Heinz Insu Fenkl’s Cathay is a complex interweaving of fiction, translation, scholarship, and transformative writing. It includes new translations of the three luminaries of Tang Dynasty poetry: Li Po, Tu Fu, and Wang Wei—but that is only to whet the appetite. The volume also features the opening of the seventeenth-century Korean Buddhist classic Nine Cloud Dream, by Kim Man-jung, an emulation of a horrific yet transcendent Tang Dynasty chuanji (“strange tale”), a magical, and yet postcolonial revisioning of Hans Christian Andersen’s nineteenth-century fairytale, “The Nightingale,” and the enchanting story of the Shakyamuni Buddha’s conception and birth. The scope and depth of Fenkl’s achievement are astonishing. A simultaneous tribute to and criticism of Ezra Pound’s history-making 1915 chapbook of the same title, Fenkl’s Cathay is destined to be an instant literary classic.
Heinz Insu Fenkl is an internationally renowned author, editor, translator, and folklorist. His first book, Memories of My Ghost Brother, an autobiographical novel about growing up in Korea as a bi-racial child in the ’60s, was a Barnes and Noble “Discover Great New Writers” book in 1996 and a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award for First Fiction in 1997. He is also coeditor of two major collections of Korean American fiction: Kŏri and Century of the Tiger. He is currently the recipient of a fellowship from the Korean Literature Translation Institute to translate the seventeenth-century Korean Buddhist masterpiece, Nine Cloud Dream. Fenkl was raised in Korea, Germany, and the United States. He lives in the Hudson Valley with his wife and daughter and teaches at the State University of New York, New Paltz.
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