Special Feature: The Poetry and Art of Jidi Majia
Translated by Denis Mair, Eleanor Goodman and Jami Proctor Xu
Art by Jidi Majia
Prose by Jidi Majia
Poetry by Jidi Majia
Jidi Majia was born in 1961 in southwest China in the largest Yi ethnic area in the country, the Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture. When he was 24 years old, his collection Self-Portraits and Others won the second National Ethnic Minority Literary Award in Poetry (1981–1984). At 25, he won China’s highest national poetry award, the third National Excellence Award for a Poetry Collection (1985) for his book Songs of First Love.
His poetry has been translated into nearly forty languages, and close to eighty volumes of his work have been published in more than forty countries and regions. This makes him the most translated contemporary Chinese poet of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. He has received many awards, including the Sholokhov Literary Memorial Award, the Chinese Poetry Soul Award from the Chinese International PEN Association, the South African Mkiwa Humanitarian Award, the European Medal of Poetry and Art HOMER award, the Romanian Contemporary Magazine Award for Excellence in Poetry, the Bucharest Poetry Award, the Janitsky Literature Award in Poland, the Silver Willow Poetry Lifetime Achievement Award from the Cambridge Xu Zhimo Poetry and Art Festival, and the Tadeusz Micinski Expressionist Phoenix Award in Poland.
Other books include The Eagle’s Wing and the Sun, Identity, Fire and Words, I, the Leopard . . . , From the Leopard to Mayakovsky, A Great River, and Split-Open Planet (Regent Press, U.S.). At present Jidi Majia serves as vice-chairman of the China Writers Association.
Denis Mair (translator) holds an M.A. in Chinese from Ohio State University and has taught at the University of Pennsylvania. He has translated the autobiographies of the philosopher Feng Youlan and the Buddhist monk Shih Chen Hua. His translation of the art criticism of Zhu Zhu was published by Hunan Fine Arts Press (2009). He has translated poetry by Jidi Majia, Yan Li, Mai Cheng, Meng Lang, and many others.
Eleanor Goodman (Gu Ailing) (translator) is a Research Associate at the Harvard Fairbank Center. Her book of translations, Something Crosses My Mind: Selected Poems of Wang Xiaoni (Zephyr Press, 2014) was the recipient of a 2013 PEN/Heim Translation Grant and winner of the 2015 Lucien Stryk Prize. The book was also shortlisted for the International Griffin Prize in 2015. A collection of her own poetry, Nine Dragon Island, was shortlisted for the Drunken Boat First Book Prize.
Jami Proctor Xu (translator) is a poet, translator, and artist. She writes in Chinese and English. She grew up in Tucson, Arizona, and currently splits her time between Northern California and China. Her Chinese poetry collections include Shimmers (EMS: Du Shi Series, 2013) and Suddenly Starting to Dance (Yi Press, 2016). Her English chapbook Hummingbird Ignites a Star was published in 2014. Her poems appear frequently in journals and anthologies in China and the U.S. Jami has translated collections by the Chinese poets Jidi Majia and Song Lin. In 2013 she received a Zhujiang Poetry Award for a non-Chinese poet who has made a significant contribution to contemporary Chinese poetry.
Image from Paper Republic