These are great pieces -- but I feel like work like this could be in an even better spot, with a better readership. Xi Chuan's already been in the Boston Review (circ 40,000), the Drunken Boat, AGNI, other places...I think poems like these should get sent to literary magazines, esp. big ones, rather than blogs (although there's nothing wrong with blogs). Many literary magazines will put the stuff online anyway (especially if you ask).

Maybe there's a specific reason that these appeared here, but pieces like these should go big first, somewhere like the New England Review or better [for example on the out-of-date journal ranking here

I guess what I'm saying is, these are good poems!

Sully, June 12, 2011, 5:12p.m.

thanks, Sully--glad you really liked the poems! Still, I wouldn't underestimate reach of blogs in general or of Poems and Poetics in particular; Jerome Rothenberg is a very important figure in the history of contemporary American poetry, for those who know.

But I've got a lot of Xi Chuan translations I've been sending out--a nearly completed manuscript of his Selected Poems, covering his entire career--so you shouldn't worry that these will get lost. My XC translations have appeared in Two Lines and Chinese Literature Today, been written about in The Believer, and are forthcoming at Cerise, Cha, Alligatorzine, Tinfish, Xcp: Cross Cultural Poetics, and more. And then of course the book will come out...

As for the more mainstream journals, my bias is that their aesthetics and Xi Chuan's don't generally fit, or if they do, it's because they tend to ghettoize the writing that's interesting and inventive in their "translation" section. Anyway, that's how things used to be at The New England Review or Poetry (both places I interned when I was younger, coincidentally...). Maybe they've changed? It's worth a look.

Thanks!

Lucas

Lucas Klein, June 13, 2011, 5:03a.m.

by the way... correct me if I'm wrong, but Xi Chuan's appearances at Agni were as a co-translator of two Bei Ling 貝嶺 poems with Willis and Tony Barnstone. At least, that's what this site suggests.

Lucas

Lucas Klein, June 13, 2011, 9:30a.m.

You're right about AGNI. I didn't mean to get personal -- I didn't know that you as the translator/submitter posted this news article yourself, since it wasn't signed, and I'm not trying to get critical about your decision-making in re: submission. Submission is a trial no matter what, and poems end up where they do, and the akashic record is the akashic record -- good work finds its readership on its own, and this is good work.

I do think, though, that the translation-section 'ghetto' of bigger circulation magazines should make up a part of this artist's profile in the US (and your translation submissions). Some of us intentionally turn right to the translation section when we get the NER or Poetry -- even if the internal politics of those places are less than ideal.

And there are plenty of places that don't do the ghettoizing you speak of -- from memory (might be wrong!) the Paris Review, the Atlantic, Boston Review, and more experimental places like Jacket, Fence, A Public Space...can't remember. But not everyone spits on translation, and at least in my opinion the poetry "mainstream" isn't that mainstream at all -- it more or less runs on novelty and experiment.

Plus, pretty pretty typesetting!

Sully, June 13, 2011, 8:47p.m.

Hi, Sully--I didn't take it as personal criticism. Actually, I think the question of journal publication is an important aspect of larger considerations of translation, because we're not only talking about what we're translating from, but what we're translating into. How to represent something from another language must, at some point, consider where we're doing the representing.

Anyway, one of the obstacles to publishing in more mainstream print journals is that we don't get many of them here in Hongkong, so it's hard to keep up to date on what's happening where. It's not fair to me, to Xi Chuan, or the editors for me to submit translations to a journal that isn't a good fit.

Lucas

Lucas Klein, June 14, 2011, 4:13a.m.

Hm, that is a pickle. Some mainstream -- doesn't even flow past Hong Kong!

Sully, June 16, 2011, 12:43a.m.

Well put. Indeed, one of my problems with the so-called "mainstream" is that it's only so-called.

Lucas

Lucas Klein, June 16, 2011, 6:55a.m.