Abstract
This essay suggests that the transnational or global turn in recent scholarship on modernism must be tempered by equal attention to the mediations and translations that complicate purportedly global accounts of modernist literature. I take as my example two instances of what I term the modernist news poem, a form that evokes the newspaper page in its rapid leaps from one place or context to another. Auden’s “In Time of War” sonnet sequence and verse commentary deploy such leaps to present a global vision of journalistic lies and poetic truth. But this clear Audenesque vision, shared by many scholars of global modernism, becomes muddied when one attends to mediation—to the problem of circulation, translation, mistranslation, and that which does not get translated at all. The problem is exemplified by the publication of Auden’s sonnet sequence in Chinese translation, including translations by the poet Bian Zhilin. Bian’s own news poem “Composition of Distances” (“Juli de zuzhi”) and his self-translation of the poem into English in turn suggest an approach to modernism that is less sure of its global perspective and more attentive to the discontinuities of media, communication, and translation. Instead of envisioning news, poetry, and translation through such binaries as good and bad, truth and lies, China and the West, the local and the global, original and translation, Auden’s and Bian’s poems and translations and their circuitous history of publication highlight the movements between these poles: the mediations, omissions, misrecognitions, and mistranslations that belie sweeping global visions.