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New England Review

Auguste Lacaussade

Le Piton des Neiges

To my friend A. Lionnet
Translation from NER 36.1. 

Ocean, Ocean, when your fuming waves
Lift, roaring, making one majestic wave
From foaming heads, rearing up to air,
Appearing to touch the sky with its sublime crest;
We see its peak smoking like a vast
Crater, its huge mass mastering the waters!

The furrows that its volume compresses,
Come in fury to smash themselves at its base;
The wave rises and leaps towards its arrogant
Brow; but this one—see!—like the God of the tempest,
With foam and vapors crowns its crest,
And seems to dominate its furious aspect.

 

—translated from the French by John Kinsella

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Auguste Lacaussade (1815–1897) was born on the French Indian Ocean possession of Bourbon, later named Ile de la Réunion. He published his first volume of poems in 1839, Les Salaziennes, followed by Poèmes et Paysages (1852), and Les Épaves (1861).

John Kinsella’s most recent books include the poetry collection Jam Tree Gully (W. W. Norton, 2012) and the collaborative work Redstart, with Forrest Gander (Iowa University Press, 2012). He is a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, and a Professorial Research Fellow at the University of Western Australia. 

Xiao Kaiyu

Our Poets

Translation from NER 36.2

When in our indignation Chinese
becomes pallid and ossified
as in hotels, markets, banks,
computers, going through customs, open-bar parties. . . .
we, benighted, alien students of Borges,
tin-eared impersonators of Rilke’s theism,
victims of the gawky translation of Joseph Brodsky’s verse,
producers of goose eggs out of Barthes’ Writing Degree Zero,
fraudulent drunks who feign lunacy and conceal our spiritual numbness,
we curse English. In New York, Paris,
and all the meat-eating cities, we chase the dollar,
and the endorsement of self-important professors,
and we use antiquated Chinese to represent China.

—translated from the Chinese by Christopher Lupke

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Xiao Kaiyu was born in the village of Heping, Zhongjiang County, Sichuan Province, in 1960. Beginning in his youth, he was interested in literature and traditional Chinese culture, although he pursued Chinese medicine in college, graduating with a degree in 1979. After several years of practicing traditional Chinese medicine in Sichuan and writing poetry on the side, he moved to Shanghai in 1993, where he served as an editor, taught at university, and began publishing his poems. He spent several years in the late 1990s and early 2000s in Germany, learning the language and reading widely in European literature. After returning to China, he accepted a position as Professor of Chinese at Henan University in Kaifeng, where he currently works.

Christopher Lupke is professor of Chinese at Washington State University, where he coordinates Asian Languages. He was classically trained in Chinese in Taiwan and at the Middlebury College Chinese School, the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and Cornell University, where he received his PhD in 1993, writing his dissertation on modernism and the diaspora. His scholarship has focused on modern China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, and he has published books on the notion of ming (“fate, destiny, or life’s allotment”), contemporary Chinese poetry, and the cinema of Hou Hsiao-hsien, and articles on a broad range of subjects pertaining to modern Chinese culture. He has steadily published translations of Chinese literature in English but still considers himself “early in his career” (if not young), as he hopes to publish the poetry of Xiao Kaiyu as a book.

Goran Petrovic

The Sixty-Nine Drawers

Translation from NER 35.2. 

Screen Shot 2015-11-17 at 11.40.07 AMAll around, as far as the eye could see, stretched a garden of ravishing beauty. The road first wound between rows of larches, and then red oaks prevailed, and then, in perfect harmony, in a fireworks of form, the wholes were interchanged, skillfully joined by bends of brushwood and low, shrubby vegetation. One could hardly take a step without this next angle of observation giving rise to some new delight. From the primeval lichens, tranquil mosses, stubborn mistletoes, and trembling ferns in the hollows, through the young ivy and mighty trunks, to the round, pyramidal, branchy, conical, sadly drooping and bushy outlines of the treetops. Isolated here and there. Then grouped in small clusters of birch or conifer. Divided by forked trails of settled dust . . .

Solitary, disheveled English oaks—on grassy plateaus swarming with mushroom caps. Then pastures, gentle slopes edged by wild blackberry bushes and low walls of dry-stacked stone, overgrown with creepers of ivy. Quite unexpectedly—steeper inclines and endemic flora nestled against bare, blanched rocks, as in the Alps. In seemingly carelessly arranged contours, but always in such a way that the shady side never encroached on the sunny, so that each blade of grass had sufficient light and cool . . .

—translated from the Serbian by Peter Agnone

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Goran Petrovic has published dozens of books, including five collections of short stories, three novels, several plays, a book of essays, and a novella. His books have been translated into more than sixteen languages and have been adapted for theater, television, and radio. His awards include the NIN Award for the Novel of the Year, the Ivo Andrić Award for the Book of Short Stories of the Year, and the National Library of Serbia Award for the Most Read Book of the Year. He is the member of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts and the Serbian PEN Centre. The novel excerpted in this issue of NER has been published in sixteen languages other than English, including French, German, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Polish, and Russian.

Peter Agnone (1948–2011) studied Serbian at the University of Pittsburgh and visited the former Yugoslavia numerous times. He translated David Albahari’s novel Bait (2001) as part of the Northwestern University Press Writings from an Unbound Europe series, and was nominated for the 2003 American Association of Teachers of Slavic and Eastern European Languages book prize. He also translated short stories by Goran Petrović, Vidosav Stevanović, and Mihajlo Pantić, which appeared in The Man Who Ate Death: An Anthology of Contemporary Serbian Stories (2006), and completed a translation of Petrović’s novel The Sixty-Nine Drawers before he died in 2011. 

Yin Lichuan

Korea, North Korea

Translation from NER 36.2. 

I want to go to Korea
I want to go to the Square
to the floral-printed North Korea

a holiday with the Koreans:
flowers in torrential waves
old people and children arranged into squares
young smiles frozen into walls
women with gazes like torches
leader standing before his portrait
all walk at the same pace

—translated from the Chinese by Fiona Sze-Lorrain

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Yin Lichuan, poet, fiction writer, film director, and scriptwriter, rose to literary notoriety as a founder and the most prominent member of the “Lower Body” movement, based in Beijing during the early 2000s. Born in 1973 in Chongqing, Sichuan Province, she studied French at Beijing University and earned a graduate degree in filmmaking in Paris at École supérieure libre d’études cinématographiques (ESEC). Her publications include a collection of selected writings, Feel a Bit More Comfort (2001); a novel, Bitch (2002); and three volumes of poetry, Karma (2006), Wet Paint (2007), and The Doors (2015). A volume of selected poems, Karma, translated by Fiona Sze-Lorrain, is forthcoming from Zephyr Press. Since 2006, Yin has devoted herself to filmmaking; her debut feature, The Park, was released in 2007, and Knitting premiered at the Cannes Festival in 2008. She lives in Beijing.

Fiona Sze-Lorrain is the author of two poetry collections, My Funeral Gondola (El Leon Literary Arts, 2013) and Water the Moon (Marick Press, 2010), and several translations of contemporary Chinese, French, and American poets. She lives in France and works as a zheng harpist and editor. 

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