About the Editor

Lucas Klein, MA, MPhil, editor and founder of CipherJournal, is a labor activist, writer, and translator currently living in Connecticut, after having lived in both Paris and Beijing. A graduate of Middlebury College, where he studied Literary Studies and Chinese, he is currently slouching towards a Ph.D. in the dept. of East Asian Languages & Literatures at Yale University.

Translations of his from the French and Chinese have appeared or are forthcoming in several print and online literary journals in addition to this one. Specifically, he has translated the poetry of Charles Baudelaire for Composite Translations, and the next issue of Frank will include his translations of poetry by Aimé Césaire, Léopold Senghor, Li Bai 李白 and short fiction by Gao Xingjian 高行健. His translations of Yu Hua 余華 and Ge Fei 格非 appeared in the issue of Manoa devoted to postmodernist Chinese fiction, while his translations of Du Fu 杜甫, Li Shangyin 李商隱, and Wen Yiduo 聞一多 were published on Fascicle. He translated poems for the Taipei International Poetry Festival by Yang Weichen 楊維晨, Yang Ze 楊澤, Walis Nogang 瓦歷斯諾乾, Jing Xianghai 鯨向海, Yang Jiaxian 楊佳嫻, Xu Wenwei 須文蔚 (with Andrea Lingenfelter), Wu Yinning 吳音寧, and Hung Hung 鴻鴻, published in Images of the World. Most recently, his translations of three poems by Chen Dongdong 陳東東 were printed in the Inside China special edition of World Literature Today. His translation of Japanese with Ease has been published by Assimil.

Lucas is also a prolific book reviewer, appearing regularly in Rain Taxi (click for his takes on Alex Kuo, Eileen Chang 張愛玲, Bei Dao 北島, Yang Lian 楊煉, Eliot Weinberger, which was blurbed for the back cover of the paperbook, and Jerome Rothenberg; his reviews of Han Shaogong 韓少功, Miljenko Jergović, more Gao Xingjian, Mo Yan 莫言, Xue Di 雪迪, Gregory Rabassa,  Gu Cheng 顧城, Jacques Roubaud, Charles Baudelaire, Mary Ann Caws, and more Gao Xingjian have appeared in print), and The American Book Review has published his review of Gao Xingjian’s novel One Man’s Bible 一個人的聖經. His review of The Miseries of Poetry, by Kent Johnson and Alexandra Papaditsas, appeared in The Review of Contemporary Fiction, a comparative take on versions of the Daode Jing 道德經 by David B. Axelrod and Thomas Meyer was published on Zoland Poetry, and he has reviewed Eric Hayot’s Chinese Dreams: Pound, Brecht, Tel Quel for Twentieth Century Literature while his review of Ezra Pound and Confucianism: Remaking Humanism in the Face of Modernity by Feng Lan is forthcoming from The Canadian Revue of Comparative Literature as is a joint review of Mary Fung & David Lunde’s translation of The Carving of Insects by Bian Zhilin 卞之琳 and Eight Contemporary Chinese Poets edited & translated by Naikan Tao and Tony Prince from the Asian Studies Review.

Elsewhere, The second issue of Palimpsest includes two of his original poems, and The Modern Word has awarded honorable mention to his entries in two contests, one a fictional book review, the other an imaginary review of the film version of Robert Coover’s The Public Burning. He has appeared in Bookforum responding to a questionnaire about internationally-focused literary criticism in the absence of Susan Sontag, and a letter to the editors of The Believer, responding to an article about Araki Yasusada, was published in Typomag. Big Bridge has published his article on Kenneth Rexroth’s Chinese translations from the Beat Meets East Conference, June 2004, in Chengdu 成都.

With Haun Saussy and Jonathan Stalling, he is the editor of Ernest Fenollosa and Ezra Pound, The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, A Critical Edition, forthcoming from Fordham University Press.

Click here for his full Curriculum Vitae. Lucas welcomes any comments or questions by email at LKlein (a) CipherJournal (dot) com.

Lucas Klein
New Haven, CT
June, 2007