MCLC: dual translation, world lit, poetry diss review

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: Lucas Klein <LRKlein at cityu.edu.hk>
Subject: dual Translation, world lit, poetry diss review
****************************************************************

Source: Dissertation Reviews: http://dissertationreviews.org/archives/2610

A review of Foreign Echoes and Discerning the Soil: Dual Translation,
Historiography, and World Literature in Chinese Poetry, by Lucas Klein.

Lucas Klein’s dissertation, Foreign Echoes and Discerning the Soil: Dual
Translation, Historiography, and World Literature in Chinese Poetry, is
notable both for its ambition and its erudition. In seeking to answer how
the “Chineseness” of Chinese poetry, its quality of being or seeming
natively Chinese, is produced in and through acts of translation, Klein
not only tackles Modernist-inspired poetry from the twentieth century,
where “Chineseness” is a salient issue, but also the monolith of the
Chinese literary tradition itself, including such ultra-canonical figures
as Wang Wei 王維 (692-761) and Du Fu 杜甫 (712-770). In practical terms,
this 
impressive breadth of scope results in a dissertation in two parts: the
first featuring studies of modern poet Bian Zhilin 卞之琳 (1910-2000) and
contemporary poet Yang Lian 楊煉 (b. 1955), and the second reaching back to
Tang Dynasty masters Wang Wei, Du Fu, and Li Shangyin 李商隱 (813-858). By
avoiding the urge to arrange his chapters chronologically ― or, at least,
by putting the modern before the pre-modern ― Klein refuses to allow
“traditional China” or its poetic stand-in, Tang regulated verse, their
place as the seat of pure Chineseness, untarnished by contact with the
modern West; in fact, one of his goals is to situate the Tang Dynasty back
into a global network of cultural interaction and exchange. The
arrangement of chapters further serves to illustrate Klein’s methodology,
which is to allow the insights of deconstruction, Marxist thought,
translation studies, and contemporary avant-garde poetics to illuminate
the distant past ― and vice-versa. Klein’s dissertation serves the larger
goal of deconstructing the binaries tradition/modernity, native/foreign,
textual analysis/high theory, and, most centrally, original/translation.

Klein’s introductory first chapter, entitled “Qu’est-ce qu’un Sinologue?”
(in reference to Michel Foucault’s “What is an Author?”) and subtitled
“The Landscapes of World Literature & Chinese Poetry at Degree Zero,”
places the study of Chinese literature, both modern and pre-modern, within
the field of World Literature, through a discussion of Stephen Owen’s
“What is World Poetry?” Owen’s scholarly presence ― as authority, as
inspiration, as foil ― pervades the dissertation, in particular this
provocative 1990 article in response to Bonnie McDougall’s translations of
Bei Dao 北島 (b. 1949). Partly, Klein wishes to take issue with the habitual
deprecation of translation that Owen’s article may exemplify, as it
suggests that “translation is damned with the original sin of not being
original poetry” (p. 17); partly, he wishes to take an opportunity to
accept that many of Owen’s criticisms of modern Chinese poetry are valid,
and that any discussion of Chinese poetry in the present moment must
contend with arguments against globalization as well as in favor of
cosmopolitanism. Klein compares world literature, as a phenomenon of
globalization, to the economic globalization enacted by capitalism, and he
wonders if bourgeois Romanticism has had the same assimilating effect on
national literatures as bourgeois capitalism has had on markets. However,
Klein is not willing to write off Bei Dao as merely the symptom of
globalized bourgeois culture, suggesting rather that we see Bei Dao and
his “Obscure” (menglong 朦朧, elsewhere translated “Misty”) contemporaries
in the line of Roland Barthes’s “neutral,” as a disengagement from the
overly-politicized discourse of the Cultural Revolution period. By
exploring the many-layered problem of Bei Dao’s poetry (and the
“translation style” [fanyi wenti 翻譯文體] he advocated), McDougall’s
translations of Bei Dao into English, Owen’s review of those translations,
and the cavalcade of responses to Owen, Klein sets the stage for his
discussions of Chinese poetry as World Literature, and Chineseness as
constructed through acts of translation.

Klein’s first body chapter, entitled “Discerning the Soil: Bian Zhilin,
Dual Translation, and the Politics of Writing and Reading World
Literature,” addresses “dual translation” in Bian Zhilin’s poetry (along
both the vertical axis, pre-modern to modern, and the horizontal axis,
foreign to native). Bian’s poetics, for Klein, allow “Chineseness to be
included in, without being essentialized by, World Literature” (p. 53).
This characterization stands in contradistinction to two less favorable
models of world literature, embodied by poets associated with Bian: Xu
Zhimo 徐志摩 (1897-1931), whose poetry subsumes its Chineseness beneath
various exotic foreignizations (for instance, allusions that only fluent
speakers of English could understand), and Wen Yiduo 聞一多 (1899-1946),
whose formalist poetics required a strict division of the native past from
the international, but Western-led, future. Bian’s poetics employ multiple
acts of displacement exemplified by his translation of T. S. Eliot’s
“Tradition and the Individual Talent,” where the terms past, present,
native, and foreign become seriously jumbled through transposition into
Chinese. Bian’s configuration of world literature “demand[s] and creat[es]
a space for China’s pre-modern literary heritage within that
configuration. Particularly, Bian achieves this through translation, and
through linking translation of the foreign with translation of the native
past” (p. 104).

In Chapter 2, “Believing in the Brush: Yang Lian and the Translated
Poetics of Ethnography,” Klein turns to contemporary poet Yang Lian in
order to discuss ethnography, or the written representation of cultures,
in terms of translation. When Yang, a poet very concerned with China’s
mythological past, makes essentializing claims about the Chinese language,
such as that characters cannot fit into Western notions of “grammar,”
Klein asks “is he noting an essential difference (or différance?) between
languages, or is he essentializing one upon the expectations established
by the other?” (p. 125). What happens when a Chinese poet’s view of his
own language is shaped by notorious mis-representers like Ezra Pound and
Jacques Derrida? Can Yang escape the criticism leveled at him by another
poet, that his “isn’t the China of Chinese people, it’s the China of
Westerners” (p. 125)? Like many of the other figures Klein discusses in
this dissertation, Yang negotiates between two seemingly opposite forces,
one nativizing (the literary movement known as “Roots Seeking” xungen 尋根)
and one foreignizing (“Obscure” poetry, frequently criticized for its
foreign influences). In digging for the distant origins of Chinese
culture, Yang’s archaeological poetry often turns up China’s others, such
as the culture of ancient Chu 楚, which challenge and undermine that
originary Chineseness even as they are incorporated back into it. “By
standing between the familiar and the strange,” Klein concludes, “Yang
Lian writes poetry that is equally nativizing and foreignizing, resulting
in a poetry that enacts a World Literature by thwarting it, by calling
forth the questions about writing and speaking, and by writing about
cultures familiar and strange to audiences always in translation” (p. 191).


The second part of Klein’s dissertation is even more ambitious, as it is
where he repositions that most “Chinese” of literary forms ― Tang
regulated verse ― as itself a translation. In Chapter 3, entitled “Echoes
of Sanskrit: Reading Regulated Verse as Translation, & the Śunyatā of
Form,” he asks how “the forms and content matter of one national
literature [have] been affected by other literatures, and [how] that
national literature has represented its foreign others” (p. 196). Klein
admits that the ideas of globalization and world literature are more
comfortably discussed with respect to the modern period, but that
introducing them into a discussion of Tang China may help us discuss “the
construction of Chineseness and the relationship between poetic form and
content” (p. 197). Klein’s discussion of the Regulated Verse form (lüshi 律詩
 or jintishi 近體詩) as a translated form ― “not translation in the narrow
sense of the word,” but a form whose “matrix of associations with
foreignness and translingual practice [was] manifested in prosody, in its
response to commercialism, and in its underlying Buddhism” (p. 243) ―
leads him to examine the prosodic form itself as an expression of Buddhist
content in the context of its period of origin and flourishing, from the
Six Dynasties through the High Tang. In order to argue for regulated verse
poetry as a translated, foreign, and specifically Indian-Buddhist form
within the context of Middle Period China, Klein discusses the origins of
the poetic form, starting from the prosodic prescriptions of poet and
Buddhist devotee Shen Yue 沈約 (441-513), which led to the categorization of
Chinese syllables into the four tones of Middle Chinese. More intriguing,
Klein explores the Palace Style poetry of the Liang Dynasty, in particular
the “Odes on Objects” (yongwu 永物) subgenre, which “demonstrates the power
that an object holds over its user, who in turn believes that his object
is ultimately nonexistent, that form is emptiness” (p. 228). Klein’s
ingenuity is to treat the “form” of the poem as a “form” in the Buddhist
sense of something illusory and impermanent, whose contemplation will
result in the viewer’s realization that all forms are nonexistent. Thus
the form of the poem is able to extend the Buddhist content.

The fourth chapter, “Composing Foreign Words: Canons of Nativization in
the Poetry of Du Fu,” extends Klein’s argument about translation to the
subject of canon formation, by asking how the “closed” system of a
National Literature is constructed out of, or in the context of, a global
circulation of forms and events. Klein’s case study in this discussion is
the most canonical of Chinese poets, Du Fu, whose commentators have
thoroughly incorporated his poems into the National Literary tradition.
Klein discusses how canonization deprives a work of the originality and
surprise that it must have once contained ― drawing on Hans-Georg Gadamer
and Wolfgang Iser, he argues that “canonical reading” removes the
limitations of historical context placed on a work by, paradoxically,
constantly re-interpreting and re-translating it for each new age in the
form of commentaries. In the case of Du Fu, his canonization as the “Poet
Historian” creates a tension between the “lofty,” morally upright tone his
poems are thereby presumed to have and the morally dubious Regulated Verse
form he employed. Again, the issue for Klein comes down to translation:
“Du Fu translates between the aesthetic of Regulated Verse and the ethic
of Archaicism” (p. 273) by nativizing the Regulated Verse form and
bringing it in line with the moral ideology of Archaicism and its call for
a “return to antiquity.” This contradiction is embodied in Du Fu’s
treatment of the historical figures and poets that he alludes to ―
canonizes ― in his own work. For instance, Du Fu redeems Yu Xin 庾信
(513-581) for Archaicism as a Chinese among the barbarians at the Western
Wei (535-556) court, despite the fact that Yu’s own poetry carried on the
work of the Regulated Verse innovators. By writing about native Chinese
historical topics in the “foreignizing” style of Regulated Verse, Du Fu
helped broaden and expand the possibilities of Chineseness even as the
canonization of his poetry ― and his own poetry’s canonization of Yu Xin ―
helped define that Chineseness in a restrictive way. Klein admits that
“nativizing continues the translation process, moving [the original,
foreign form] from there to here. That may be the nature of translation,
ultimately: to be neglected, forgotten” (p. 300). At the same time,
“rather than say it is subsumed into the canon, we could say that
translation builds the canon” (p. 301), so that the various nativizing
gestures and processes undertaken by Du Fu and his readers end up
constructing a National Literature out of a world of source materials.

In the final body chapter, Klein addresses the notoriously difficult
late-Tang poet Li Shangyin, choosing once again to consider Li’s poetry as
a form of translation. An ambiguity in the title of the chapter, “An
Awakening Dream: Borders and Communication in the Translation of Li
Shangyin,” hints at the problems involved: does “the Translation of Li
Shangyin” imply that Li himself performed translation? Or does it instead
refer to the process whereby Li’s original poetry is rendered into a
foreign language, such as English? In fact, Klein means both: on the one
hand, Li’s formal eccentricities “re-foreigniz[e] the by then already
nativized formality of Regulated Verse” (p. 325), at the same time as his
writing thematizes barriers to communication and the insufficiency or
unreliability of language; and on the other hand, the ambiguities that
populate Li’s poetry ― for instance, where the Chinese character jiao 角
can mean “corner” or “horn” ― can only be fully expressed by putting them
into other words, that is, in translation or interpretation. On an even
larger, historical level, Klein sees Li’s poetry as engaged in a struggle
to translate between a native religious tradition (Daoism) and a foreign
one (Buddhism), during an era when the Tang emperor was carrying out
xenophobic anti-Buddhist policies. Klein describes Li’s poetry as
“hermetic,” in reference to Hermes’s role as the god of boundaries, of
crossing boundaries, and all transactions. As one who erects boundaries in
order that they may be traversed, who seals off in order to connect,
Hermes is the perfect figure for the one poet of the Chinese tradition
whose poems have been interpreted so much that their meaning is ever less
certain. We suspect that Klein has this paradox in mind when he introduces
the chapter by asking, “Is Li Shangyin the most Chinese of pre-modern
poets?” (p. 313). The answer is yes, if Chinese simultaneously implies
foreign, and if originals are simultaneously translations.

Klein’s dissertation is impressive both in terms of breadth and depth, and
it represents a welcome, successful attempt to bring discussions of Modern
China closer to discussions of China’s past. This work will be of interest
not only to Chinese literature specialists, but perhaps equally to
comparatists and cultural historians. Readers interested in high Modernist
and avant-garde poetry from the English-speaking world should also take
note, as this dissertation consistently places its subject matter, both
modern and pre-modern, in dialogue with an Anglo-American poetic tradition
that owes so much to the translation of Chinese texts.

Brian Skerratt
Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations
Harvard University
skerratt at fas.harvard.edu

Primary Sources

Bian Zhilin 卞之琳. Bian Zhilin wenji 卞之琳文集 [The Collected Writings of
Bian 
Zhilin]. Hefei: Anhui jiaoyu chubanshe, 2002, 3 vols.

Yang Lian 楊煉. Dahai tingzhi zhi chu: Yang Lian zuopin, 1982-1997, shige
juan 大海停止之處: 楊煉作品 1982-1997, 詩歌卷 [Where the Sea Stands Still:
The 
Collected Writings of Yang Lian, 1982-1997, Poems]. Shanghai: Shanghai
wenyi chubanshe, 1998.

Wang Wei 王維. Wang Youcheng ji jianzhu 王右丞集箋注 [Vice-Minister Wang
[Wang 
Wei]’s Writings, Annotated]. Zhao Diancheng 趙殿成, ed. Shanghai: Shanghai
guji chubanshe, 2003.

Du Fu 杜甫. Dushi xiangzhu 杜詩詳注 [The Poems of Du Fu, Meticulously
Annotated], Qiu Zhao’ao 仇兆鰲, ed. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2004 reprint. 5
vols.

Li Shangyin 李商隱. Li Shangyin shige jijie 李商隱詩歌集解 [The Collected
and 
Explicated Poems of Li Shangyin]. Liu Xuekai 劉學鍇 and Yu Shucheng 余恕誠,
eds. 
Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1998. 5 vols.

Dissertation Information

Yale University. 2010. 432 pp. Primary Advisors: Kang-i Sun Chang and Haun
Saussy.

_______________________________________________
MCLC mailing list
MCLC at lists.service.ohio-state.edu
https://lists.service.ohio-state.edu/mailman/listinfo/mclc