Lu Xun’s Weeds, translated by Matt Turner
Poetry. Bilingual Chinese and English. July 2019. Limited-edition artists’ book by Monika Lin and trade paperback. Featuring an introduction by Nick Admussen and woodblock print artwork by Monika Lin. Make inquiries here. This title is available for order from Small Press Distribution, Amazon, and elsewhere.
Read a poem from Weeds: Faint Bloodstains
Read Dylan Levi King’s review on Paper Republic: “Matt Turner manages to capture…the madness and slack beauty of Lu Xun’s prose poetry…a good match for drinking alone while listening to the Sunn O))) album with Scott Walker.”
Weird syntactical swerves, psychological scratch loops, and rocket trajectories characterize these poems. Certainly, they never yield to Western Modernism’s economies. Instead, Lu Xun’s oneiric imagery is ever chocked and gusty; unexpected pronouns pop up like masked faces at a window. It would take a poet-translator as deft, daring, and refractory as Matt Turner to take on the sarcasm, playfulness, mystery, and aggressive invention of these poems in Chinese. If ever the worms of boredom have settled into your heart, this is the book that will draw them out, unthread them through your pores, and leave them to dangle until “they squint at each other and, slowly, slowly, scatter.”
–Forrest Gander
As the literary embodiment of China’s soul, Lu Xun has gone through many reincarnations in the form of translation. Matt Turner’s new rendition of Weeds (until now known as Wild Grass) is a daring leap across the linguistic abyss. Like a magnanimous host making room for a persnickety guest, Turner’s English is a generous accommodation for the pique, pout, and poetics of the wild and protean imagination of a Chinese master.
–YUNTE HUANG, EDITOR OF THE BIG RED BOOK OF MODERN CHINESE LITERATURE
Lu Xun’s poems are stories about stories, their seductions and betrayals. The argument of “The Argument” is that stories are best received when they are not true. Those who say a new-born son will be rich and great are well received, but note that he will die and you’ll be beaten. In order to tell the truth and not be beaten, the speaker is advised by a teacher simply to exclaim “Oh! This child! Just look! There!” The story that is without story is “a good story,” because it attends to the moment and its place: “Everything interlocks into a pattern where the clear sky meets the water, and weaves into a single piece.” Memory is an illusion, one that haunts the brother who destroyed his younger brother’s kite, and who lives with deep guilt. The only free man in such a story is the one who cannot remember the story. Paradoxically, perhaps, we are lucky readers not to have witnessed the “death and decay” that Lu Xun wishes even for his “weeds.”
–Susan Schultz
Like Shakespeare, the fact that Lu Xun used a particular turn of phrase is sufficient to establish that phrase as part of modern standard Chinese. His readers at the time encountered some of his writing, Weeds included, with bafflement and wildly varying interpretations. This translation emphasizes that generative uncertainty. It cares more about what the collection could mean than what it must. In this way, the translation carries across the sense of the openness of the future that energized and terrified Chinese intellectuals in the early twentieth century.
–Nick Admussen, from the introduction to weeds