MCLC: Poetry translation forum (4)

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Poetry translation forum (4)
I want to thank A.E. Clark for his kind words about my poetry translations. Attention for poetry is good, especially the strong and sustained attention for poetry that Jidi Majia has managed to create. The article raises important points. Formal concerns, especially looking for rhymes, can be deceptive. I'd rather count syllables. But that's ancient poetry, mostly. Another point was personal contact, with living poets. Personal contact is very important for translation. It is also very important for writing, editing, presenting and publishing poetry in general. In Brno, Czech Republic, I wrote a poem in English in 2011. "We don't know where the light comes from", that's the most important line. I never managed to do a German version, not until a few days ago. A friend was listening and making suggestions for a book, and suddenly I thought of "Wir wissen nicht, wo's Licht herkommt." Yi Sha 伊沙 has a good Chinese translation of that poem, by the way. He has done quite a few of my poems for now, mostly from English. When I'm with poets all the time, speaking Chinese, I start to write in Chinese, too. Especially if there are poetry meetings and contests every day, which is always the case with Yi Sha.
《詩會主義》
詩會主义好,
詩會主义好。
我们的新詩典人民地位高。
体制派被打倒,
作家协会夹着尾巴逃跑了。
2016.1.26
You can find English and German versions of this here on my blog. Yi Sha's daily online microblog column NPC 新世纪诗典 has presented over 700 poets in five years. Some of them are very well-known, like Yan Li 严力, Han Dong 韩东，Xu Jiang 徐江, Hou Ma 侯马 and Shen Haobo 沈浩波. There are also many female poets, including  Jun Er 君儿 and Tu Ya 图雅 from Tianjin, Xi Wa 西娃, An Qi 安琪, Xiang Lianzi 湘莲子, Tang Guo 唐果, Chun Sue 春树, Benben 笨笨, and many others. The fourth NPC book compitation has just come out in Chinese. I have translated hundreds of poems from this series in English and German. Hope to do a NPC anthology in both languages. If you have any ideas about publishers for this, please contact me.
This summer I am going to present a paper in Stockholm on dreams and imagination in today's Chinese poetry. Poets like Xu Jiang 徐江, Yi Sha 伊沙 and Ma Fei 馬非 are featured, as well as Xu Jiang's poetry magazine Kui (Sunflower) 葵 and Yi Sha's NPC.
Along with Jidi Majia, Ma Fei 馬非 is one fo the main organizers for the Qinghai International Poetry Festival and many other poetry festivals in China. Here are a few of Ma Fei's new poems from the last few months.
The newest one goes like this:
Ma Fei
WHY WRITE POETRY?
In my dream
they hung me up,
dipped a leather whip in cold water
to beat me,
so I should confess.
Their question
was tricky:
“Why do you write poems?”
I told the truth:
“I don’t know.”
The leather lashed as heavy rain,
thicker, harder.
Really couldn’t stand it,
so I roared, “Pain! …”
A miracle happened,
the rain of blows stopped.
2016
Tr. MW, 2016
You can find the Chinese original via the link above.
Cheers,
Martin
by denton.2 at osu.edu on May 2, 2016
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