A hometown is a nose bleed (or construction-site cement coursing through your parents’ veins) a warm current that even time cannot resolve Picking up a piece of the past is like picking up a fragment of bone, unearthing night’s dark flesh A hometown isn’t fertile soil (but it is a ferry) a poor and humble […]
Cindy M. Carter
CINDY M. CARTER is a Beijing-based translator of Chinese fiction, poetry and film, and a founder of the literary website Paper Republic. Her script and subtitle translations have won awards at Cannes, Berlin, Venice, Rotterdam and numerous other film festivals, and she has worked with dozens of China’s most daring independent directors, including Wang Bing (West of Tracks; Fengming: Portrait of a Chinese Woman), Wang Xiaoshuai (Shanghai Dreams; In Love We Trust), Huang Wenhai (WE: Creatures of Politics, Voices of Conscience), Zhao Liang (Crime and Punishment; Petition) and Xu Xin (Karamay). Her 2004 translation of Guo Xiaolu’s novel Village of Stone was nominated for the Dublin IMPAC Award and the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. She recently finished translating Yan Lianke’s Dream of Ding Village, a novel banned for its frank depiction of blood-selling and AIDS in the Chinese countryside. The book will be published in early 2011 by Constable and Robinson, U.K.
MOONLIGHT 月光 by Xiao Qiao (translated by Cindy M. Carter)
The moonlight at my door is white. It flashes by like weaponry. A shattered scenery resolves into sweet and sharpened drops of candy. Bit by bit, they prick the slightly-slanted corners of your eyes. 我门前的月光很白 像某种兵器一闪而过 破碎的景象慢慢坚实 变成甜蜜的有点尖锐的球形糖果 一颗一颗 刺穿你微微倾斜的眼角 Return to table of contents for Issue 2 Winter 2010
CACTUS (THE IMMORTAL PALM) 仙人掌 by Xiao Qiao (translated by Cindy M. Carter)
The Chinese word for cactus, 仙人掌, translates as “Palm of the Immortals.” The cactus grows not from immortal arms, but vainly from the sands, thirsting for a surgery: Oh cut me, cut me open, let me hear the water gush from me… Comes a western trader, peddling wigs as sleek as silver, whose merchant-eyes pierce […]
REQUIEM by Cindy M. Carter
The first bullet makes a brand new hole in a history vermilion. Potholes, bullet holes, dark stains upon the paving stones. Months from now, all this will be replaced. Heads, arms, legs, trunks, tanks, guns, bitumen and bicycles. One long row of cycles crashes to the ground. It will be some time before the corpses […]
Contributor Bios for Issue 2 Winter 2010
Issue 2 Winter 2010 TAO AIMIN is known for her anthropological works made from the washboards of rural woman. Over the years she has collected thousands of these boards, recording the stories and faces of the women whose hands wore these boards down through the recursive repetition of monotonous labor. Creating installations and experimental ink […]
MAYDAY Magazine: Issue 2 Winter 2010
ART curated by Maya Kóvskaya PRACTICES, POWER & THE PUBLIC SPHERE: Dialogical Space & Multiple Modernities in Asian Contemporary Art ART NONFICTION Maya Kóvskaya Public Action Art and Performative Interventions in the Chinese Public Sphere ART NONFICTION William Hurst (performance photography by Han Bing) ORPHANS OF PROGRESS: Workers and Political Discourse in Post-Socialist China ART […]
