The Organization of Distance

Dear MCLC List

I am thrilled to announce Brill’s publication of my monograph, The Organization of Distance: Poetry, Translation, Chineseness, Sinica Leidensia Vol. 141:

What makes a Chinese poem “Chinese”? Some call modern Chinese poetry insufficiently Chinese, saying it is so influenced by foreign texts that it has lost the essence of Chinese culture as known in premodern poetry. Yet that argument overlooks how premodern regulated verse was itself created in imitation of foreign poetics. Looking at Bian Zhilin 卞之琳 and Yang Lian 楊煉 in the twentieth century alongside medieval Chinese poets such as Wang Wei 王維, Du Fu 杜甫, and Li Shangyin 李商隱, The Organization of Distance applies the notions of foreignization and nativization to Chinese poetry to argue that the impression of poetic Chineseness has long been a product of translation, from forces both abroad and in the past.

Table of Contents

Introduction: The Great Wall and the Tower of Babel: On Chinese Poetry as Translation

Part 1

  1. Discerning the Soil: Dual Translation and the World Poetics of Bian Zhilin
  2. By the Brush: Yang Lian and the Translated Poetics of Ethnography

Part 2

  1. Indic Echoes: Form, Content, and Contested Chineseness in Six Dynasties and Tang Regulated Verse
  2. Composing Foreign Words: Canons of Nativization in the Poetry of Du Fu
  3. An Awakening Dream: Borders and Communication in the Translation of Li Shangyin

Conclusion: Realms of Transformation: Chinese Dreams and Translational Realities

http://xichuanpoetry.com/?p=4169
https://brill.com/view/title/36511?format=HC&offer=371692
e-book: €44.00 / US$53.00
hardback: €49.00 / US$59.00

Lucas Klein <lklein@hku.hk>

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