顏峻詩歌譯文等等 Yan Jun’s poetry

This Moment (live video)

Yan Jun at Poetry International Festival

Some translations of Yan Jun’s poetry into English, French, Dutch and German

Bones (2002)

February and June (2007)

February 17 (2006)

July 19th (2006)

Charter 09 – Yan Jun

Charter-Sonnet
(electric guitar, small marshall-speakers, voice recitation)

I demand to abolish the automatic ticket-control on the subway, and insist on ticket control by hand till the end of time;

I demand the election of the president of the USA by all mankind;

I demand measures for stricter birth control: encourage homosexual marriages and discourage heterosexual marriages with fines;

I demand an amendment to the constitution: abolish all commas, colons and semicolons;

I demand to get rid of Mahjong and KTV bars, to arrest everyone who walks their dog at five in the morning, and to install regular poetry readings at police stations;

I demand the abolition of art, and a change of life;

I demand to pour salt into wounds, and poison drinks, and a cold butt stuck into every excited face;
I demand to construct two enormous speakers in the green hills at the bank of a stream and hold a concert of noise without any audience;
I demand that you and I stay together, forever, and never to part;

I demand to remember, these black blossoms, and the glittering stars above the bicycle change into a few young faces;

I demand to reprieve the locked-up words, to reprieve “your mother’s cunt”, and also “President Jiang Zemin”;

I demand to demand, to forbid what’s forbidden, abolish abolishing, to ridicule satire, and have those who have nothing to do and just pour out their heart at you tied up and gagged;

I demand to break into song at the entrance of hell, and to sleep on the bus;

I demand to break the silence, to keep the peace…

Tr. MW, July/August 2010

Thanks to Marc Hermann, who translated this poem into German!

On his blog, Yan Jun provides the following comment: „About politics, as in At this Moment (Ci ke), in Charter Sonnet and in Against all organized deception (Fandui yiqie you zuzhi de qipian): I regard these poems as political action, not as political poems. Either all poetry is political poetry, or there are no political poems. Because poetry per se is already a form of political action. I have no crying politics, to make people high, no politics for a statue.“ (from the author’s comment to Ci Ke).

What is “a cold butt stuck into every exited face”? To stick a cold buttock into an excited face, or cold buttocks into flushed faces (zai re lian shang tie leng pigu) is a contemporary Chinese expression, meaning to cold-shoulder someone. So maybe I should have used ‘cold shoulder’ instead of ‘cold butt’. This is what Marc Hermann did in his German translation. The verse with this ‘cold butt’ in the original and the ‘cold shoulder’ in the German translation on subway billboards and other places for public advertisements in Germany was noticed also by Chinese readers.

5条回应 to “顏峻詩歌譯文等等 Yan Jun’s poetry”

  1. Poetry and music « 中国大好き Says:
    3月 16, 2012 7:39 下午 | 回复

    […] Yan Jun (Lanzhou/ Beijing) has become well known since 2003, both for his sound projects and for his poems. Yan Jun wrote about parts of the music scene in China in 2010. His article is collected in the book Culturescapes China (Basel 2010), with other representative texts on recent music and literature. […]

    赞

  2. Wienzeile 62: 橫穿長城的頭顱 – Mit dem Kopf durch die Chinesische Mauer « 中国大好き Says:
    5月 9, 2012 8:53 下午 | 回复

    […] Venster 99 in Wien mit einer Multimedia-Lesung präsentiert (siehe Plakat). Der Dichter und Musiker Yan Jun 顏峻 tritt live auf. Die Zeitschrift ist bei der Redaktion, im Sekretariat der Abteilung Sinologie des […]

    赞

  3. Ingrid Fischer-Schreiber » Blog Archive » Mit dem Kopf durch die chinesische Mauer Says:
    5月 10, 2012 4:42 下午 | 回复

    […] 99 in Wien mit einer Multimedia-Lesung präsentiert (siehe Plakat). Der Dichter und Musiker Yan Jun 顏峻 tritt live auf. Schlagwörter:China, Internet, Social Media, Translation Kommentar (RSS) […]

    赞

  4. Yan Jun: July 19th, I 颜峻：7月19日，我 « 中国大好き Says:
    8月 9, 2012 5:05 下午 | 回复

    […] 7月19日，我 Yan Jun July 19th, […]

    赞

  5. Flying over the sea, quietly « 中国大好き Says:
    9月 7, 2012 3:16 下午 | 回复

    […] Yan Jun February 17 […]

    赞

留下评论

这个站点使用 Akismet 来减少垃圾评论。了解你的评论数据如何被处理。