中国大好き

再说中国新诗 300 首 （中英对照）
Lucas Klein, translator of Xi Chuan 西川, has commented on 野鬼’s new anthology of 300 Modern and Contemporary Chinese Poems (Chinese-English) 中国新诗 300 首 （中英对照）. Lucas Klein’s blog is called Notes on the Mosquito, like his new Xi Chuan translations compilation. Notes on the Mosquito as a title reminds me of Bei Dao’s 北岛 Harvest 收获, don’t know if that is intended.

There is Zhang Xinying’s 张新颖 fine anthology 中國新詩 from 2000 (in Chinese), incl. 2 interesting poems by Zhou Zuoren 周作人. Zhang has close to 100 poets and up to 10 poems from each of them. If you cover the last 30 or 40 years, it would have to be rather thick to include at least ten or twenty examples each from 食指、芒克、多多、楊煉、于堅、韓東、西川、伊沙等等，to mention only a few older living males.

My favorite contemporary anthology is 黃梁’s 大陸先鋒詩叢. 10 volumes came out in 1998/1999 – Bai Hua 柏华、Zhu Wen 朱文、Meng Lang 孟浪 etc. 等等. Another 10 came out in 2009, incl. Tibet’s poetess and dissident blogger Woeser 唯色, migrant worker poetess Zheng Xiaoqiong 郑小琼（鄭小瓊）, and a few more not-so-well-known poets like Pang Pei 庞培（born 1962).

The new 300-poems-anthology is Chinese-English, but it seems the English versions will all be done by Chinese translators. Some translators could be native speakers of English, and/or writing poetry in English. But it does look like an inner-Chinese project, so to speak. The Chinese Issue of The Drunken Boat from 2006 provides a very broad spectrum in the categories minorities, gender and localities in Asia and beyond. Xi Chuan is prominently featured. The 2008 China issue of The Atlantic Review also has an interesting mixture and beautiful poems, incl. Xi Chuan. But these two anthologies are all in English. In my earlier blog post on this topic of anthologies I have written about the advantages of starting from women writers and minorities. That was in Chinese, sorry.

Huang Liang is operating in Taiwan, but he still had some trouble with Mainland authorities about meeting and publishing Woeser 唯色. The 300 modern poems anthology includes the blind folk singer Zhou Yunpeng 周云蓬, who is also in the 10/19/12 New Statesman issue curated by Ai Weiwei, along with Zuoxiao Zuzhou 左小祖咒. On the other hand, compiler Diablo 野鬼 （Zhao Siyun 赵思云 is not the editor) told me they could never include Li Qin’an’s 李勤安 When Martial Law Was Lifted 解嚴以後, because with books you have to worry much more about (self-)censorship than online. I think When Martial Law Was Lifted 解嚴以後 is a landmark poem in any sense. I like Xi Chuan’s poetry very much, but on the whole now and then it needs to be complemented with something more explicitly political. Actually you could say the same about Hsia Yu 夏宇, maybe. Anyway, Li Qin’an 李勤安 still sounds relevant in Taiwan today, according to some of my friends there. On the Mainland, the role(s) of poetry are more acutely questioned, also by Zhao Siyun 赵思云 and Diablo 野鬼 (Zhang Zhi 张智), for example. See Diablo 野鬼’s “非诗” and Zhao Siyun’s Lili’s Story 丽丽传.

标签： censorship, china, literature, poetry, taiwan, tradition, translation

This entry was posted on 11月 15, 2012 at 8:07 下午 and is filed under November 2012, October 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.