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Lucian of Samosata
- The True History
- Icaromenippus, An Aerial Expedition
Ibn al-Nafīs - Theologus Autodidacticus
Rokeya Sakhawat Hussain - Sultana's Dream
Naif Al-Mutawa - The 99: Origins

Sometimes when reading old things that have been called "early science-fiction" I think "Well, that's not really very science-y," but while I was reading these I thought more about what was known of science in the times they were written, and about how even some modern stuff doesn't fit my sometimes exacting preferences for storytelling, and decided that these all definitely count each in their ways. Lucian does the fantastic voyage; Ibn al-Nafīs the message story; Hussain the utopia. And of course the 99 doesn't need any explanations, it's just a modern superhero series.

Long post behind cut )Also of interest: Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad's website Islam and Science Fiction.
[identity profile] whereweather.livejournal.com
#13. Three Chinese Poets: Translations of poems by Wang Wei, Li Bai, and Du Fu, translated by Vikram Seth
1992, HarperCollins

Here is an interesting double play: a collection of poems by three Tang Dynasty Chinese poets, translated into English by Indian poet and novelist Vikram Seth.

I had not known Seth spoke Chinese (though looking it up on the Internet, apparently everybody else did: he is "a famous polyglot" who speaks German, Welsh and French as well as Hindi, Urdu, Mandarin and English, and one of his early award-winning books was a travel narrative through Muslim China and Tibet (From Heaven Lake, 1983, in case you were wondering)).  In fact, I had not known much about Seth at all except what I decided/learned/concluded from reading about the first third of Golden Gate, his amazingly ambitious and eccentric verse novel about San Francisco, late one night when someone left it in the grad-student work room while I was procrastinating on writing my thesis.  From reading this I concluded that Seth appeals to me.  I like his playfulness, his eccentricity -- his standing-outside-of-the-orbitness; at the same time, his obvious irregular but snooty attachment to the Established.  (Not that this is a universally admirable trait, but it's something I share, so I recognized myself in it.)  I like his queer sensibility, his flashes of nastiness blurred with a deep attempt to reach for compassion and humanity.  I like his baroque attachment to rhyme, which I also have and which is not very popular these days -- is very risky, also, because unsuccessful free verse is just boring, but unsuccessful rhymed verse descends into doggerel, which makes me sometimes too nervous even to make the attempt.

I think some of Seth's translations here are successful, and some of them really aren't.  (Which is okay, right?)  He has taken the -- to me -- very surprising approach of trying to translate the poems in metered and rhymed English versions; they are, in fact, metered and rhymed in Chinese, but of course the process of translation complicated everything... I feel like this inevitably puts such a personal stamp on the end results that in this entry I'm tagging Seth as the author, _as well as_ the translator.  (Eccentric, maybe, but... so? Seth is eccentric; he makes me feel like eccentricity.)  Even though, I should note in fairness, Seth gives the disclaimer that his translations "are not intended as transcreations or free translations" à la Ezra Pound.

Though you are kind enough to ask... )

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