Our last podcast was on Mao’s Yan’An lectures. If you left that podcast wondering, “Fine, but what’s an example of what Mao considered REALLY bad art?”, then we have a treat for you: Gao Xingjian’s 1981 play “Bus Stop.” A peculiar existential piece very much indebted to Samuel Beckett, it hardly seems the sort of […]
How would the world’s population function if it knew the end was coming…in 400 years? What would your view of humanity be if everyone you loved had been brutally taken from you by a tyrannical regime? These are the two structuring questions for the Hugo and Nebula-award winning novel The Three-Body Problem by China’s greatest […]
Back in action after a brief hiatus, Lee and Rob interview translator and professor Lucas Klein, whose most recent work, October Dedications, is a book of translations of the poet Mang Ke. Prof. Klein is best-known for his work with Xi Chuan, but gives a nice guided tour of historical trends in poetry translation, the differences […]
In today’s podcast, we will take a look back at Haizi, post-1979 China’s most famous poet. Previously, in this episode, we talked about Haizi in this mythologically laced poem. Today, we’re going to take a look at his most famous poem, called “Facing the Sea, the Spring Warm, Flowers Blooming.” http://traffic.libsyn.com/chineseliteraturepodcast/Haizi_-_Poem_-_Looking_Towards_the_Sea.mp3 Below, Lee has provided […]
Political allegory? Straight-ahead love story? Supernatural adventure? All of the above? Lee and Rob discuss the story “Rare Stone from Heaven” (tr. Hu Shiguang) from the renowned collection Strange Tales from Liao Zhai (《聊斋志异》), and debate just how literally you can read a story about a man’s love affair with a rock. […]
Dead just months before the June 4th massacre in Tiananmen Square, Hai Zi is held up as the great “pure” poet of contemporary China, unconcerned with politics. But how true is that? We discuss his epic work, The Seven Books of the Sun, by way of grappling with the question. […]