Think of Cold War communist insurgency and guerilla warfare might well spring to mind. Sometimes it worked, building from the hinterlands to capture the capital: see Cuba. Sometimes it failed: see Che in Bolivia. And sometimes the revolutionaries remained stuck in the wild, undefeated but unable to seize the state.
Chinese
That translator Dong Li calls Chinese poet Ye Hui “metaphysical” in his introduction to The Ruins—a characterisation repeated in the book’s marketing material—might seem challenging, but in the fact the poems, while not exactly straightforward or immediately obvious, are—for most part—eminently accessible and interesting.
If one ever forgets what poetry is for, this newly-released collection is a reminder of its ability to renew, sooth and provoke. Mirror is a translation of a lengthy posthumous selection of Chinese poet Zhang Zao’s lifelong opus.
From a general historical perspective, the current confrontation between mainland China and Taiwan is not difficult to explain. By the end of the 19th century, Qing Dynasty was teetering on the brink of collapse. Territories were carved out and handed over to foreign colonizers after failed battles. Taiwan was ceded to the Empire of Japan in 1895.
A Cure for Chaos is one of the recent titles in Princeton University Press’s book series “Illustrated Library of Chinese Classics,” aimed at showcasing the Chinese classics in Zen Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism, and more, in graphic form. With illustrations by the renowned illustrator CC Tsai, translation and introductory commentaries by philosophy professor Brian Bruya of Eastern Michigan University, the books in this series visualize the ideas that characterize Chinese philosophy.
What happens if you took one of the classic characters of Chinese literary fiction and dropped him into early 20th-century China? That’s the premise of Wu Jianren’s novel, New Story of the Stone, written in 1905, which takes Jia Baoyu, from the classic Dream of the Red Chamber, and takes him first to Qing China and the Boxer Rebellion, and then to the fantastical “Realm of Civilization”, a world that, in Wu’s eyes, reflected what he thought would happen if people embraced Chinese beliefs.
“Untranslatable”, concluded the erudite, 17th-century Jesuit missionaries, referring to the glorious corpus of Chinese poetry. While they acknowledged that poetry played an outsized role in Chinese civilization, they limited their translations to histories and scientific texts. They knew of but didn’t try to tackle the Book of Songs or the Tang dynasty anthologies. We can explain their reluctance by recalling that in their era, Latin and Italian poetic forms shaped their tastes just as strictly as ancient Chinese forms limited that of their hosts. They could not translate Chinese poetry into Petrarchan sonnets or Horacian odes, so they didn’t.
New Story of the Stone by Wu Jianren is one-part fan fiction, one-part historical fiction, and one-part science fiction. A full translation by Liz Evans Weber gives English-language readers access to the early 20th-century novel and a fascinating perspective on a moment in China’s history that speaks volumes about its present and possible futures.
Zhang Guixing’s Elephant Herd is as complicated and teeming as the rain forest in which it is set. Within this rich natural environment is a family drama, a political drama, and what amounts to a coming-of-age novel in an incredibly violent, and seemingly amoral, world.
Mud, blood, farts and plenty of swearing: esteemed author Jia Pingwa minutely details the brutal reality of peasant life in this magnum opus set during the Cultural Revolution.
You must be logged in to post a comment.