Abstract
This paper is divided into two parts. Part I gives a brief survey of English translations of modern Chinese poetry in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The select translations—their foci and chronology—not only delineate a historic trajectory but also suggest broader geopolitical and sociocultural implications. Part II proposes that we understand “translatability” as “elective affinity.” Borrowed from German letters and science, “elective affinity” is an essential component of translation across cultures, and it is illustrated with two sets of examples: the encounters between classical Chinese poetry and modern American poets, and those between modern Chinese poetry and Anglo-American translators.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Acton, Harold, and Shih-hsiang Chen (1936), Modern Chinese Poetry, London: Duckworth.
Acton, Harold (1948), Memoirs of an Aesthete, London: Methuen & Co.
Alley, Rewi (1954), ed., The People Speak Out: Translations of Poems and Songs of the People of China, Beijing: Self-published.
Alley, Rewi (1984), comp. & trans., Light and Shadow Along a Great Road: An Anthology of Modern Chinese Poetry, Beijing: New World Press.
Barnstone, Tony (1993), ed., Out of the Howling Storm: The New Chinese Poetry, Hanover and London: Wesleyan University Press.
Davidson, Michael (1989), The San Francisco Renaissance: Poetics and Community at Mid-Century, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
De Man, Paul (1983), “’Conclusions’ on Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Task of the Translator’,” Yale French Studies, Vol. 69: 25–46.
Duo Duo (2002), The Boy Who Catches Wasps: Selected Poems of Duo Duo, Gregory B. Lee, tr. Brookline, MA: Zephyr Press.
Gu Cheng (2005), Sea of Dreams: The Selected Writings of Gu Cheng, trans. & ed. Joseph R. Allen, New York: New Directions.
Haizi (2010), Over Autumn Rooftops, trans. Dan Murphy, Austin, TX: Host Publications.
Hsia Yu (2001), Fusion Kitsch, trans. Steve Bradbury, Brookline, MA: Zephyr Press.
Hsu, Kai-yu (1963), ed. & trans., Twentieth-Century Chinese Poetry: An Anthology, Garden City, NY: Doubleday.
Ing, Nancy (1961), ed. & trans., New Voices: Stories and Poems by Young Chinese Writers, Taipei: Heritage Press.
Parks, Tim (2000), “Perils of Translation,” New York Review of Books, XLVII.1 (January 20).
Payne, Robert (1947), ed., Contemporary Chinese Poetry, London: Routledge.
Qian, Zhaoming (1995), Orientalism and Modernism: The Legacy of China in Pound and Williams, Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Rosenwald, John (1988/99), ed., Smoking People: Encountering the New Chinese Poetry, special issue of The Beloit Review, 39.
Shang Qin (2006), Feelings Above Sea Level: Prose Poems from the Chinese of Shang Qin, trans. Steve Bradbury, Brookline, MA: Zephyr Press.
Snyder, Gary (1959), Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems, San Francisco: Origin Press.
Tang, Chao and Lee Robinson (1992), ed. & trans., New Tide: Contemporary Chinese Poetry, Toronto: Mangajin Books.
Wang, Jing (1996), High Culture Fever: Politics, Aesthetics and Ideology in Deng’s China, Berkeley and London: University of California Press.
Wang, Ping (1999), ed., New Generation: Poems from China Today, Brooklyn: Hanging Loose Press.
Weber, Max (2002), The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Peter Baehr and Gordon C. Wells, New York: Penguin Books.
Yang Mu (1998), No Trace of the Gardener: Poems of Yang Mu, trans. Lawrence Smith & Michelle Yeh, New Haven, Conn: Yale University Press.
Yeh, Michelle (2004), “The Chinese Poem: The Visible and the Invisible in Chinese Poetry,” in The Poem Behind the Poem: Translating Asian Poetry, ed. Frank Stewart, Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press.
Yeh, Michelle (2008), “’There are no camels in the Koran’: What Is Modern about Modern Chinese Poetry?” New Perspectives on Contemporary Chinese Poetry, ed. Christopher Lupke, New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Yu, Kwang-chung (1960), ed., New Chinese Poetry, Hong Kong: Heritage Press.
Zhong Ling 钟玲 (2004), Meiguo shiren Shi Naide yu Zhongguo wenhua 美国诗人史耐德与中国文化 (Gary Snyder the American poet and Chinese culture), Taipei: Lianjing chubanshe.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
About this article
Cite this article
Yeh, M. Modern Chinese poetry: Translation and translatability. Front. Lit. Stud. China 5, 600–609 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11702-011-0143-9
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11702-011-0143-9