MCLC: Censorship and salesmanship at US book fair (6)

[MCLC LIST]

MCLC LIST
Censorship and salesmanship at US book fair (6)
As soon as art speaks to you, it is political speech. You are part of a polis. Of different polises - how do you write that? If you speak about art to other people, in a certain context, it becomes political. In the story Broken Glass 《破碎玻璃》 by Li Hao 李浩, a primary school teacher takes an art book from a student and uses it to humiliate him. With a "perverse" picture by Picasso. In this way, Picasso becomes politica l- in a similar way as he intended his "Guernica". Eric may be familiar with this story. It will appear in the forthcoming inaugural German issue of 人民文学, modelled after the very successful and amazing "Pathlight" that many of us know.
My own art is political.
晚报！晚报！早有早报，晚有晚报。不是不报，时间未到。
Eric has a point - many times you hear, watch, read an art piece, it may simply refresh you. Make you stretch yourself. But every time you watch, hear, read a piece of art, you take part in an act. An act of communication. Something is communicated to you. Moves you.
I have translated poems by Liu Xiaobo into German and English. Sometimes they make me feel awkward and uncomfortable. Even when they are powerful.
But every poet I love has a few poems, or more than a few, which are political.
Machine-gun fire, in Yi Sha's 伊沙 S-S-S-T-T-TUT-T-TER 结结巴巴 (1991). And in Ernst Jandl's SCHTZNGRMMM (1957).
Or in Liao Yiwu's 廖亦武 MASSACRE 大屠杀 (1989), of course.
You can draw the line somewhere, everyone does. You are not obliged to take part when it makes you uncomfortable.
Have you watched Liu Xia's 刘霞 December 2013 poetry video from house arrest? The whole thing is a great piece of art and resistance. Both of it, inseparable. Two poems, read and performed, smuggled out. Mischievous, daring. Funny. Hard to translate, I think - at least the second one. The first is just a tree. If you show that tree to anyone who doesn't know it, and doesn't know the author, it's just a poem. That's what I love about it, and in this way Eric does have a point. But the whole point of the poem in the video is still resistance. It cannot be non-political, although it is. That's the beauty.
Link to video: Nobel peace prize winner Liu Xiaobo’s wife reads poem from house arrest – video
I have translated that tree into German, with a few other things, incl. subtitles to another video: http://banianerguotoukeyihe.com/2015/06/14/liu-xia-in-beijing-berlin/
Every story I ever read in PATHLIGHT is political. Chinese literature is about being able to speak. Any literature, any art, anywhere. Like Picasso in school.
Have you read Woeser's 唯色 poetry? Most of her poems are not political in the sense that politics poke through in any way. They are just very moving, evocative pieces of great Chinese-Tibetan literature in Chinese. If you sent them in under another name to an editor somewhere in China who hasn't read them and doesn't know the real author, they will be printed, no problem. In China, I have heard poets who don't have to do anything with Tibetan politics speak of her with awe and regret.
Literature by migrant workers is political - because of its context, first and foremost. See what I wrote above, at the beginning.
How about some Rumsfeld? Or maybe some Plato? Or maybe COMPROMISE, CHINESE-ENGLISH？
http://banianerguotoukeyihe.com/2014/12/14/what-was-it-that-rumsfeld-said%ef%bc%9f-%e4%be%af%e9%a9%ac-hou-ma/
http://banianerguotoukeyihe.com/2014/02/25/republic-shen-haobo/
http://banianerguotoukeyihe.com/2014/04/24/compromise-chinese-english-%e3%80%8a%e5%a6%a5%e5%8d%94%e7%9a%84%e4%b8%ad%e8%8b%b1%e6%96%87%e8%a7%a3%e9%87%8b%e3%80%8b/
Thank you,
Martin Winter <dujuan99 at gmail.com>
by denton.2 at osu.edu on June 18, 2015
You are subscribed to email updates from MCLC Resource Center  
To stop receiving these emails, click here.

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.osu.edu/pipermail/mclc/attachments/20150618/572b7cd3/attachment-0001.html>