In Journey to the Land of the Real we get a glimpse of the utter foreignness that Victor Segalen experienced in China over a century ago.
Matt Turner
Matt Turner's writings can be found in Seedings, Los Angeles Review of Books China Channel, and Bookforum. He has translated or co-translated Lu Xun, Chan Chi Tak, Yan Jun and Hu Jiujiu, and is prose editor for the March 2018 issue of Cha. He lives in New York City.
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A Dystopian Fairy Tale Reflects Challenges of the Present
Despite the serious environmental and political challenges presented in The Emissary, Yoko Tawada suggests that another path exists.
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An Enigmatic Literary Icon of Modern China
Although Lu Xun eventually cast his lot with the communist revolutionaries, he took a dim view of literature that attempted to recover a national identity or culture.
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The Past and Future of China’s Socialist Literature
The story Nicolai Volland tells will surprise those who believe communist China was closed to the world, and anyone who thinks communist literature is dull or irrelevant.
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A Poem of Shame: In the Words of China’s Workers
Iron Moon: An Anthology of Chinese Worker Poetry, edited by Qin Xiaoyu and translated by Eleanor Goodman, collects work by Xu Lizhi and 30 other worker poets.
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Poems About Everything: Bénédicte Vilgrain’s A Tibetan Grammar
Whatever her own commitments to the Tibetan language or Buddhism, Bénédicte Vilgrain utilizes their historical and philosophical aspects on behalf of her own work, and on behalf of poetry writ large.
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Etel Adnan: Philosophy at Night
Lebanese-American artist, philosopher, and poet Etel Adnan’s recent publication, Night, is in equal measure a series of meditations on intersubjectivity and spirituality, and a dialogue between prose poetry and short verse.
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Cosmic Wind: Yoshimasu Gozo’s ‘Alice Iris Red Horse’
In 2003 I received an invitation to attend a reading by the poet Yoshimasu Gozo, someone I had never heard of. I asked around, and was told that Gozo was an avant-garde poet who read in a bygone oracular style.
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Resisting Totality: The Paintings of Zhu Jinshi
A precocious youth forced to work in a factory during the Cultural Revolution, the painter Zhu Jinshi afterwards joined the seminal new art group the Stars (星星), producing works that dabbled in the imported medium of abstraction.
