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Source: Asymptote (April 9, 2025)
Devoured, Like Snow Into Sea: Ye Lijun and Fiona Sze-Lorrain on Chinese Nature Poetry
By Alton Melvar M Dapanas

Art is from the same source as poetry, and what comes from the mind will eventually return to the mind, as long as one keeps exploring.

In an interview from The Kenyon Review, the poet Ye Lijun (叶丽隽) confesses: “I feel and think of myself as a nature poet, not a contemporary Chinese pastoral poet,” perhaps revealing the specificities of genres in Chinese ecoliterature. Poetry within Chinese nature writing comes in loose nomenclatures: among others, there is shanshui shi (山水詩), the poetry of mountains, rivers, and landscape; tianyuan shi (田園詩), the poetry of fields, gardens, and farmstead; and shanshui tianyuan shi (山水田園詩), nature poetry. This latter category is brilliantly displayed in My Mountain Country (World Poetry Books, 2019), the first bilingual publication of Ye, a promising poet of the post-70s generation.

The book explores the visceral connections between the poet and the landscape she inhabits, with its poems taken from Ye’s three Chinese-language poetry collections and translated by her long-time translator, the award-winning writer, poet, and zheng harpist Fiona Sze-Lorrain—named in Chinese Literature in the World: Dissemination and Translation Practices (2022) as one of the most prolific translators of modern Sinophone writings. In this conversation, kindly mediated by her translation, I spoke with both Ye (in Lishui) and Dr. Sze-Lorrain (in Paris) on this English-language debut, and how their book speaks to the larger body of Chinese nature poetry.

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): My Mountain Country is a bilingual volume of selected poems taken from your various Chinese-language poetry collections. Could you share the story behind these poems and the journey of bringing these collections to life? Continue reading Interview with Ye Lijun and Fiona Sze-Lorrain →

New Publication:
Shi Penglu and Joe Lockhard, “John Brown in China.” South-North Cultural and Media Studies 39, 1 (2025)

ABSTRACT

This study delves into the depiction of John Brown in China across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It provides an extensive review of a wide range of Chinese-language histories of the United States and texts relating to US slavery. The paper delineates an evolving discourse within Chinese scholarship regarding John Brown, transitioning from an emphasis on his role as a symbol of the latent revolutionary potential within American society in the mid-to-late twentieth century, to a more contemporary critique that calls into question the efficacy of Brown’s rebellion, preferring Lincoln’s constitutionalism. Where older standard histories in US classrooms often treated Brown as a madman and traitor, our survey indicates that these misrepresentations never gained currency in Chinese histories that near-uniformly praise Brown. The research highlights interpretative discrepancies within the Chinese academic milieu in reimagining and reinterpreting this controversial and nearly mythological figure from nineteenth-century American history. Such discrepancies include portraying Brown as a singular historical fulcrum; neglecting his affiliations with African American struggles against slavery; failure to mention Brown’s religious motivations; and isolating Brown as a character intrinsic to American history, thereby neglecting the broader international backdrop of his era. Contemporary discussions of whether John Brown was a terrorist or hero, or his appreciation within present abolition movements, remain entirely obscured in China.