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BEI DAO ON:
ALLEN GINSBERG, GARY SNYDER, SUSAN SONTAG, OCTAVIO PAZ

BLUE HOUSE
By Bei Dao
From the Chinese by Ted Huters and Feng-ying Ming
ISBN 0-939010-58-5 (paper), $13.95
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5 x 7½
8 b&w photographs
262 pages

In Blue House Bei Dao not only explores his relationship with poets such as Allen Ginsberg and Tomas Tranströmer, but also sketches the more personal and sometimes seemingly banal episodes of a dissident living in exile. This is Bei Dao's first collection of essays in English translation. Those familiar with Bei Dao will notice the same lucid eye and strength that mark his poetry.

Bei Dao makes poetry out of the swirling layers of language born in the midst of crises such as the Tiananmen Square massacre, and in the seemingly insignificant human gestures and doubts that fill each day. In the essays of Blue House, philosophical evenings with Ginsberg and Paz coexist with the history of Davis, California; discussions of pop culture with his daughter, Tiantian; and memories of life in China under Mao.

The essays here ring with the pure clarity of a bell...Bei Dao has structured this collection wisely. Before the later, bittersweet meditations on “Moving”, “Driving” and other pastimes of the poet in exile, he crafts several deft, unblinking character sketches of writers familiar to a Western readership...Blue House is a series of still lifes that adds up to a self-portrait.
—David Kipen, San Francisco Chronicle

Read an excerpt.

Bei Dao has been in exile since the 1989 Tiananmen incident, has lectured around the globe, and currently teaches at the University of California Davis. He is the author of four books of poetry in English translation and one fiction collection.

Professor Ted Huters teaches in the department of East Asian Languages and Literature at UCLA and Feng-ying Ming teaches at Whittier College.

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Poetry in which the societal is entwined with the individual,
the Chinese enmeshed in the global

THE BOY WHO CATCHES WASPS
By Duo Duo
From the Chinese by Gregory B. Lee
ISBN 0-939010-70-4 (paper) $16.95
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6 x 8½
224 pages [bilingual Chinese/English]

Although talismanic words—pear, orchard, sky, parents, death, river, ice—recur throughout Duo Duo's Selected Poems, the poems themselves express dramatic changes in the thirty years for which they provide an accounting, an emotionally expressive ‘news that stays news.’ Duo Duo's poems in English rivet us with their obsidian sharp images and their evocative connotations. They are the cri de coeur of a fractured I.
—Forrest Gander

Duo Duo began to write poetry in the early 1970s when the Cultural Revolution was still in full swing. He was obliged to write clandestinely, never imagining he would one day have readers. He continued to write throughout the 1980s, publishing in samizdat publications, and then more openly as the authorities relaxed their grip. Duo Duo left China for a reading tour of England June 4^th 1989, the morning after the Tiananmen massacre that he had witnessed.

Duo Duo's poetic vision embraces a historical and political vision that is much more diverse, more global than that circumscribed by the confines of the last third of China's twentieth century. The context of China, Duo Duo's lived experience, is necessarily present in the poet's imaginary, but it is diffused in a world-view that embraces all of modern humanity's dilemmas, our increasing separation from nature, and our alienation from one another. The exile, like the hybrid and other “in between” subjects, writes of China with the benefit of critical distance, but also writes with an exceptional perspective of wherever he finds himself.

Before leaving China, Duo Duo worked as a journalist. His writing has been widely translated and published throughout the world, including two small selections of his work—in English—published in the UK and Canada. Generally associated with the other menglong (ambiguist) poets, such as Bei Dao and Yang Lian. Duo Duo currently lives and teaches in the Netherlands.

Gregory Lee currently lives in France and teaches at l'Université Jean Moulin Lyon III. He has also taught at the Universities of Cambridge, London, Chicago and Hong Kong. His translations of Duo Duo and other Chinese poets have appeared in numerous publications, including Fissures: Chinese Writing Today (Zephyr Press), and Abandoned Wine (Wellsweep Press).

Also available: Fissures: Chinese Writing Today [Zephyr Press, ISBN 0-939010-59-3 (paper)]

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Personal epic from Taiwanese poet and calligrapher

DRIFTWOOD
Lo Fu
From the Chinese by John Balcom
Poetry
ISBN 0-939010-83-6 (paper) $16.95
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5¼ x 8½
200 pages

Traces of Rilke are unearthed in Lo Fu's long poem sequence, Driftwood, along with his affection for surrealism and the early modernists such as Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Apollinaire, and the more contemporary verse of Wallace Stevens. On New Year's Day 2001, the poem appeared in the literary supplement to the Liberty Times in Taiwan and was serialized for three months straight. Lo Fu has won almost every literary award in Taiwan and has published more than three-dozen volumes of poetry, essays, criticism, and translations. Despite his prolific output, Lo Fu considers Driftwood to be the book that sums up his experience of exile, his artistic explorations, and his metaphysics; Driftwood is a personal epic and the greatest achievement of his old age.

Lo Fu is the pen name of Mo Luofu, who was born in Hengyan, Hunan Province, in 1928. He joined the military during the Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945) and moved to Taiwan in 1949. While stationed in southern Taiwan in 1954, he founded the Epoch Poetry Society with Zhang Mo and Ya Xian, serving as the editor of the Epoch Poetry Quarterly for more than a decade. He immigrated to Vancouver in 1996, where he still lives.

John Balcom has translated more than a dozen books into English from Chinese. He is Associate Professor and Chinese Program Head at the Monterey Institute. Balcom previously collaborated with Lo Fu on the translation of his book of poetry Death of a Stone Cell (Taoran Press).

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BEST OF CONTEMPORARY CHINESE
POETRY AND PROSE
IN ENGLISH TRANSLATION

FISSURES: CHINESE WRITING TODAY
Edited by Henry YH Zhao, Yanbing Chen, and John Rosenwald
ISBN 0-939010-59-3 (paper), $14.95
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5½ x 8½
292 pages

Fissures: Chinese Writing Today is an anthology of contemporary Chinese poetry, prose and essays taken from the literary journal Jintian (Today). Jintian has been the foremost voice of contemporary Chinese writing since its inception on “The Democracy Wall” in Beijing in 1978, and its subsequent reinvention in 1989. This is the third volume in the series and the first undertaken by a U.S. publisher. Authors include Bei Dao, Gao Ertai, Hong Ying, Duoduo, Yang Lian, Sun Xiaodong and Zhu Wen—names that will only continue to grow in importance as Chinese literature expands the established Western canon.

From Breyten Breytenbach's preface:

The un-initiated non-Chinese reader must be especially careful not to look at Chinese literature through the glasses of his or her own conditioned expectations. We have all been bamboozled by the clichés of exoticism and romanticism, reassured by the security of ‘distance’ and charmed by the lures of ‘difference’ […] Alternatively—and sometimes simultaneously—we were told that we'll never understand: China is the last Unknown; and since it is so old and so rich and so big and so threatening, it is probably the Unknown Universe. There would seem to be a need for us non-Chinese to have a China of the mind.
It is by no means the slightest merit of this collection to be thus wiping clean our glasses in order to give us a feel of the ‘ordinariness’ of modern existence. It constitutes a horizontal slice of the many expressions of literary creativeness in present-day China.

This anthology is a window into the minds and lives of some of the world's finest young writers.
—Gary Snyder

The stories, essays and poems gathered here show a restlessness with the past and also a homage to it
—Jonathan Spence

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ONE OF THE MOST PROVOCATIVE AND
COSMOPOLITAN POETS
WRITING IN CHINESE TODAY

FUSION KITSCH
By Hsia Yü
From the Chinese by Steve Bradbury
ISBN 0-939010-64-X (paper), $13.00
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7 x 8½
144 pages

Listen to Hsia Yü read “Bringing Her a Basket of Fruit”.

From the introduction to Fusion Kitsch by Steve Bradbury

Hsia Yü's frank and innovative treatment of gender and sexuality in a small handful of poems in this collection and in her second collection Ventriloquy (Fuyushu) was seized upon by critics and scholars anxious to find a candidate to fill the long-vacant post of “Chinese feminist poet.” But while Hsia Yü may well have been one of the first woman poets writing in Chinese to have written about love and romance in a manner that broke dramatically from the conventions and constraints of traditional Chinese women's poetry, if we bother to look beyond labels at the poetry itself, we will find a body of work that is far less interested in providing a critique of gender relations or advancing a sexual/textual agenda than in exploring the sensuous and quirky interface between the pleasures of the flesh and the pleasures of the text. It is this preoccupation with pleasure that sets Hsia Yü apart from other poets writing in Chinese today; that and the fact that her poetry embodies a fusion of styles and influences—both high and kitsch—with the French influence running perhaps stronger than most.

Among her numerous honors, Hsia Yü was most recently awarded the Taipei City Literature Award for her book Salsa.

The Saw

I visualize you walking on the other side from me
In our scanty understanding of the universe
We propose a simple definition
Which we call “the time difference”
Whenever I feel delicious or defeated
In the watery regions of the night
We author our “form and meter”
Like the cardinal principles
Certain schools of painting have long advanced
Pressing myself against the dark
I continue my contemplation of a kind of saw-tooth-shaped truth

I engage in the contemplation
Of serration
An opened can for instance
My contemplation of the can goes thus:
The opening of a can turns
Upon a kind of saw-tooth-shaped truth

I contemplate but then I sleep
Sleep being an ancient practice
Older than civilization
Older yet than poetry
I sit and puzzle over it for hours
Resolved to not resist it

I contemplate sleep
When like a saw
I drag myself awake

I contemplate the saw

CONTRIBUTORS
Born in Taiwan but now dividing her time between Paris and Taipei, Hsia Yü makes a living as a song lyricist and translator. She is the author of four volumes of poetry, of which the most recent is Salsa (1999). She first came to prominence in the mid-1980s with the appearance of Beiwanglu, or Memoranda (1983), a self-published collection of poetry whose brassy and iconoclastic tone struck a deeply sympathetic cord in Taiwan's younger readers. Besides her popularity in Taiwan, Bei Ling devoted ten pages of an issue of his journal Tendencies to her poems, and Michelle Yeh and Goeran Malmqvist's anthology of Taiwan poetry, forthcoming from Columbia, will contain translations of 27 of Hsia Yü's poems.

Steve Bradbury translates Chinese literature and teaches American and Children's Literature at National Central University in Chung-Li, Taiwan. His translations have appeared in Manoa, boundary 2, Mid-American Review, and numerous other journals.

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SO TRANSLATING RIVERS AND CITIES
Zhang Er
From the Chinese by Bob Holman, Arpine Konyalian Grenier, Timothy Liu, Bill Ransom, Susan Schultz and Leonard Schwartz
Poetry
ISBN 0-939010-93-3 (paper) $14.00
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6 1/8 x 8
152 pages [bilingual Chinese/English]

Zhang Er, joined by translator Bill Ransom, reads in Chinese and English

In So Translating Rivers and Cities, Zhang Er offers a glorious scroll or map of transformations. Everywhere in these poems, the image of enchantment becomes luminous fact of enlightenment. Wisdom proceeds through the enchanted eye into pure mind, finding no obstacle, broaching no impediment. The effect is of a sudden, entirely true transparency.
—Donald Revel

Shuttle, ferry, transport, transfer, transformation, translate. And so this book goes, these are its qualities and actions as it performs our world—many landscapes. Strange tales of our tribe, like dangerous tangled scarlet kisses and fire-red slippers, are caught in these wending lines. We are shuttled between periphery and center, exploring all that might lie there—smooth ovum at center, lying in wait, reproductive; at the outskirts, the mind, a restless wind. The poems move us back and forth from past to future, future to past, always fingering an unstable and gripping present.
—Eleni Sikelianos

So Translating Rivers and Cities is a bilingual selection of work from Zhang Er's three most recent Chinese manuscripts. As with her previous Zephyr book, Verses on Bird, an intriguing aspect of this project is the list of translators involved in the project—among them Bob Holman, Timothy Liu, Susan Schultz and Leonard Schwartz—all well-known poets and critics. Their participation is necessary in capturing the multiple layers of Er's work throughout her varied poetic sequences.

Zhang Er was born in Beijing, China and moved to New York City in 1986. Her writings of poetry, non-fiction, and essays have appeared in publications in Taiwan, China, the American émigré community and in a number of American journals. She is the author of multiple books in Chinese and in English translation. She has read from her work at international festivals, conferences, reading series and universities in China, France, Portugal, Russia, Peru, Singapore, Hong Kong as well as in the U.S. She currently teaches at The Evergreen State College in Washington.

Bob Holman's eighth book, A Couple of Ways of Doing Something, a collaboration with Chuck Close, was published in 2003. He was a founder of Mouth Almighty/Mercury Records, the first major label devoted to poetry. He is Chief Curator of the People's Poetry Gathering, Poetry Guide at About.com, and Proprietor of the Bowery Poetry Club (bowerypoetry.com). He was recently appointed Visiting Professor of Writing at Columbia University, and received the 2003 Barnes & Noble “Writers for Writers” Award.

Arpine Konyalian Grenier, author of St. Gregory's Daughter and Whores of Samarkand, is a graduate of the American University of Beirut and the MFA Program at Bard College, New York. Her work has appeared in Columbia Poetry Review, The Iowa Review, Phoebe, and Kiosk.

Timothy Liu's first book of poems, Vox Angelica (Alice James Books, 1992), received the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America. His subsequent books of poems are Burnt Offerings (Copper Canyon Press, 1995) Say Goodnight (Copper Canyon Press, 1998), and Hard Evidence (Talisman House, 2001). Tenured at William Paterson University, Liu lives in Manhattan.

Bill Ransom has published six novels and six collections of poems, including Finding True North from Copper Canyon Press, which was nominated for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. His novel Jaguar was recently re-released by Wildside Press. He is a member of the faculty at The Evergreen State College.

Susan M. Schultz is the author of multiple poetry and essay collections, most recently And Then Something Happened (Salt, 2004) and A Poetics of Impasse in Modern and Contemporary American Poetry (Alabama, 2005). She edited The Tribe of John: Ashbery and Contemporary Poetry (Alabama, 1995). She founded Tinfish Press, which publishes a journal and chapbooks featuring experimental work from the Pacific. Schultz is Professor of English at the University f Hawai`i-Manoa.

Leonard Schwartz is the author of several collections of poetry, most recently Ear and Ethos and The Tower of Diverse Shores (Talisman House). He is also the author of a collection of essays A Flicker At The Edge Of Things: Essays on Poetics 1987-1997 (Spuyten Duyvil) and co-editor of two anthologies of contemporary American poetry: Primary Trouble: An Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry and An Anthology of New(American) Poets ( both from Talisman House). He teaches at The Evergreen State College in Washington.

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VERSES ON BIRD
Selected poems of Zhang Er
From the Chinese by Rachel Levitsky, Timothy Liu,
Leonard Schwartz, and Eleni Sikelianos.
Poetry
ISBN 0-939010-80-1 (paper) $12.95
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5¼ x 7½
104 pages [Bilingual Chinese/English]

Listen to Zhang Er read some of her poems
(Zhang Er reading with Susan Schultz at the University of Hawai'i in 2000; recorded by Juliana Spahr)

Listen to Zhang Er discuss her recent work (Episode #53).

Zhang Er reflects on all that disappeared when the Yangtze was flooded.

…a highly developed range that's very complex, subtle, very beautiful.
—Leslie Scalapino

Zhang Er's poems lead us to another world, where we take a bird's-eye view of our world; dive into the blank of writing and shriek in despair. The eloquence in her poems is a voice debating our time.
—Bei Dao

‘The Bird’ is observed and represented, even as its representation is observed. The bird is material and thought, as well as intention and outcome. The fully imagined bird provides glimpses through history and beyond landscapes, from unusual vantages and perspectives. Thought and experience surround the bird even as they are encompassed by its purview. In Verses on Bird, Zhang Er delivers a vibrant and expansive phenomenology—rich in descriptive and discursive detail, surprising throughout.
—Ed Friedman (Former Director, St. Marks Poetry Project)

Zhang Er grasps for the spiritual through objects of the mundane, quietly detailing the wonder and desperation that courses through human lives. In these poems, the eye watches the eye so that no facet of our existence remains unexplored. “Zhang Er belongs to the generation beyond lament or anger over the hardship endured by Chinese intellectuals, from overthrown rebellion to construction, from confusion to clarity, from darkness to light (ambiguity to clarity). She walks out of suffering and uncertainty, discovers the loveliness, preciousness of life and self-respect…”
—New World Poetry Bimonthly

Verses on Bird … constantly invites us to reassess our relationship to language and of language's relations to the world. The wonder of this volume is that most of the translations by the four poets who contributed to it [Eleni Sikelianos, Leonard Schwartz, Rachel Levitsky, and Timothy Liu] are nearly as engaging as the poems they represent. This is no small achievement, and it is a credit to the publisher to have gathered so many fine translations under one cover and to have gone to the no-small expense of presenting them in a bilingual format.
—Steve Bradbury, “Tin Fish”

[from the poem Verses on Bird]

The river is moving. The blackbird must be flying.
From classical fugues to Romanticism, this effort produced
Schubert. When storms attack, the nightjar's cry
Swells. The noble revolution will require great
Sacrifice, yet do not ask me to capture this process on the black
And white keys, nor to switch to another tone.

I could not find two birds with identical pitch.

With nothing to induce it, innocence makes me walk
Into rushing water as if I were brave. Empty space is great, but nothing
Repeats itself there. Whether I do
Or whether I don't; from each, the sum of the piano's voice will rise.
Not to be doubted: bird writes poem, one vowel at a time.

Zhang Er was born in Beijing, China and moved to the United States in 1986. Her writings of poetry, non-fiction, and essays have appeared in publications in Taiwan, China, the American émigré community and in a number of American journals. She is the author of multiple books in Chinese and in English translation. She co-edited First Line and Poetry Current, which are Chinese poetry journals based in New York, and she has read from her work at international festivals, conferences, and universities in China, France, Portugal, Russia, and Peru, and in the US. She has also participated in projects sponsored by the New York Council for the Arts and by the Minetta Brook Foundation.