The Zigzag Way: Avant-Garde Poetry from China

Series Editor Frank Stewart.
Guest editor Arthur Sze.

The summer 1998 issue features the new generation of avant-garde poets from the People’s Republic of China and Taiwan, guest-edited by Arthur Sze. Nearly all of the writers featured here live in China under the scrutiny of the government, and the government’s overview extends to those outside the country as well. As a result, as author and translator Wang Ping explains in an interview with Arthur Sze, Chinese writers have learned to avoid censorship while striving to tell the truth: writing, as she says, in a “zigzag way.”

Included in this issue are poetry by sixteen Chinese writers; an interview by Sze with poet and fiction writer Wang Ping; fiction and nonfiction from Hong Kong, gathered for MANOA by Lisa Ottiger; new translations of poetry by Rabindranath Tagore, winner of the Nobel Prize, and fiction by Enchi Fumiko, recipient of Japan’s Order of Cultural Merit; fiction, essays, poetry, and reviews by twenty U.S. writers; and a portfolio of prints by Hawai‘i artist Laura Ruby.

Extracts

“Since words were created

what fun did I ever have?

I look for news of the sun

like a swallow’s tail

With spring and rain

I came into this world

What fun did I ever have?

Flowers bloom on top of my head

like a pumpkin song”
—from “Since Words Were Created”
 by Liang Xiao Ming

“When I first saw him, he was peering through the glass of my shop, as if he were just another man on Portland Street with a minute to spare. But he didn’t seem to have a minute to spare. He wasn’t looking at the blazer Ah Ho had made. He paid no attention to the solitary mannequin, which I’d dressed so well it looked like a businessman who happened to misplace his head. No, he was looking at me, taking my measure in my own tailor shop.”
—from “Lau the Tailor”
 by Charles Philipp Martin

208 pp., summer 1998 (10:1), $20
ISBN 978-0-8248-2057-6
JSTOR