David Perry
I’m grateful and pleased not only to have my own work in the latest issue of philoSOPHIA , but also to share space with the writer and artist Han Bo alongside scholars and translators Sun Dong, Yuan Gao, Yuming Piao, and Yizhong Ning in a special forum focused on Han Bo’s China Eastern Railway 《中东铁路》 cycle of poems. (I post this a day after having received here in Shanghai the physical copy of the journal — physical mail between the US and China seems to arrive later and later.)
Philosopher, translator and theorist Kyoo Lee — “translingual reader of all things poetic as well as prosaic” — proposed and edited the project a year or so after I gave a talk with her at Fudan University on poetry and translation for a graduate seminar led by Bao Huiyi . In On & Off the Rails: Notes on the Practice of Poetry & Translation in which I talked about a set of in-progress translations of Han Bo poems that Monika Lin and I would later publish as The China Eastern Railway .
Kyoo was fascinated by the dense wordplay within the poems and how it sustains multiple, proliferating readings of a text that, on the surface, is a poetic travelogue tracing 2012 journey tracing the historic route of a built by imperial Russia, seized by Japan, and which played a complex role in the convulsive sequence of transitions from the faltering Qing to the shaky Republic to a doomed Manchukuo and then on into the volatile stages of revolutionary and post-revolutionary PRC history.
David Perry