1998

The Zigzag Way
Avant-Garde Poetry from China

Series Editor Frank Stewart
Guest editor Arthur Sze

Inland Shores
Writing from Western Canada

Series Editor Frank Stewart
Guest editor Charlene Gilmore

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

The winter 1998 issue of MĀNOA features a collection of nature writing guest-edited by Charlene Gilmore. Focusing on Western Canada, this feature includes poetry by Jan Zwicky, Tim Lilburn, Elizabeth Philips, Charles Lillard, and Monty Reid; fiction by Kevin Van Tighem and Susan Haley; and essays by Theresa Kishkan, Don Gayton, Dave Carpenter, Sid Marty, and Alan Haig-Brown.

Also in this issue: an interview with Indian fiction writer Bharati Mukherjee; new translations of poems by Ayukawa Nobuo; fiction by Hawai‘i writer Cedric Yamanaka; essays by Ken Lamberton and Dorie Bargmann; “Brief Lives,” a collection of short memoirs by Leon Edel, Marjorie Sinclair, Virgil Suarez, Gao Da, Kimiko Hahn, and others; and “Stories in the Stepmother Tongue,” a collection of fiction by writers whose native language is not English.

Extracts

“I went under the

     earth and the river

gave me a rag, a leg bone to hold.

We looked into one another's

face. Don't say I'm here.

I am feverish with grass.

A dark in things, in wild rose,

        a stalk, a line coming out of the

        mouth and

curving, is weight, privacy, sleep,

           a cache of fat

the seeable thing sucks on, turns to and

     lives with.”
—from “Slow World” by Tim Lilburn

“Aunt Dot stood upon the stone threshold and pointed out landmarks. She recalled how my grandfather, John Claude, plowed one field with a team of horses, and how my grandmother, born Ora Zook, of resolute Pennsylvania-Dutch stock, plowed the other. Glancing down, I saw broken fragments of Delft china glinting in the grass, reminders of my grandmother’s vanished kitchen. Father recalled the night the house burned to the ground, when mice, chewing on matches, set the place on fire. It was he who first woke to sound the alarm. How do you get eight kids out of a burning shack? Grandfather picked up my uncle Walter, then a toddler, and simply threw him out through the front window, glass and all. As they recalled that night, I looked down and saw, shining among the sage, pieces of broken, melted glass, coloured with time.”
—from “Where the Deer and
 Antelope Play” by Sid Marty

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

232 pp., winter 1998 (10:2), $20
ISBN 978-0-8248-2143-2
JSTOR