Lucas Klein

contact

Lucas Klein is a union organizer and editor of CipherJournal.com, the online journal of creative translation. His translation interests are primarily in Chinese poetry, both contemporary & pre-modern, and he is currently translating the work of Xi Chuan 西川, work from which was selected for the inaugural Online Translation Slam of the PEN American Center.

After living in Beijing and Paris, he has spent the last five years in Connecticut, where he slouches towards a PhD in Chinese Literature at Yale. His dissertation is on understanding translation as a way to read Chinese poets in the 20th century & the Tang Dynasty, with chapters on Bian Zhilin 卞之琳, Yang Lian 楊煉, Du Fu 杜甫, and Li Shangyin 李商隱.

His translations, essays, and poems have appeared or are forthcoming at CipherJournal, Jacket, Drunken Boat, Frank, Manoa, and Big Bridge, and he regularly reviews books for Rain Taxi and other venues.

 
 

May 2009

all posts

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.

6 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.

21 comments