I’m grateful and pleased not only to have my own work in the latest issue of philoSOPHIA, but also to share space with the writer and artist Han Bo alongside scholars and translators Sun Dong, Yuan Gao, Yuming Piao, and Yizhong Ning in a special forum focused on Han Bo’s China Eastern Railway 《中东铁路》 cycle of poems. (I post this a day after having received here in Shanghai the physical copy of the journal — physical mail between the US and China seems to arrive later and later.)
Philosopher, translator and theorist Kyoo Lee — “translingual reader of all things poetic as well as prosaic” — proposed and edited the project a year or so after I gave a talk with her at Fudan University on poetry and translation for a graduate seminar led by Bao Huiyi. In On & Off the Rails: Notes on the Practice of Poetry & Translation in which I talked about a set of in-progress translations of Han Bo poems that Monika Lin and I would later publish as The China Eastern Railway.
Kyoo was fascinated by the dense wordplay within the poems and how it sustains multiple, proliferating readings of a text that, on the surface, is a poetic travelogue tracing 2012 journey tracing the historic route of a built by imperial Russia, seized by Japan, and which played a complex role in the convulsive sequence of transitions from the faltering Qing to the shaky Republic to a doomed Manchukuo and then on into the volatile stages of revolutionary and post-revolutionary PRC history.
Kyoo, as she notes with coeditor Alyson Cole, was particularly interested in how the nine-poem cycle can be read in (troubled and unsettling) terms of gendered and sexed identities and forms of production and reproduction:
The last entry in the tranScripts in this issue is a new category, FORUM in Translation. The topic we chose for this collective experimentation is “Cycles of Engendered/Endangered Contemporaneity in Han Bo’s China Eastern Railway Poems.” Initially, we were intrigued by a fascinatingly untranslatable wordplay in one of Han Bo’s signature poems, “现代性器” (Xiandaixingqi, a compound word that carries three concepts at once — modern, xiandai; modernity, xiandaixing; and sexual organ, xinqiquan 性器官 — which could then be something like “modernisexuorganicity,” a translated neologism by Kyoo Lee). Sensing some ingenious potency of this newly cast concept, without providing any specific instructions or suggestions, we asked each invited contributor to translate the poem in their own words together with another piece by Han Bo on “器” (qi, machine, equipment, organ, container, capacity) cross-referentially for some context (as that “qi” is what is generating this sudden disorientation). We also asked everyone — David Perry, Yuan Gao, Yuming Piao, Yizhong Ning, and Dong Sun — to provide their own brief analysis of those two pieces read together as specifically and theoretically as possible. With Han Bo’s responsive reflection that follows, we now have a uniquely rich and dynamic collection of articles that freshly engages his iconic China Eastern Railway poetry through close readings and closely contextualized commentary, a polyvocal collection in translation that, in some obliquely allegorical ways, addresses some of the thorny questions on gendered modernity in China today and its share of traumatic complexity and contemporaneity. (Coeditors’ introduction)
In addition to my translations1My translations became research projects and I learned a lot directly from Han Bo as well as from the outstanding translators Andrea Lingenfelter and Matt Turner, not to mention the poetry-loving computer scientist Zhang Zheng, among others. of three poems (published in the The China Eastern Railway chapbook), my forum article, “‘She Lives in the Temporary’: Bodies without Organs, ‘Engendered Opposites,’ and Dao-Time in Han Bo’s China Eastern Railway Cycle,” seeks to take a long view in two ways: one that explores references in the poems to Chinese philosophy, in particular philosophical Daoism, and another that seeks to shift the time of industrial modernity from a predominantly historical framework into a geological and planetary, post-Holocene one2Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene, post-Anthropocene, Etceteraocene; Deleuze and Guattari provide several tools that, I hope, have helped rig up what I think is a rather shaky, but potentially useful, conceptual contraption.
The abstract:
Han Bo’s 2011 China Eastern Railway nine-poem cycle begins and ends with the figures of two different women, initiating and then intensifying via the cycle’s structure of a circuit, or loop, a reading of the poems in which conceptual binaries are scrambled and undone. Gender binaries are at the root of the larger structure of binary pairs, and as such gender serves as a particularly intense site of a critique that may be read in coproductive terms by way of both contemporary critical theory and China’s deep philosophical traditions. In this essay’s reading of the poems, modernity — in both Western and Chinese forms — is deconstructed in ways that are legible in terms of aspects of 道 Dao as well as concepts drawn from the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Further in this regard, Kyoo Lee’s analysis of xuanpin (“dark female animal”) in the Daodejing helps bring this deconstructive critique into a space of “ontologically interfused or fermented thoughts” that challenge gender itself as a stable and stabilizing category, positing instead a “contemporized” conception of Dao as ceaseless dynamic flux and flow with respect to gender as well as all received and constructively “natural”-ized binaries. The poems gesture toward a dissolution of conceptual binaries, and further toward a state of generative flux, that is not only obliterative of “modernity” (with an emphasis on time and temporalities) but also radically productive of capacities for new, creative apprehensions and articulations of relations between humankind and nonhuman nature. This analysis has broad application ranging from concrete historical moments and events (the history of the 中东铁路, the China Eastern Railway) to ideological formations, national and civilizational projects and identities, and ongoing planetary ecological crisis. Finally, it points toward possible productive entanglements and fusions of lines of Chinese thought (Dao as an aspect not only of Daoism but also of Confucian thought and, in less direct ways, forms of Chinese Buddhism) with lines of Western philosophical endeavor.
A few further notes on Kyoo Lee, with whom I’ve been lucky to collaborate on a set of events hosted by NYU Shanghai:
- In 2017, Kyoo gave a talk on Claudia Rankine’s Citizen that I facilitated with Monika Lin.
- In the spring of 2018, I organized a panel discussion with Kyoo, Lucas Klein, Bao Huiyi and Eleanor Goodman on “the state of the art” of English-language translation of contemporary Chinese poetry. (The discussion came to center on gender and why, as Maghiel van Crevel in his 2017 “snapshots of the Chinese poetry scene” asked, why “poetry activities and the discourse about poetry in the broadest sense [are] such deafeningly male-dominated affairs?” — a question that I, in part, hope to continue addressing via collaborative translations of Sun Dong’s poetry and writing on poetics and the Chinese poetry scene.)
- In the fall of 2019, Kyoo and Charles Bernstein gave a talk titled On R|E|A|D|I|N|G Listeningly: Philosophy, Poetry, Plurivocality (having had to switch venues after the Chinese university originally slated to host them insisted on previewing the text of their presentation, which was impossible, given that it was an entirely live conversation designed to carom from these point to that, that question to this, and so on).
