarship, between premodern and modern Chinese poetry. The texts come from Shenqing shi 深情史 (Histories of Affection) by Liu Liduo 劉麗朵 (1979-); The Banished Immortal, Chinese American poet and novelist Ha Jin's 哈金 (1956-) biography of Li Bai; the book-length poem-sequence Tang 唐, by Yi Sha 伊沙 (1966-); and poet Xi Chuan's 西川 (1963-) scholarly book Tang shi de dufa 唐詩的讀法 (Reading Tang Poetry). The author con tends not only that these writers' dealings with Tang poetry make it part of a still living tradition but also that such engagement offers a way to under stand the dynamic, rather than static, canonicity of Tang poetry.
Chinese Poetry and Translation: Rights and Wrongs, 2019
This essay starts from the premise that a poem is a translational process: always, not just once ... more This essay starts from the premise that a poem is a translational process: always, not just once it has been translated in the conventional sense. From there, the author complicates and reorients the authenticity claims that have been built into the discourse around both the ancient Shijing and Chinese migrant worker poetry today. He argues that these two poetries’ many moments of intralingual, interlingual, and cultural translation constitute and reiterate each other – and that the recognition of this should place proper attention on the work and the art involved in each.
Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese, 2017
Are classical Chinese and modern Chinese one language, or two? Is translating classical Chinese p... more Are classical Chinese and modern Chinese one language, or two? Is translating classical Chinese poetry the same as or different from translating modern Chinese poetry? I have earlier argued that modern Chinese poetry is in some ways a translation of premodern Chinese poetics through the filter of international poetics—but if this is the case, then should translation of classical and modern poetry into English be more similar than they are? Looking at Lydia Liu’s notion of the “supersign” alongside my experiences translating contemporary poets Ouyang Jianghe and Xi Chuan as well as Tang dynasty poet Li Shangyin, I discuss what I call “weak interpretations” and “strong interpretations” and how they play out in the translational alignment of classical and modern Chinese poetry with poetry in English today.
Genre, 2018
According to Rey Chow, the “inscrutable Chinese” is “the cross-ethnic stereotype par excellence.”... more According to Rey Chow, the “inscrutable Chinese” is “the cross-ethnic stereotype par excellence.” How does this stereotype play out in modern and contemporary American poetry’s tradition of representing China and Chinese literature? For poet and Asian American studies professor Timothy Yu, whose One Hundred Chinese Silences (2016) comprises parodic rewritings of poems that try to engage with the Chinese aesthetic, the representation of China in American poetry amounts to an “orientalist tradition” that “sees China as a source of unchanging aesthetic traits fixed in a remote past,” offering stereotypes of Asians as “silent, reticent, passive, yet also exotic, mysterious, objects of aesthetic contemplation.” But is Yu’s project not at the same time reinscribing a kind of Chinese inscrutability, presenting China as perennially unknowable in its critique of so many efforts to make Chinese culture known? Understanding translation through Judith Butler’s “performativity,” the article looks critically both at Yu’s poems and the texts he parodies, in particular those by Gary Snyder and Ezra Pound, in the context of works by John Ashbery, the Language poets, Jonathan Stalling, and Eliot Weinberger, to argue that Yu’s work represents a translation anxiety and pleads for more translations into English, including into American poetry.
Mo Yan's 2012 Nobel Prize for Literature quickly turned into the most controversial international... more Mo Yan's 2012 Nobel Prize for Literature quickly turned into the most controversial international literary prize of recent memory. The controversy took place largely in English, and largely on the American internet, where as much as Mo Yan was honored as being an important literary voice from a country whose contemporary cultural products are often neglected, he was criticized for supporting the Chinese Communist Party and its government. Defenders have pointed out that the politics in his fiction are neither as simple nor as straightforward as his party membership might otherwise indicate, but critics have said he writes a "daft hilarity" in a "diseased language," calling his works in translation "superior to the original in their aesthetic unity and sureness." Taking a detailed look at the controversy and debate, I examine the theoretical assumptions and stakes at work in the reading of Mo Yan and his Nobel, with attention to their ideological underpinnings, followed with a discussion on the importance of considering translation and the relationship between literary reading and politics. I close with a look toward a broadly applicable model of internationalist reading I call translational.
Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, 2018
Is Hong Kong poetry Chinese poetry, poetry in Chinese, Sinophone poetry, or something else? For t... more Is Hong Kong poetry Chinese poetry, poetry in Chinese, Sinophone poetry, or something else? For that matter, what is the relationship between Sinophone literature and Chinese literature? Scholars have often called on Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s notion of “minor literature” to explain, expand, and expound upon the concept of the Sinophone. But if the proper –phone of Hong Kong literature is not Mandarin but Cantonese, then D & G’s specification that a “minor literature doesn’t come from a minor language” but is instead what “a minority constructs within a major language” should both raise doubts about the applicability of the Sinophone designation to writing from Hong Kong and open up new possibilities for thinking about a Sinophone literature written by non-minority writers from mainland China. To that end, this paper reads the recent work of Hong Kong-based poet Cao Shuying 曹疏影 (b. 1979), a woman raised in Harbin who writes in Mandarin, and her husband, Liu Waitong (Liao Weitang) 廖偉棠 (b. 1975), who grew up in Zhuhai, writes in both Mandarin and Cantonese, and has gained prominence in Hong Kong as a cultural commentator and public intellectual. Looking in particular at Liu’s poem “Over the Counter-Revolution” 鳩嗚之詩, written in the aftermath of the 2014 Umbrella Movement, and Cao’s 2012 poem “Hong Kong” 香港 (from which the title of this paper is derived), it discusses how their engagements and positioning vis-à-vis the broader circles of Hong Kong and mainland poetry and their dialogues with the traditions of Chinese literature offer answers and visions for the Sinophone status of Hong Kong writing and the possibility of a minor mainland literature that could satisfy the Sinophone. The paper ends with a consideration of the Sinophone vis-à-vis another of Deleuze and Guattari’s influential concepts, the rhizome.
Reading China Against the Grain: Imagining Communities, 2020
A new literary history of Modern China, 2017
On underground poetry in 1970s China.
Metamorphoses: a journal of literary translation, 2018
Are Chinese steamed buns, or mantou 饅頭, "just bread"? What can we understand about translation an... more Are Chinese steamed buns, or mantou 饅頭, "just bread"? What can we understand about translation and its relationship to power by investigating this claim?
Chinese Poetic Modernisms, 2019
阅读诗歌以及中国诗歌也许能够帮助理解或解决现代主义和世界文学本身固有的矛盾。如果文学现代主义确如艾略特·温伯格所言，倾向于发现从前未予关注的作品，并以“国际风格”无明显地域性的普遍主义为显著特征... more 阅读诗歌以及中国诗歌也许能够帮助理解或解决现代主义和世界文学本身固有的矛盾。如果文学现代主义确如艾略特·温伯格所言，倾向于发现从前未予关注的作品，并以“国际风格”无明显地域性的普遍主义为显著特征，那么用非西方语言创作的所谓现代主义诗歌并非代表着在西方文化逻辑驱动下对地方文化的消除，而是代表着当地文化重新发掘各自自我的过去以应对西方伦理及美学。２０世纪８０年代，中国当代诗人西川以“后朦胧”抒情诗人姿态步入诗坛，后来发展到以散文诗形式持续探究古文化奥秘。通过细读西川诗文，可以探索现代主义确定性特征的方方面面，并将它们彼此联系；可考查在文学研究、尤其中国现代文学研究中占主导地位的世界文学理论流派；最后，将西川诗与中西美学的双重关系为参照，可探究翻译其诗的特别之处。
World Literature Today, May 2014
Burton Watson has proven himself one of the best translators of classical Asian literature. Throu... more Burton Watson has proven himself one of the best translators of classical Asian literature. Through background information about Watson's life and close reading of his poetry translations, the following essay highlights the intricacies of his artistry and demonstrates the genius of his translations in reconciling the perceived rift between poetry and scholarship.
Sign Language Studies, 2009
This essay was practically finished by the late Ernest Fenollosa; I have done little more than re... more This essay was practically finished by the late Ernest Fenollosa; I have done little more than remove a few repetitions and shape a few sentences. We have here not a bare philological discussion, but a study of the fundamentals of all esthetics. In his search through unknown art Fenollosa, coming upon unknown motives and principles unrecognized in the West, was already led into many modes of thought since fruitful in "new" western painting and poetry. He was a forerunner without knowing it and without being known as such. He discerned principles of writing which he had scarcely time to put into practice. In Japan he restored, or greatly helped to restore, a respect for the native art. In America and Europe he cannot be looked upon as a mere searcher after exotics. His mind was constantly filled with parallels and comparisons between eastern and western art. To him the exotic was always a means of fructification. He looked to an American renaissance. The vitality of his outlook can be judged from the fact that although this essay was written some time before his death in 1908 I have not had to change the allusions to western conditions. The later movements in art have corroborated his theories.-Ezra Pound. ] This twentieth century not only turns a new page in the book of the world, but opens another and a startling chapter. Vistas of strange futures unfold for man, of world-embracing cultures half weaned from Europe, of hitherto undreamed responsibilities for nations and races. The Chinese problem alone is so vast that no nation can afford to ignore it. We in America, especially, must face it across the Pacific, and master it or it will master us. And the only way to master it is to strive with patient sympathy to understand the best, the most hopeful and the most human elements in it. It is unfortunate that England and America have so long ignored or mistaken the deeper problems of Oriental culture. We have misconceived the Chinese for a materialistic people, for a debased and worn-out race. We have belittled the
Chinese Poetry and Translation: Rights and Wrongs offers fifteen essays on the triptych of poetry... more Chinese Poetry and Translation: Rights and Wrongs offers fifteen essays on the triptych of poetry + translation + Chinese. The collection has three parts: "The Translator's Take," "Theoretics," and "Impact." The conversation stretches from queer-feminist engagement with China's newest poetry to philosophical and philological reflections on its oldest, and from Tang- and Song-dynasty classical poetry in Western languages to Baudelaire and Celan in Chinese. Translation is taken as an interlingual and intercultural act, and the essays foreground theoretical expositions and the practice of translation in equal but not opposite measure. Poetry has a transforming yet ever-acute relevance in Chinese culture, and this makes it a good entry point for studying Chinese-foreign encounters. Pushing past oppositions that still too often restrict discussions of translation-form versus content, elegance versus accuracy, and "the original" versus "...
What makes a Chinese poem “Chinese”? Some call modern Chinese poetry insufficiently Chinese, say... more What makes a Chinese poem “Chinese”? Some call modern Chinese poetry insufficiently Chinese, saying it is so influenced by foreign texts that it has lost the essence of Chinese culture as known in premodern poetry. Yet that argument overlooks how premodern regulated verse was itself created in imitation of foreign poetics. Looking at Bian Zhilin and Yang Lian in the twentieth century alongside medieval Chinese poets such as Wang Wei, Du Fu, and Li Shangyin, The Organization of Distance applies the notions of foreignization and nativization to Chinese poetry to argue that the impression of poetic Chineseness has long been a product of translation, from forces both abroad and in the past.
Selected poems of Li Shangyin (c. 813–858), edited and newly translated from the Chinese by Chloe... more Selected poems of Li Shangyin (c. 813–858), edited and newly translated from the Chinese by Chloe Garcia Roberts, with additional translations by A.C. Graham and Lucas Klein
The selected poems of Mang Ke 芒克
Anthology plus twenty-four volume set
A special issue of the Journal of Oriental Studies
Edited by Gilbert C. F. Fong, Shelby K. Y. Chan, Lucas Klein, Bei Dao, Christopher Mattison, and ... more Edited by Gilbert C. F. Fong, Shelby K. Y. Chan, Lucas Klein, Bei Dao, Christopher Mattison, and Chris Song, the Poetry and Conflict twenty-two volume box set is an extended edition of the single-volume anthology. Included are twenty-two pocket-sized paperbacks and a complimentary USB (incl. video clips and photos of the previous IPNHK) encased in a fine paper box, containing works by each of the poets included in the anthology, accompanied by English and/or Chinese translations. This collection seeks to make accessible the best of contemporary international poetry with outstanding translations. Each of the twenty-two volumes can be purchased separately.
Edited by Bei Dao, Shelby Chan, Gilbert Fong, Lucas Klein, and Christopher Mattison, Islands or ... more Edited by Bei Dao, Shelby Chan, Gilbert Fong, Lucas Klein, and Christopher Mattison, Islands or Continents 島嶼或大陸 box set is an extended edition of the single-volume Islands or Continents. It comprises eighteen pocket off-prints encased in a fine paper box, each containing more selected works by one of the internationally renowned poets included in the single volume, accompanied by English and/or Chinese translations. The goal of Islands or Continents collection is to disseminate and make accessible the best of contemporary international poetry through high quality translations by outstanding translators.
Translation and Literature
CLEAR, 2020
folksong "Froggy Went A-Courtin'" popular when I was a child in the US) probably matched with enj... more folksong "Froggy Went A-Courtin'" popular when I was a child in the US) probably matched with enjoyable tunes as well; certainly their rhythms would be fun. Idema's translations here are like Idema's translations in his many other publications in English. They are clear, but beyond some incorporation of slang and vulgar language when it directly reflects the original, there is little visible attempt to translate different styles into different styles. If it were not for his introductions, the reader could only distinguish prose from poetry by the hard returns at the ends of lines of verse. The stories here are his focus, and in presenting them in a form that encourages comparative study with the folklore of other cultures, Wilt Idema has provided another signal service. Moreover, Idema's "Epilogue: Some Comparative Perspectives" (pp. 285-94) provides valuable clues about productive places to start with this research. As we might expect, the notes and bibliography here are copious, of tremendous help in pursuing these insect tales farther.
Translation Studies, 2020
Journal of Oriental Studies, 2020
Prism: Theory and Modern Chinese Literature, 2021
A review of the book by Jacob Edmond
Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews (CLEAR), Dec 2014
CLEAR, 2018
Prose poetry" sounds like an oxymoron-what is it, and what are its denotations and connotations? ... more Prose poetry" sounds like an oxymoron-what is it, and what are its denotations and connotations? Are they any different in the Chinese context, where it is known as sanwenshi 散 文诗? These are the stakes of Nick Admussen's new monograph, which argues that Chinese prose poems "recite and reproduce their raw materials … not only to produce an independent piece of art that contains its own history, but to comment on and transform our understanding of prose" (1). Appropriately, Admussen's definition of the prose poem in China both recites and refuses certain aspects of the genre or subgenre as known in other languages.
Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews, Dec 2013
syntactically complex, and because his prose work moves between intricate intertextuality and ton... more syntactically complex, and because his prose work moves between intricate intertextuality and tonally layered vernacular, a bold attempt to render the feeling of a poem into English is almost always preferable to the uninterpretability of a literal translation. For every ambitious misstep - at one point the set expression 改朝换代 is translated as "regime change" (p. 195) - there is an inspired, creative rendition of the Chinese that allows a poem to exist in English. The simplest example of this is the translation of "小老儿" as "Yours Truly" in the poem of the same title (pp. 115---123). The two phrases are different, and there is no clear lexical rationale for representing one with the other, but the English poem that results from Klein'ʹs choice of translation builds on the multiple valences of its title in a way that is both powerful and powerfully similar to the original Chinese.
Twentieth Century Literature, Jan 1, 2006
Pacific Affairs, Jan 1, 2011
Page 1. Voices in Revolution POETRY and the AUDITORY IMAGINATION in MODERN CHINA john a. crespi P... more Page 1. Voices in Revolution POETRY and the AUDITORY IMAGINATION in MODERN CHINA john a. crespi Page 2. Voices in Revolution Page 3. Voices in Page 4. Revolution Poetry and the Auditory Imagination in Modern China ...
commissioned by Canadian Review of Comparative Literature; publication never confirmed
Rikucho KANTAISHI ho reformed this . In his hands prose was recovered after the decadence of 8 dy... more Rikucho KANTAISHI ho reformed this . In his hands prose was recovered after the decadence of 8 dynasties (Kan, Gi, Rikucho ). For this merit he was called the great master of literature in later ages.
Chinese Literature Today, 2019
These four poems by Mi Jialu show a personal contemplation on the torturous human condition infli... more These four poems by Mi Jialu show a personal contemplation on the torturous human condition inflicted by historical traumas, environmental crisis, and diasporic alienation. Through a gaze of a surreal lens, the poet seeks to express the inexpressible haunted by memory, dreams, and ghosts. With a more psychological quest, the poet embarks on a journey into the heart of darkness for self-redemption and spiritual illumination.
Chinese Literature Today
From the mind of the Newman Prize laureate Han Shaogong comes the tale of a relationship between ... more From the mind of the Newman Prize laureate Han Shaogong comes the tale of a relationship between a virtuoso peasant musician, Old Yin, who is from the rural settlement of Bianshan Cavern, and the county's orchestra conductor, Mr. Liu, who cannot believe what he hears. Could the extraordinary music Yin composes possibly be his own? Who is this Old Yin? Could he be a living master?
Metamorphoses: a journal of literary translation, 2018
"On Fan Kuan’s Great Mountain Scroll Travelers among Mountains and Streams" and "Once More on Fa... more "On Fan Kuan’s Great Mountain Scroll Travelers among Mountains and Streams" and "Once More on Fan Kuan’s Travelers among Mountains and Streams"
Manoa, Jan 1, 2003
... after them. I finally fell to the ground, face up, my blood crawling in all directions. My bl... more ... after them. I finally fell to the ground, face up, my blood crawling in all directions. My blood was like the roots of a hundred-year-old tree bulging out of the ground. I was dead. Translation by Lucas Klein Yu . Death Narrative 167
Manoa, Jan 1, 2003
At noon on 26 July, my colleague Pei Zhong gave me a call. He says that "thing"... more At noon on 26 July, my colleague Pei Zhong gave me a call. He says that "thing" I'd asked his help about was beginning to display some attractive features. Three o'clock this afternoon, Purple Bamboo Park. I had never asked him to do anything, but this was how he liked to talk. ...
Journal of Translation Studies, 2019
Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews, Dec 2013