In China, writing is a calling. We go where the language goes. Literature is the means of our discovery, our determination, and our desire. As the nation tangles with currents of rapid change, hurried now by intelligent technologies and pursuits of economic development, it is important to remember that the dedications of its writers are ancient. They say to us: as long as there is the impetus to put a mind into language, there is someone to hear those words-across time, across demarcations, across divides. This anthology is the acknowledgment that the world is listening.
To select from the Chinese language's vast repositories. Well, it's anything but simple. For as long as it has existed, literature in China has always been something of a grand occasion, with each of its innumerable contributors an essential element (imagine an ocean being separated into droplets). In our past curations, we've faced this vastness with equal parts reverence and trepidation, knowing that at any time, an extraordinary voice could be emerging amidst the canals and rivulets of the literary landscape. As the saying goes, masters are hidden amongst the masses. So in addition to lauded authors, we also read widely in search of singular, independent approaches to the Chinese language-artisans who work in the exquisite methods of gemstones, porcelain, silk. This is the wishful thinking we indulge in as editors, but also as readers and intimates of letters.
For this compilation, we only set ourselves a few guidelines. The work had to be excellent; the writer had to have a point of view that is under-explored in the Anglosphere; there had to be a balance of genders; and the language must be so special that it has the potential to torture translators. This final aspect came only from our love for the Chinese language-which, like all languages, has a singular soul, a force drawn from its age and its malleability throughout time. The more a writer is able to tap into that soul, the more difficult the piece would inevitably be to translate. We loved the lines that made us think: "How could this ever be said in English?" We looked for voices that made us consider Chinese in its ever-changing, ever-individualizing forms, because that is how writing transcends textuality to present itself as a wonder of the mind, emerging in such surprising forms. Also, we knew our translators-themselves writers, poets-would be up to the task.
We considered what would be the most impactful, surprising, or moving for the purveyors of world literature. Admittedly, we wanted to change the way that English readers approach Chinese writing. Beyond the expected stories of revolutionary tragedy, soulless oligarchy, or oriental romanticisms, we set our focus on choosing works that embody the contemporary spirit of experimentation and stylistic flair, intending to introduce textual inventions that indicate towards the nation's sheer variety and polyphony. And to tell you about these pieces.
It must be acknowledged that every writer working in the Chinese language is held to account by the vast annals of history, and the three who have taken this task to heart are San San, Chen Chuncheng, and Li Hongwei. San San's period piece, "Lady Wei's Dream," seems at first typical of a classic work, but soon cracks open to reveal a treatise on destiny and a formidable account of feminine strength, drifting from lush poeticisms to startling revelations. On the opposite side of time, Chen Chuncheng has his eye cast on the future. In his story, "Mass of Dream of the Red Chamber," he poses a hypothesis: if the most cherished tome of the Chinese canon were to be destroyed, what would happen to us? Elements of science fiction and fantasy are used to deconstruct and reconstruct the reverberations of iconic works, building an enthralling narrative of epistemological and political conquest. As for Li Hongwei, his piece, "Pulling Thunder," ranges across the tenets of Daoism, Buddhism, and divination in a story of mystical technique; this profound story questions the role of human life amidst the uncertainty of magic-which is perhaps something we've invented only to extend our own curiosities.
Our stories must rest just above or beneath reality, without mimicking its contours exactly. What one expects from literature is a degree away from direct experience, a distance by which we are given some room for discovery. The excerpt from Huo Xiangjie's novel, Stellar Corona, recounts the tale of a southern family and their development across generations, from the first colony to the latter half of the nineteenth century, when Chinese culture experienced tremendous shifts with the influx of external influence. Through his incantatory prose, the intricacies of an enormous, interconnected world are forged through a single clan's ancestral presence. Similar complexities also appear in the excerpt from Lu Yuan's novella, The Large Moon and Other Affairs, which sees a new world held within the apocalypse; celestial phenomena merge with dreamy phantasmagoria to portray a global collapse that is, despite its strangeness, still all too vivid in our era of climate devastation and international crises. Lastly, in "History in Bomi Time," the young writer Li Jiayin constructs a narrative around the fictional Bomi tribe, applying anthropological methodology with the micro-histories of independent invention, reflecting the contradictions within our contemporary evaluation of history.
Daily life often finds its way into surrealism and absurdity, and the two writers who most closely approach this chaotic tableau are Suo Er and Da Tou Ma, exemplifying their profound ability to soar unimpeded across narrative boundaries. While it initially appears to be describing the pedestrian routines of a married couple, Suo Er's "Man and Wife" veers in its latter half; turns out that the young people trying to make a living in the city are still harboring nostalgic thoughts of a profound, rural order. As for Da Tou Ma, the young, tired characters of "Catcher in the Rye" are similarly awash in the urban tide, attempting to find some enduring meaning amidst the nihilism of spectacle. Salinger's presence in the title is part of a greater puzzle in the author's 2020 collection, Nine Stories, in which she takes on the themes of nine Western literary works, intuitively rendering a collision of cross-cultural themes.
As for the six poets we've selected, they range across four generations of writing. The first is Ma Xu, born in the late fifties, who has applied his incisive consciousness to avant-garde poetics for the last forty years. Guided by his distinctive style, readers can pass through the lines to arrive at the center of his thinking, which, in the topography of poetry, is also a peak by which to look over the linguistic vistas. Representatives from the next generation-poets born in the seventies-are Jiang Li and Du Lulu. Jiang expresses a clear dialectical intelligence in his pieces, cohering imagery with philosophical practice. Du, who has been active in many channels of Chinese-language poetry, writes of the deceptively true paradoxes of contemporary life, substantiated through her presence as a proud woman poet. Fu Wei and Jia Wei are born in the nineties, and as such, their elegant, surprising work characterizes both a deep immersion in poetic tradition and the urge of any contemporary writer to free themselves from past convention. As for the mysterious poet Tan Lin, when we felt the need to incorporate a poet who writes in form-someone approaching modern aspects with the ancient temperament of ephemerality, precision, and perfection-he came immediately to mind.
Additionally, we've included two essayists in this volume. Mao Jian has long been renowned for her cultural and film criticism, and in her moving memoir, "No One Sees the Grasses Growing," she recalls the eighties and nineties, a time of unconstrained artistic prosperity for both the nation and the author, then a university student in Shanghai. As for the writer Hei Tao, his pieces are paintings of Jiangnan's dense and vivid hues. Since its very beginnings, China has distinguished between its northern and southern regions, and here, Hei draws our attention to the warm valleys and waters that raised him, the residences, courtyards, tools, plants, relatives, and sages that appear now as if in a dream. They are elegies for the lost things of the south, and through them passes not only sorrow, but a profound love and reverence.
In bringing all of these writers to the page, we are profoundly grateful to our translators, who have worked tirelessly to untangle images from their representations, emotions from their grammatical constraints, and philosophy from that strange liminal space between the word and the ineffable. Their effort indicates a truth that literature can learn from physics: nothing is ever destroyed-it simply changes forms.
Perhaps to absolve ourselves from what Baudelaire called the ennui of modernity, there is only literature-its creation, its translation-because this work still requires equal parts passion and intelligence, dedication and discovery. It...
