Above: public domain image
As with a tree reaching maturity, the creative process takes time. Sometimes it takes 30 years or more.
That’s the case with a new collection of Chinese poetry, painstakingly translated in person and remotely, by one of our College of Liberal Arts and Sciences faculty members and several Chinese scholars.
From 1990-91, during a year teaching in a Beijing, China university under a Fulbright award, Creative Writing Professor Stephen Haven asked his American Literature students to introduce him to some local poets. They hung out at parties, discussing their art the best they could given the language barrier, and the seeds of a literary project began to take root.
“Jin Zhong was at the first party and was one of the only people present who spoke English,” Haven recalls. “Some of the poets urged Jin Zhong and I to start working together on English translations of their work. They needed English translations of their poems to apply to international poetry conferences and were interested in having their work appear in western journals.”
The men got down to work, translating 17 poems by Duo Do, Mo Fei and Wang Jiaxin during the course of that year, roughly 30 pages, most of which appeared a few years later in the Philadelphia-based American Poetry Review, the largest stateside poetry journal.
Also, around that time, while Haven traveled to Heilongjiang University, in Harbin, China, for a weeklong stint as visiting lecturer, he struck a friendship with the school’s Foreign Languages Department chair, Wang Shouyi, and the two hatched a plan to help the latter become a Fulbright Scholar at Haven’s then-home institution, Ashland University in Ohio.
“As we needed to have a project proposal for Wang Shouyi’s Fulbright application, we discussed translating the work of two Chinese poets, Mang Ke and Gu Cheng,” Haven says, adding that Shouyi eventually made it to Ashland as a 1996-1997 Fulbright Scholar. They met each week to work on the poems, completing nearly 45 pages of translations during Wang’s year in the United States.
Those early- and mid-1990s encounters marked the beginning of what would become “Trees Grow Lively on Snowy Fields: Poems from Contemporary China,” a 300-page collection of Chinese poetry translated by Haven and three scholars from China and published last year. The book, which really began to take shape in 2011 in collaboration with his friend and former graduate student Li Yongyi, has already been reviewed favorably.
“Over the course of a 30-year collaboration, they have created lovely translations that offer passageways between distinctly different cultures,” concludes Brad Crenshaw in his review for the webzine Singapore Unbound.
Haven explains that many of the poets in the anthology — in the 1970s and 1980s — were among the first Chinese writers following the 1949 Communist Revolution to publish poems without attempting first to win approval from state censors.
In addition, according to Haven, North American Review this year will run its assessment of the collection, in a review written by the Harvard East Asian Studies scholar Xiafei Tian, originally from Harbin, China.
“It will be interesting to hear the perspective of a critic who can read the poems in English and in the original Mandarin,” Haven says.
That is a skill Haven concedes he lacks.
“The biggest challenge was that I have extremely limited language skills in Mandarin. I know only numbers (up to about 1,000) and key phrases useful in restaurants, taxis, airports and supermarkets, and cannot read the language,” Haven says. “Together, with each collaborative translator, I worked line-by-line, always in-person, until after 2011 when Li Yongyi and I began to meet on Skype.”
The nature of Chinese characters, in contrast with English words, presented another challenge to Haven and his collaborators.
“Each Chinese character carries a far greater range of meaning than an English word, and more language is packed into a typical Chinese poetic line than into a typical line of English poetry,” Haven explains. Many English words — articles, conjunctions, pronouns, prepositions — are crucial to grammar but contribute little to the visual or descriptive effect of a poem.
“In Mandarin, there are no articles, no gender-specific pronouns, no prepositions, etc., so the language is more densely packed in most poetic lines,” Haven says.
Though the culmination of the 30-year collaboration is satisfying, Haven says he learned something important about how daunting the task was.
“Beyond the possibility of a classical Chinese poetry translation project with Wang Shouyi, I don’t believe I will ever again be involved in a translation project because I don’t have adequate skills in a foreign language.”
For those interested in learning more about this undertaking, Haven and two of his fellow translators — Wang Shouyi and Jin Zhong — and Twelve Winters Press publisher Ted Morrissey will hold a virtual discussion and reading on Wednesday, Feb. 16, at 7 p.m.
