"The army is the dreams we share / Our tent is the sky (we have nothing to hide) / Take a deep breath."
There are no city gates here
No city walls, no army, no tanks
There are the people, there are things they care about, there are tents
There is the night sky with no wind, an empty, empty sky
You can watch the TV, the one and only CCTV,
To learn about the world and
Watch live-edits of people hurting people,
The Tape Recorder looks stuck up
In his suit and tie. He’s getting ready to lie
But his eyes are flickering (tape’s stuck, won’t play)
“All writers are writing science fiction in a certain sense in so far as they explore concepts of alienation and modernity.”
Ken Liu is a Chinese-born American writer whose body of translations and original fiction is helping shed light on the current boom of science fiction and fantasy writing in China to English-speaking audiences. A lawyer and programmer by profession, he made his publishing debut with “The Paper Menagerie,” a short story about a mail-order bride and her son coping with cultural alienation through the care of sentient origami animals. The story swept the science fiction and fantasy establishment, garnering the Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy Awards in a stroke. Many more stories and translations were to follow.
Liu first came to my attention through his translation of The Three-Body Problem, the first book in a trilogy by the bestselling author Cixin Liu, popularly regarded as the key figure in China’s science fiction community.
The novel is made up of two interwoven narratives, one set in near-future China (no concrete dates are given) and the other during the height of the Cultural Revolution. Ye Wenjie is an astrophysicist and engineer whose father is brutally murdered during an uprising of the Red Guards. Branded a reactionary because of her family ties, she is sent to a rural labor camp. Her troubles are compounded when the authorities learn of her interest in the nascent environmental movement.
A look at intersecting poetics, visual arts, languages, and global industries
How to write the poetry of finance capital? There certainly is a poetry in the modern market; in the glowing lights of the myriad digits that flit through a bank server; and in capital’s capacity to erect and destroy cities with the stroke of a pen.
But when all that is solid melts into air, how can an artist make capital itself into a tangible object for reflection? The artist Xu Bing attempted this task with his sculpture “Phoenix”: a pair of twelve ton, one-hundred-foot long birds meant to represent China’s new ascendance in this age of global capital, fashioned from scrap metal by a team of migrant workers. Xu Bing’s sculpture, in turn, inspired the contemporary Chinese poet Ouyang Jianghe to write a poem in tribute to the work, also entitled “Phoenix,” which Austin Woerner has recently translated. READ MORE…
Many translators might agree that language is song, a kind of mouth music. Each text has a unique time signature and timbre, and when we translate voice, we have to open our ears before opening our beaks to become songbirds. And translators have a special insight into how a language’s sounds are made up of tones: pitches that help to convey meaning. A toneless voice, whether spoken, written or translated, is like a song without melody.
I learnt recently that mouth music is the alternative name for lilting, the subtle rise and fall of words in a sentence, and originally a style of Gaelic singing. Given that the nitty-gritty of literary translation is the picking up on nuances in voice, it strikes me as odd that translators, myself included, don’t dedicate much airtime to lilting. Why don’t we talk about lilting when we talk about voice? Isn’t it odd that translation theorists—boasting the loftiest and loveliest buzzwords in all the humanities—haven’t yet adopted it? After all, lilts are not merely ephemeral: a good prose stylist (and good translators too) can conjure them in writing. In James Joyce’s Dubliners, “The Dead” presents a good example of a lilt woven into a text, one that reverberates off the page when read aloud:
A poet of non-poetic things, Sun Wenbo drops himself into the mine of his subject and then starts tapping on the walls around him to find a way to tunnel out. This is the tension that undergirds his work, whether the poet’s intellect will manage to make its way back to the surface. His lines are sinewy but vernacular, sometimes verging on chatty, with moments of startling grace. He has read and absorbed the greats of Chinese literary history, and he writes as much to Du Fu as to his contemporaneous readers. His oeuvre as a whole presents a poet passionately concerned with words above all, but also with history and politics, the metaphysical and social realms, philosophy, love and its failures. When judging their peers, Chinese writers tend to be concerned not only with a poet’s output, but with his or her attitude toward the work of poetry. Sun Wenbo ranks among the most focused and intent. He has a scholar’s force of concentration and a soldier’s determination.
