The Cultural Translation of Battlers Poetry (Dagong shige)

Contemporary mainland-Chinese poetry displays a great deal of diversity and dynamism. Battlers poetry (dagong shige)—writing by members of the underclass of domestic migrant workers—is a relatively recent arrival. This essay delves into the discourse surrounding battlers poetry and its interactions with other poetry “departments,” particularly that of avant-garde poetry. It does so from the perspective of cultural translation. I argue that this is especially helpful for understanding the dynamics of battlers poetry, and of “poetry” at large as a discursive space in China today. The essay offers a discussion of translated people, texts in transit, commentary as conflict and battlers poetry’s representation outside China. In closing, it asks how this poetry might affect the genre’s habitual conceptualizations

Chinese Poetry and Translation : Moving the Goalposts

Poetry + translation will trigger claims the size of office blocks, all the way from Robert Frost (censored here) to Eliot Weinberger (Poetry is that which is worth translating). Add Chinese to the mix, and things get even better. The translation of poetry is fun to bounce around in conversation, but winds up frequently in dead-end discourse full of zombie notions of equivalence, faithfulness, servitude, and so on— not to mention the specter of the genre’s “inherent untranslatability.” In June 2017, a dozen scholars and translators held a workshop at Lingnan University, assuming primariness and agency for translation instead. Most of all, rather than from real and imagined problems of (Chinese)-poetry-and-translation, speakers worked from its potential: for rocking the boat rather than providing safe passage, for moving the goalposts and getting away with it, for empowering the translator to choose, time and again, which rule s/he wants to break, and unleashing whatever it is that happens next. We were grateful when the Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese offered us the opportunity to publish the papers as a special issue. While translation—interlingual and otherwise—is a central feature of the study of Chinese literature as practiced in an international community, it nevertheless doesn’t always get the attention it deserves, and we are happy to help address this. This special issue conjoins theoretical contributions with in-depth reflection generated from inside processes and results of translation and its infrastructure. Chris Song and Nick Admussen conceptualized and organized the workshop, together with the undersigned. Lingnan University provided generous funding. A special word of thanks goes to Yifeng Sun, professor of translation studies and Dean of Arts, for his unstinting support and his hospitality on the day. I thank the authors for their readiness to revise and expand their papers on a tight timeline, and Chris for his expert handling of the production of this special issue of JMLC. Maghiel van Crevel, guest editor Leiden, 1 December 201

A Journey into the City. Migrant Workers' Relation with the Urban Space and Struggle for Existence in Xu Zechen's Early Jingpiao Fiction

In contemporary China, rural-urban migrants constitute a new urban subject with entirely new identity-related issues. This study aims at demonstrating how literature can be a valid field in investigating such evolving subjectivities, through an analysis of Xu Zechen’s early novellas depicting migrants’ vicissitudes in Beijing. Combining a close reading of the texts and a review of the main social problems characterising rural-urban migration in China, this paper focuses on the representation of the identity crisis within the migrant self in Xu’s stories, taking into account the network of meanings employed by the writer to signify the objective and subjective tension between the city and the countryside

Language Shattered : Contemporary Chinese Poetry and Duoduo

Language Shattered is both a history of poetry from the People's Republic of China and a case study of the oeuvre of a leading Chinese poet. After the stifling orthodoxy of the 1950s and early 1960s, the terror of the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) brought official Chinese literature to a total standstill. At the same time, disillusioned youths were more or less accidentally exposed to a varied body of foreign literature and began writing underground poetry. In the 1980s this poetry scene, now above ground, became one of pluriformity and proliferation in both official and unofficial circuits. The brutal suppression of the 1989 Protest Movement gave it an exile offshoot. The historical overview in Part I of this book is complemented in Part II by a discussion of Duoduo's poetry. Duoduo's career as a poet reflects the vicissitudes of Chinese Experimental poetry - and his beautiful, headstrong poems merit attention in themselves. They show that Chinese poetry is not just of interest as a chronicle of Chinese politics, but as literature in its own right

Language Shattered: Contemporary Chinese Poetry and Duoduo

Language Shattered is both a history of poetry from the People's Republic of China and a case study of the oeuvre of a leading Chinese poet. After the stifling orthodoxy of the 1950s and early 1960s, the terror of the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) brought official Chinese literature to a total standstill. At the same time, disillusioned youths were more or less accidentally exposed to a varied body of foreign literature and began writing underground poetry. In the 1980s this poetry scene, now above ground, became one of pluriformity and proliferation in both official and unofficial circuits. The brutal suppression of the 1989 Protest Movement gave it an exile offshoot. The historical overview in Part I of this book is complemented in Part II by a discussion of Duoduo's poetry. Duoduo's career as a poet reflects the vicissitudes of Chinese Experimental poetry - and his beautiful, headstrong poems merit attention in themselves. They show that Chinese poetry is not just of interest as a chronicle of Chinese politics, but as literature in its own right

Language Shattered

Language Shattered is both a history of poetry from the People's Republic of China and a case study of the oeuvre of a leading Chinese poet. After the stifling orthodoxy of the 1950s and early 1960s, the terror of the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) brought official Chinese literature to a total standstill. At the same time, disillusioned youths were more or less accidentally exposed to a varied body of foreign literature and began writing underground poetry. In the 1980s this poetry scene, now above ground, became one of pluriformity and proliferation in both official and unofficial circuits. The brutal suppression of the 1989 Protest Movement gave it an exile offshoot. The historical overview in Part I of this book is complemented in Part II by a discussion of Duoduo's poetry. Duoduo's career as a poet reflects the vicissitudes of Chinese Experimental poetry - and his beautiful, headstrong poems merit attention in themselves. They show that Chinese poetry is not just of interest as a chronicle of Chinese politics, but as literature in its own right