Lucas Klein

Assistant Professor

Hongkong

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Lucas Klein--a former radio DJ and union organizer--is a writer, translator, and editor of CipherJournal.com. His translations, essays, and poems have appeared or are forthcoming at Two Lines, Jacket, and Drunken Boat, and he has regularly reviewed books for Rain Taxi and other venues. A graduate of Middlebury College (BA) and Yale University (PhD), he is Assistant Professor in the dept. of Chinese, Translation & Linguistics at City University of Hong Kong. Endure, a small collection of Bei Dao 北島 poems translated with Clayton Eshleman, is now out from Black Widow Press, and his translation of the Selected Poems of Xi Chuan 西川 is forthcoming. He is also at work translating Tang dynasty poet Li Shangyin 李商隱.

 
 

May 2009

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Tibet's True Heart

In a comment to my post on May 4th & Chinese Literature in Translation, talking about disparities in how different genres of Chinese literature are represented in English, I wrote:

find me one English translation of a single-author collection of poems by a poet living in China.

I was thinking that someone might mention books by Taiwanese poets Shang Qin 商禽 or Hsia Yu 夏宇, both translated by Steven Bradbury (and published by Zephyr Press, a great small press with a large repertoire of translations from the Chinese). And I knew of other works in progress of mainland authors, still awaiting publication.

But I didn't expect that another answer would come from Tibet. This morning I opened my mailbox and found a package sent by A. E. Clark, with a book of his translations of Tibetan-Chinese poet Woeser, Tibet's True Heart, published by Ragged Banner Press.

Woeser writes in Chinese and now lives in Beijing, but her writing is infused with the complexities of her Tibetan cultural background. I haven't yet read Tibet's True Heart, but I look forward to reading Andrew Clark's English versions of her poems.

Sample poems and more recent writing of Woeser can be found on the Ragged Banner website.

By Lucas Klein, May 18, 10:33p.m.

5 comments

May 4th & Chinese Literature in Translation

To commemorate the 90th anniversary of the May Fourth Movement, the South China Morning Post runs an article investigating

Left on the Shelf: Ninety years after the May 4 movement spawned a host of Chinese literary giants, Ben Blanchard examines why mainland writers remain largely unread internationally

As a tribute to the May Fourth Movement goes, it's no last-year's Sunday New York Times Book Review, featuring four new translations of Chinese literature, but then again, May Fourth doesn't fall on a Sunday this year.

What the South China Morning Post article does raise, implicitly at least, is the question of World Literature and its relationship to Chinese literature.

More…

By Lucas Klein, May 4, 5:04p.m.

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