Song of the Snow Lion:
New Writing from Tibet

Series Editor Frank Stewart.
Guest Editors Tsering Shakya and Herbert J. Batt.

Song of the Snow Lion features new fiction, poetry, and essays from Tibet. Since China’s invasion of the country in 1950 and the suffering wrought by the Cultural Revolution, Tibetans have struggled to prevent their ancient culture and country from disappearing. At the same time, many of them recognize that modernization in some form must come. Out of such difficult political conditions and cultural paradoxes, Tibetan authors have developed a literature that, despite Chinese censorship, explores the pressing questions facing the country today.

The authors in the feature include Tashi Dawa, Sebo, Ju Kalzang, Tashi Pelden, Alai, and Geyang. In addition, there are works by Yangdon, the first Tibetan woman to publish a novel; poet and novelist Meizhuo, a woman of extraordinary range; and Dhondup Gyal, considered the founder of modern Tibetan writing. An overview essay by co-guest editor Tsering Shakya explains the rise of a modern Tibetan literature.

Other writers in the volume include Vietnamese American author Andrew Lam; Lenore Look, a Chinese American woman who traveled back to her parents’ birthplace in the PRC; exiled Chinese poet Xue Di; essayist Virgil Suárez; and poet Bill Tremblay. In addition, the volume features reviews of current books and a portfolio of photographs of Ladakh by Karl Einar-Lofqvist.

About the guest editors: Tsering Shakya is one of Tibet’s leading intellectuals; his books include Fire Under the Snow: The Testimony of a Tibetan Prisoner and The Dragon in the Land of Snow: A History of Modern Tibet.
Herbert J. Batt is a translator and scholar of Chinese literature; his recent book is Tales of Tibet: Contemporary Chinese-language Fiction on Tibet.

Extracts

“Chinese rule had an immediate and striking impact on the Tibetan language at every level—because it was initially used as the means for the Communists to convey their message. At this stage, Tibetan intellectuals were recruited as ‘important patriotic personages’—a class that would mediate between the past and the present. Because many of the early literary elite came from monasteries and the religious community, the Chinese assumed that they would be trusted by the masses.”
—from “The Waterfall and Fragrant Flowers:
 The Development of Tibetan Literature
 Since 1950” by Tsering Shakya

“He crawled to her side and marked a bloody cross on their son’s pure-white forehead. With a laugh, he spoke these last words: ‘Damn. Killing everywhere. With knives. With guns. That’s life.’ Ugyen watched his mother pull his father’s knife from his belt and solemnly lay it on him there inside her robe, passing on the legacy to him. The icy blade on his face made him shudder as if he’d gotten an electric shock. The cold steel of the knife pressed against his chest so heavy he couldn’t breathe. His father stroked his face, laughed contentedly, then died.”
–from “The Glory of the Wind Horse” by Tashi Dawa

“History—ah, history!
Why have you laid your head down to sleep here?
If the ascendance of the Tibetan empire
Had continued to spread into the heavens like the stars
It would have been absorbed into the vast emptiness of the night.
The Land of Snows is like a fur coat torn from a rabid dog
Faded and fallen in a desolate corner of the universe.”
–from “Snow Mountain Tears” by Dpa’da

208 pp., winter 2000 (12:2), $20
ISBN 978-0-8248-2385-6
Project Muse
JSTOR