The Organization of Distance

Reviews / Votes

"The introduction's theoretical framework will surely be a contribution to translation studies, the modern chapters are as astute as they are powerful, and the conclusion on the role of transformation in the construction of Chineseness carefully articulates the political implications of the book. [...] More scholars would do well to work as ambitiously as Klein in this book, to write across the gaps of China and the West, modern and premodern, sinology and comparative literature - gaps that can only be bridged by translation."

- Thomas J. Mazanec, in Journal of Translation Studies, New Series, 3.2 (December 2019).



"Klein's readings of poems throughout The Organization of Distance are at once learned, elegant, theoretically informed, and philologically convincing both in the mix of Chinese and world literary traditions elaborated. Canons are shown to be not closed into national intertextuality but opened out into the languages and modes of the world that helped inform them. [...] Capaciously and learnedly, Lucas Klein has given us a Chinese poetic tradition deeply embedded in the languages and forms of the world, always transacting and translating them from the foreign into the native and the native into the foreign."

- Rob Wilson, University of California at Santa Cruz, USA, in Journal of Oriental Studies (forthcoming)



"the challenge of Klein's insights will be of interest and important to a range of audiences. His book, quite amazingly, speaks to scholars and readers of both modern and classical Chinese poetry, engaging the scholarship from both of these fields while challenging its members to think outside their disciplinary boxes. The book is suitable for in-depth graduate seminars, especially on the topics of translation and translingual practice. Although it may be a rather steep climb for undergraduate readers, given that Klein assumes his readers possess a considerable familiarity with the scholarly literature on both classical and modern Chinese poetry, I think that chapters 4 and 5 both stand well on their own and could be assigned as additional reading on Du Fu and Li Shangyin for ambitious students. Last but not least, Klein's book is important because his arguments are in dialogue with a larger movement to reconsider the global dimensions of the medieval world, both the way in which poetry during the Tang-Song period borrowed objects and translated ideas from broader global exchanges of the past and the way that this poetry continues to be recast and reinvented by poets of China's present."

- Benjamin Ridgway, Swarthmore College, in MCLC Resource Center Publication (November, 2020).



"Lucas Klein's The Organization of Distance is a carefully-researched and well-argued response to the central question, "is translation something done to the Chinese poem,or is it rather done through the Chinese poem?" (p. 232). Klein's positive answer to this question not only shifts our thinking about Chinese poetry and translation to the processes of foreignization and nativization that are already activated in poetic
creativity and interpretation themselves, but also demonstrates that the "Chineseness" and "translatedness" of Chinese poetry are co-emergent and interdependent, in modern and contemporary Chinese poetry as well as far back in premodern eras such as the Six Dynasties and especially the Tang. I emphasize "as well as" because the book's most important aim - in my view also one of its most intellectually engaging and exciting aspects - is to close the perceived schism between premodern and modern China, also posited as various binaries of classical Chinese poetry versus modern vernacular poetry, "authentic" Chinese tradition versus Western-derived and translational modernity, Chinese literature-in-itself versus Chinese literature-intranslation [...] Klein's beautifully presented and eloquently written book offers much to all readers
interested in poetry, translation, Chinese studies, and Comparative Literature."

- Xiaofan Amy Li, Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge/University of Kent, in Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews 41 (2019).