Chinese Poetry and Translation

Maghiel van Crevel is professor of Chinese language and literature at Leiden University. A specialist of contemporary poetry, he has published a dozen books in English, Dutch, and Chinese, including scholarly monographs and edited volumes, literary translations, and language textbooks. Lucas Klein is a father, writer, and translator, as well as associate professor in the School of Chinese at the University of Hong Kong. His monograph The Organization of Distance: Poetry, Translation, Chineseness was published by Brill in 2018.

Together the essays in Chinese Poetry and Translation give voice to a wonderful group of poets, scholars, and translators, many of whom wear multiple hats. It is a good introduction to the range of issues, from equivalence to local/national identity, central to studies of poetry in cross-cultural contexts. The main currents and counter-currents weaving across the essays mirror the debates and contentions that have constantly flared up over the translation of poetry into and out of China. Poetry may be a marginalized cultural terrain that (in van Crevel's words) 'no one cares about' in today's world, but this promises great freedom and agency, and it remains an embodiment of pure spiritual value that for this very reason touches closely on power and politics.- Wen Jin, East China Normal University, Shanghai, Translation and Literature, 30.3 (2021), This is a very rich collection of essays showcasing a range of approaches to the study and practice of Chinese poetry translation. [...] In addition to the valuable research presented in most of the chapters, this book should also be highly useful for teaching about Chinese poetry, and for getting students to think about what it means to translate, or to read in translation.- Michel Hockx, Liu Institute for Asia and Asian Studies, Modern Chinese Literature and Culture (2021), The fascinating, diverse essays in this collection shed new light on the complexities of Chinese poetry and translation. They are both entertaining and erudite, a rare combination.- Susan Bassnett, University of Warwick and University of Glasgow,Ambitious in scope and delightful to read, this book perceptively traces the dynamic, multi-directional interchange between languages and cultures that allows us to become visible and legible to one another.- Géraldine Fiss, University of Southern California.

• Acknowledgments, Contributors, Introduction: The Weird Third Thing Maghiel van Crevel and Lucas Klein Conventions Part One: The Translator's Take 1. Sitting with Discomfort: A Queer-Feminist Approach to Translating Yu Xiuhua Jenn Marie Nunes 2. Working with Words: Poetry, Translation, and Labor Eleanor Goodman 3. Translating Great Distances: The Case of the Shijing Joseph R. Allen 4. Purpose and Form: On the Translation of Classical Chinese Poetry Wilt L. Idema Part Two: Theoretics 5. Embodiment in the Translation of Chinese Poetry Nick Admussen 6. Translating Theory: Bei Dao, Pasternak, and Russian Formalism Jacob Edmond 7. Narrativity in Lyric Translation: English Translation of Chinese Ci Poetry Zhou Min 8. Sublimating Sorrow: How to Embrace Contradiction in Translating the Li Sao Nicholas Morrow Williams 9. Mediation Is Our Authenticity: Dagong Poetry and the Shijing in Translation Lucas Klein Part Three: Impact 10. Ecofeminism avant la lettre: Chen Jingrong and Baudelaire Liansu Meng 11. The Trope of Life and the Translation of Western Modernist Poetry in Hong Kong Chris Song 12. Lyrical Montage: Modernist Poetry in Taiwan through the Lens of Translation Tara Coleman 13. Celan's Deathfugue in Chinese: A Polemic about Translation and Everything Else Joanna Krenz 14. Trauma in Translation: Liao Yiwu's Massacre in English and German Rui Kunze 15. A Noble Art, and a Tricky Business: Translation Anthologies of Chinese Poetry Maghiel van Crevel.