Our First Texts
It has been a busy few months, but we are delighted to have now published our first texts on the website.
Writers have written in either English or Chinese, and we’re hard at work commissioning cross-translations between the two languages.
Some pieces are still in the works, including pieces by Sipei Lu and Zhenhao Shi, the latter translated by stellar translator Poppy Toland.
But we thought we would share our initial batch of pieces, and then post updates as we publish more.
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Hannah’s Stevens' story, Lady Amherst’s Pheasant takes as its starting point Liu’s chapter on “wind and bone” (feng gu 風骨). Liu writes that writing that lacks “bone” (structure) and “wind” (inner force) resembles nothing more than a flock of colourful pheasants “jumping about in a garden of letters.” In this story, the pheasant becomes something sinister, something just glimpsed out of thecorner of the eye.
Published in English, with Chinese forthcoming!
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Ningli Deng 邓宁立’s extraordinary collection of poems, At Mount Heluo / 在合罗山, Jackfruit / 菠萝蜜, Homebrew Plum Wine / 家酿青梅酒 and Tibetan Mastiff 藏 is now online in both Chinese, and in English translation.
The final poem in the collection, Wisdom Tooth / 智齿 is still forthcoming.
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Meanwhile, in Boda Chen, the First and Last Dracologist, Yuhang Zhang reimagines Liu Xie’s work through the eyes of a nineteenth century scholar, Boda Chen. Liu’s obsession with pattern, order and purity is replaced by something more bodily and more unsettling: decay, live burials, opium smoke and unseemly happenings at the meat counter at Tesco’s.
The text is in English, with Chinese forthcoming.
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Will Buckingham’s On Spiders: An Eight-Legged Essay threads together Chinese theories of literature, Greek myth, and contemporary science to explore Liu’s claim that pattern, or wen 文, is fundamental to the universe. Along the way, it contains some intriguing facts about spiders in the Chinese literary tradition.
In English, with Chinese forthcoming.
Happy reading!