Today, we have a few excerpts from the Epic of King Gesar, “often described as the Tibetan national epic and as the longest poem in the world,” taken from Sources of Tibetan Tradition.
Set in the turbulent years of the transition from the shogunate to the Meiji Restoration, Kiku’s Prayer embodies themes central to Endō Shūsaku’s work, including religion, modernization, and the endurance of the human spirit. Yet this novel is much more than a historical allegory. It acutely renders one woman’s troubled encounter with passion and spirituality at a transitional time in her life and in the history of her people. A renowned twentieth-century Japanese author, Endō wrote from the perspective of being both Japanese and Catholic. His work is often compared with that of Graham Greene, who himself considered Endō one of the century’s finest writers. Today we have an excerpt from the first chapter of Kiku’s Prayer.
“[W]hat is perhaps most remarkable about Dr. Keene is that Japan, a racially homogeneous nation that can be politely standoffish to non-Japanese, has embraced him with such warmth.”
Donald Keene began teaching Japanese literature at Columbia University in 1955. Over the course of the second half of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first, he has written and translated over thirty books (many with Columbia University Press), has been awarded the Japanese Order of Culture (the first Westerner to be given this prestigious honor), and was an instrumental figure in bringing the classics of Asian literature to the attention of Western academia. Already a beloved figure in Japan, Keene earned “status approaching that of folk hero,” according to Martin Fackler in a profile in the Saturday New York Times, when he applied for and gained Japanese citizenship in the wake of the Fukushima nuclear accident after last year’s earthquake and tsunami.
Fackler and Keene agree that the most important factor in Keene’s popularity in Japan is his genuine affection for that nation:
Dr. Keene has spent a lifetime shuttling between Japan and the United States. Taking Japanese citizenship seems a gesture that has finally bestowed upon him the one thing that eludes many Westerners who make their home and even lifelong friendships here: acceptance.
“When I first did it, I thought I’d get a flood of angry letters that ‘you are not of the Yamato race!’ but instead, they welcomed me,” said Dr. Keene, using an old name for Japan. “I think the Japanese can detect, without too much trouble, my love of Japan.”
That affection seemed especially welcome to a nation that even before last year’s triple disaster had seemed to lose confidence as it fell into a long social and economic malaise….
BUT what is perhaps most remarkable about Dr. Keene is that Japan, a racially homogeneous nation that can be politely standoffish to non-Japanese, has embraced him with such warmth. When he legally became a Japanese citizen this year, major newspapers ran photographs of him holding up a handwritten poster of his name, Kinu Donarudo, in Chinese characters. To commemorate the event, a candy company in rural Niigata announced plans to build a museum that will include an exact replica of Dr. Keene’s personal library and study from his home in New York.
He says he has been inundated by invitations to give public lectures, which are so popular that drawings are often held to see who can attend.
“I have not met a Japanese since then who has not thanked me. Except the Ministry of Justice,” he added with his typically understated humor, referring to the government office in charge of immigration.
In his novel,Atlas: The Archaeology of an Imaginary City, Dung Kai-cheung writes from the unified perspective of future archaeologists struggling to rebuild a thrilling metropolis. In the following excerpt, Dung mixes the real-life Chek Lap Kok airport with a fictional plan that would make the airport itself mobile:
The secret of the Chek Lap Kok Airport plan is now beyond the reach of anyone to uncover. The only clue that remains to us is a blueprint drawn up in 1990 of Hong Kong’s seaport and airport development, called “Construction for the Future.” This blueprint, which displays the development of port facilities in Hong Kong at the end of the twentieth century, includes sea-lane plans, container wharves expansion, and harbor reclamation projects. It also outlines the so-called new airport plan in documents and records, that is, the enormous concept that begins with the new Chek Lap Kok location of the airport on the north shore of Lantao Island and includes a range of developments such as the airport railway and residential, industrial, and commercial sites along the shoreline. It is worth pointing out that this blueprint emphasizes the importance of Hong Kong as a seaport and airport, by hinting at its two possible exits—by sea and by air.
In the third section of his novelAtlas: The Archaeology of an Imaginary City, Dung Kai-cheung describes the streets of the fictional city of Victoria (based on Hong Kong) in the following excerpt he recounts the strange history of Public Square Street:
Yau Ma Tei’s Public Square Street is now called Jung-fong Gai (literally, “people’s quarter street”) in Cantonese, but before the 1970s it was known as Gung-jung Sei-fong Gai (public square street, that is, “square” as in an equal-sided rectangle). Some commentators have said that gung-jung sei-fong was a mistranslation of the English term “public square” and that the correct translation should have been Gung-jung Gwong-cheung (literally, “public plaza”). The name in English referred to an empty space in the street popularly known as Banyan Head. Itinerant performers would gather there at nightfall, casting divinations and telling fortunes, or singing and storytelling. Afterward, when street names were being revised, it was called People’s Quarter Street in Cantonese, taking on the meaning of a space where the populace at large would gather….
The only way of finding one’s way in the square street seems to have been by determining the direction. The four sides of the square street were fixed according to the four points of the compass, north, south, east, and west, but because there were no door numbers along the street (for no one could say where the street began and where it ended), it was rather difficult to determine if one were proceeding along the east street, the west street, the north street, or the south street. To be sure, this was not a problem for the local inhabitants, because whatever side of the street they lived on made no difference to them. Another special characteristic of the square street was that there was a flight of steps at each corner. It was said that if you kept turning right as you walked, the steps would lead upward, but if you went in the opposite direction, to the left, the steps would lead down. But whether you went up or down, you would still return to your original place by way of the four flights of steps and the four corners. Experts in cartography maintain that such phenomena can occur only on the surface of maps, or in pictures with fanciful optical illusions.
The novel, which fuses history and fiction is written from the unified perspective of future archaeologists struggling to rebuild a thrilling metropolis. Dung reimagines Victoria through maps and other historical documents and artifacts, mixing real-world scenarios with purely imaginary people and events while incorporating anecdotes and actual and fictional social commentary and critique.
In the book’s preface, Dung explains his “history as fiction” approach:
It is the task of literature to make visible the invisible. (Or, as is sometimes said, to articulate the unarticulated.) Curiously, in contrast to visual art forms like film, literature has a special capacity for rendering visibility. Words are nonvisual signs and many steps removed from the actual and the visible. By virtue of this removal, however, words invoke an imaginative power that is not bound by a photographic image. Telling and writing play on the dialectic between the visible and invisible, and that is the true meaning of “making visible.” This making is no less than the work of an artisan, in whose hands a world of objects is made and an abode of dwelling is built. What is more, it is not an abode of bricks and tiles but an abode of meanings.
It was in this spirit that I wrote Atlas, a verbal collection of maps. It was written and published in 1997, in the year the colony of Hong Kong was returned by its British rulers to become a Special Administrative Region under Chinese sovereignty. Nevertheless I chose not to write directly about the event or the contemporary situation in the narrow sense. The perspective was set in an unknown future time but with a retrospective, archaeological orientation, inquiring into the origin and the long-lost past of the city. The city is supposed to have vanished, and efforts are made by scholars to re-create its history through imaginative readings of maps and documents unearthed only recently. The city is literally rebuilt by relics and fragments, casting a shadow on the question of reality and authenticity and in turn making way for the introduction of fiction into the process of history making.
Earlier this summer, Dung Kai-cheung, author of Atlas: The Archaeology of an Imaginary City was interviewed by Christopher Mattison in a wide-ranging discussion. Among the issues discussed were translation, the impact of English on Dung’s writing, Hong Kong as a “fiction,” and Hong Kong literature.
The interview begins with a conversation about the translation of Atlas, which was both self-translated and done in collaboration with Bonnie McDougall and Anders Hanson. Dung mentions how his knowledge of English shapes and benefits how his Chinese writing is translated:
The influence [of English] is not just in terms of subject matter and literary forms but also of sentence structure and diction. My Chinese has been regarded by some language purists as “Europeanized,” which is meant to be a criticism for not writing in a proper Chinese. It is in this sense that I said the language of Atlas “lends itself to translation.”
Moving on to Hong Kong itself, Dung views the city as a fiction, an idea that shapes his “archaeology of an imaginary city.” Dung explains:
The truth is, Hong Kong was created by the British, at least at the very outset. I am not placing a value on that; it is simply a fact. And the fictitious or created nature of Hong Kong has its advantages. It has made this city wonderfully open to change and innovation. It is mirrored in the creativity of its people. Ironically, this advantage has been on the decline since the return of Hong Kong to China, a historical event which was supposed to have ended the city’s rootlessness.
Our featured book this week is the much-discussed and debated new poetry collection Poetry of the Taliban, Edited by Alex Strick van Linschoten and Felix Kuehn; Preface by Faisal Devji.
Throughout the week we will highlight aspects of the book and its coverage. We are also offering a FREE copy of Poetry of the Taliban to one winner.
To enter our book giveaway, simply e-mail pl2164@columbia.edu with your name and address (U.S. and Canadian mailing addresses only, unfortunately). We will randomly select one winner on Friday at 1:00 pm. Good luck and spread the word!
For more on the book, you can browse Poetry of the Taliban in Google Preview or check out interviews with the editors, reviews and more on the book.
Here’s what Jon Lee Anderson, author of The Lion’s Grave: Dispatches from Afghanistan, wrote about Poetry of the Taliban:
A remarkable and important work. In Poetry of the Taliban, we see that within the movement there are warriors with wounded hearts, lyrical souls, and a passionate love for language and ideas.
Earlier this week we featured thecover for Atlas: The Archaeology of an Imaginary City. In the following post, Julia Kushnirsky, the book’s designer, describes the thinking behind this beautifully evocative cover:
Atlas: The Archaeology of an Imaginary City is translated from Chinese and is an imagined literary history of Hong Kong.
The author sent us a cover of the Chinese edition that was published in Hong Kong. We felt that the significance of the bird may not be familiar to American readers, and we wanted a bolder, literary look.
I liked the concept of showing a map with the section of Hong Kong missing since it gave the reader a sense of wanting to discover the lost city. I decided to choose historic images to show the archaeological aspect of the book. I had found an antique map of Hong Kong that was created in 1841 by Captain Edward Belcher, which added to the sense of discovery and adventure felt by the explorers of the 18th century.
To “age” the black and white image I gave it a sepia tone. I wanted to fill the “missing” section of the map with a nostalgic image of the “vanished” city. I found an original hand tinted photograph of Hong Kong harbor circa 1900. It was beautifully naturally faded with sepia tones that worked really well with the map.
Finally for the title type I wanted it have movement and handwritten quality as if someone wrote across the map with a quill pen. For the final jacket design I added ragged yellowed edges to the flaps and splotches of ink on the spine and back flap.
Our printer, Coral Graphics did a beautiful job picking up the colors and adding dimension with matte and gloss effect.
“This collection was not conceived or published with a political agenda. In fact, it was refreshing to be able to think about Afghanistan outside the usual tropes and patterns. If there is any wider point to be made, it is simply that this is not a conflict that has a military solution. The war will end when the political conflict is tackled, which possibly must begin by challenging and questioning our stereotypes about the Afghan Taliban as well as Afghanistan as a whole.” — Alex Strick van Linschoten and Felix Kuehn
Monday, June 11th, The Atlantic ran an interview with Alex Strick van Linschoten and Felix Kuehn, the editors of Poetry of the Taliban. The interview, conducted over email as both Strick van Linschoten and Kuehn are in Kandahar, addresses the war in Afghanistan, Afghan cultural tradition, and the controversy their collection of poetry has stirred up in the media.
Strick van Linschoten and Kuehn begin by discussing why Afghan culture is overlooked by the West:
A certain narrative of the war in Afghanistan, or of the country itself, has existed for a few years now. The groundwork was laid long before the events of September 11, 2001, in part by journalists who travelled in the country during the 1980s. But the main themes became very clear from 2001 onwards. As part of this, the focus has been on the foreign involvement in Afghanistan, rather than on Afghanistan itself (i.e. on its own terms).
April is National Poetry Month and in honor of the occasion, we have been posting poems from our poetry collections and those of our distributed presses throughout April. Today, as April draws to a close, we are posting three poems from Korean poet Kim Sowol’s classic collection, Azaleas, translated by David R. McCann. Kim Sowol is one the most beloved Korean poets, despite the fact that he died when he was only 32. Azaleas, Kim Sowol’s only collection, was published when he was 23, and tells the story of a young man’s travels after leaving home. While the entire collection contains 127 poems, we’ve chosen (with great difficulty) three to post here today. (more…)
April is National Poetry Month, and yesterday, April 17, was National Haiku Poetry Day. In honor of the occasion, our selection today is taken from Far Beyond the Field: Haiku by Japanese Women, an innovative anthology of haiku by female poets, edited by Makoto Ueda. Ueda selected poems from twenty poets living between the 1600s and the 2000s. We have selected a few haiku from five of the poets featured in Far Beyond the Field for today’s post. (more…)
April is National Poetry Month, and over the next three weeks, we will be posting poems from our poetry titles and from those of our distributed presses. Our second selection is taken from Hiroaki Sato’s translation of the kanshi of Ema Saiko, Breeze Through Bamboo. Kanshi is a Japanese term that refers to poems written by in classical Chinese, and Ema Saiko was famous in her lifetime as one of the best female Japanese writers of kanshi. The four poems below are a set of four poems on the four seasons. Breeze Through Bamboo is part of Columbia University Press’s Translations from the Asian Classics series. (more…)
The jury for the Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize praised Clouds Thick, Whereabouts Unknown for “not only the high quality of its translations, which strive to keep a handsome formal ease even when observing in English the demands of syntactic parallelism, but also the considerable scholarship that Egan employs with admirable accessibility.”
The Financial Times recently published a delightful and fascinating article about Donald Keene. In the article, David Pilling, the Asia editor for the Financial Times, sits down for lunch with Keene at a French restaurant in Tokyo.
The two discuss Keene’s recent decision after the earthquake and tsunami to leave America for good, become a Japanese citizen at the age of 89, and to live out his days in Japan. Keene’s decision made headlines in Japan and the “Japanese spoke, many with tears in their eyes, of the courage he had given them in their hour of need.” Keene also recounts how he was introduced to Japanese literature while an undergraduate at Columbia University after stumbling upon a copy of The Tale of Genji at the Astor Hotel.
Keene’s familiarity with Japanese culture and the Japanese people grew when he became an interpreter during World War II. He was responsible for reading documents and interrogating Japanese soldiers. This also gave Keene the opportunity to read the diaries of Japanese prisoners:
In those diaries, Keene discovered the pathos of Japanese soldiers, scared, often idealistic, and far from home. “I was lucky. I read diaries and interrogated prisoners with most of whom I became friends. In a few cases the friendships lasted after the war. So, in my case, there was no demonising of the Japanese.” Once, years later, when Keene was visiting China, he was taken to a museum of Japanese atrocities. “There were life-size dolls with heads on the floor and all the rest of it,” Keene recalls, his face contorting. “And, worst of all, there were troops of Chinese children being led through. I was just so heartbroken by that. They deliberately inculcated hatred. These terrible things happened, yes. But you must get on with it.”
The blog New Yorker in Seoul recently interviewed Jennifer Crewe about Columbia University Press’s list in Korean literature. Jennifer, who is the editorial director and associate director of the press, has acquired titles in Korean for the press, making Columbia one of the leading publisher in Korean literature.
In her discussion with Patricia Park, Jennifer discusses the criteria for what the Press decides to publish, the review process, as well as some of the challenges of publishing North Korean literature. Here is Jennifer on what she looks for in a manuscript:
I am looking for fiction whose author is highly respected both in Korea and by scholars who teach Korean literature in the United States, and for work that will appeal to college students and that could be assigned in Korean literature or history courses in the US. For example, work that depicts life during a particular time in Korean history–the colonial period for example (Yi T’aejun’s Eastern Sentiments is one example from our list), or whose characters are dealing with a traumatic event in Korean history (for example Park Wan-shu’s Who Ate Up All the Shinga?, or a novel by Sok-pom Kim, written in Japanese by an author of Korean descent, called The Curious Tale of Mandogi’s Ghost, about the Four-Three Incident of 1948). These books are often used to help teach history.
Levy Hideo (Ian Hideo Levy, 1950–) is known as the first white American novelist to write in Japanese. His novel A Room Where The Star-Spangled Banner Cannot Be Heard: A Novel in Three Parts, which was just published, tells the story of Ben Isaac, a blond-haired, blue-eyed American youth living with his father at the American consulate in Yokohama. Chafing against his father’s strict authority and the trappings of an America culture that has grown increasingly remote, Ben flees home to live with Andō, his Japanese friend. Andō shows Ben the way to Shinjuku, the epicenter of Japan’s countercultural movement.
Levy was born to a Jewish American father and a Polish immigrant mother, he became an assistant professor of Japanese literature at Princeton University at twenty-eight. In this talk given at Stanford, Levy discusses language and identity of a writer as well as the difficulties and rewards of gaining the privilege of writing in the Japanese language as a culturally foreign writer.
PRI’s The World recently reviewed The Columbia Anthology of Modern Drama, edited by Xiaomei Chen. The review praises the book, writing “the anthology’s excellent selection, colloquial and stage-friendly translations, and illuminating introduction undoubtedly make the volume the authoritative choice in teaching and reading modern Chinese drama for the foreseeable future.”
The review quotes Chen’s criteria for the selection which extends from the Republican period to the post-Mao era:
My strategy was to situate this anthology first in the context of modern Chinese literary and cultural history under local and global circumstances, and second is the context of comparative drama and theater. Third, I bore in mind various formalist traditions of both East and West across time so that Chinese theater could be introduced more substantially to readers of world drama and theater in terms of dramaturgy.
Wang Anyi is among the most widely read and anthologized authors of the post-Mao era, a breaker of taboos and a speaker for China’s younger generation. Among Wang’s acclaimed Shanghai novels is the nostalgic Changhen Ge (The Song of Everlasting Sorrow)(1996). Voted the most influential work of the 1990s in China, it won the fifth Mao Dun Literature Award in 2000, one China’s most prestigious literary prizes.
