Posts featuring Chen Xianfa

Translation Tuesday: Three Poems by Chen Xianfa

The safest place for a butterfly to exist is in the word ‘butterfly’

This Translation Tuesday, we feature three poems by the Lu Xun Literary Prize-winning writer Chen Xianfa. Chen’s meditative poems often begin from the plain contemplation of a minute object—a butterfly, the rain, an earthworm—only to draw them into a larger field of philosophical ideas where language and nature’s presumed certainties are interrogated. Reflecting on her translation of these poems, Romaine Scott emphasises “the process of dissolving linguistic and cultural borders to arrive at The Third Shore,” invoking Yang Lian’s notion of translation as forging a new element. So too does Chen write: “There is no such thing as an expression set in stone,” observing a word’s numerous metamorphoses. Immerse yourself in the sparse beauty of Chen’s poems where even a speck of the world can be made anew. 

Lanruo Temple

The safest place for a butterfly to exist is in the word ‘butterfly’
There is no such thing as an expression set in stone
Nor can I speak unequivocally of a gust of wind
and though the temple may be built upon a speck
of dust, it will, nonetheless, collapse from within
There are moments when a butterfly is motionless
‘To live’ requires fewer strokes of the pen than ‘to take wing’

Taking Shelter From the Rain

It’s raining. In the square many people are running about blindly
a piece of clothing held over their heads
Of course, they are not actually blind
their eyes are simply fixed on taking shelter from the rain

Before the square was built, this was a shantytown
beneath whose poor-quality
bitumen roofs
the smell of poverty, excitement and rebellion rubbed shoulders
with the tavern’s moon. Heaven knows how many nights we
toasted each other READ MORE…

The Opening Is Where the Light Comes In

Within [this publication], we celebrate the immense, wondrous heights of the Chinese language.

Spittoon is a literary and arts collective born in Beijing, China, with the aim of bringing together Chinese and foreign writers, artists, and creators. Consisting of monthly events, poetry-music intersections, and literary and artistic publications, Spittoon has set down roots in Beijing, Chengdu, and Gothenburg, Sweden. In June 2019, Spittoon Literary Magazine Issue 5, a bilingual publication that translates and publishes China’s best contemporary voices, was published. Xiao Yue Shan, Managing Editor of the magazine and Assistant Blog Editor at Asymptote, writes from Beijing about the days leading up to the launch. 

Drivers here love talking politics, my aunt says to me after my hour-long ride into Xiaotangshan, the oddly idyllic suburban town in northwest Beijing. Really? I reply. They’ve been telling me the stories of their lives

Beijing is brimming to burst with stories, occasionally startling, occasionally brilliant, told in voices bred by an immense variousness, from the sandy waters of the Yellow River to the steaming skies of Hunan, the stillness of Heilongjiang winters to glittering Kunming greens. It is a city that collects and bounds the language of its citizens, between circling highways and sky-bound apartments. So it is that one is never beyond the reach of a story, told as regularly as the hour tells the clock.

The literature of contemporary China is represented in the contours of Beijing—a place you must visit a great number of times, an ongoing landscape impossible to traverse by foot alone, wayward beginnings which speak nothing of ending. Any attempt to define it would be a disservice, as it openly resists definition; one is only able to catch at its hems, glancing, in search of openings that allow light to come in, any small light that would lend sense to the vastness. So it is with this knowledge that we, at Spittoon Literary Magazine, set out to compile a selection of China’s most engaging and original literatures, carving a door by which one can visit again and again. This publication is an entryway toward something lasting, a portrait of a national body that refuses to stay still. Within it, we celebrate the immense, wondrous heights of the Chinese language.

READ MORE…