conventions xiiiCONVENTIONSPoem titles are marked by double angular brackets (e.g. «What the
Eagle Says»), to distinguish them from journal articles, book chapters
and so on (double quotation marks) and book titles (italics). Footnote
numbers appear at the end of the paragraph that precedes the poem,
out of respect for the integrity of the text. For the sake of consistency,
this also holds for other indented quotations. Reference to untitled
poems, the originals of which are actually called «Untitled» (᮴乬) in
Chinese, is marked by lower case after the first letter of the poem’s
first word, and named after the poem’s opening line, followed by four
successive dots (e.g. «He opens his third eye....»). In poetry and other
citations, three separate dots... indicate the omission of words from
the passage in question.
As for my use of upper case in poetry translations (titles aside), this
has depended on the feel of the original. Some of my renditions are
in lower case throughout (e.g. Yan Jun); in others only names and
the first-person singular I are capitalized (e.g. Han Dong); in a third
category the first word of each stanza also starts with upper case (e.g.
Haizi); and in clearly punctuated texts the first word of each sentence
is capitalized (e.g. Sun Wenbo).
The points of the compass are written with lower case only if their
usage is strictly spatial or geographical: Haizi lived north of Beijing, but
a highly ideologized polemic produced a North-South dichotomy. Liter-
ary-critical terms are written with lower case only if they are of wide,
multi-interpretable scope, as distinct from specific, localized literary-
historical categories: hence, romantic poethood but Western Romantics like
Byron and Shelley, and modernism but Socialist Realism.
Following current usage, for alphabetizing Chinese I have used
Hanyu pinyin (∝䇁ᣐ䷇) but only added tone marks when sound is
truly important, and retained other transcriptions as they occur in bib-
liographical detail. The same principle has informed my use of simpli-
fied characters throughout, but of full-form characters for full-form
publications as they appear in the list of works cited.
The narrative is entirely in English, with original forms given in pa-
rentheses for relevant terms and titles translated from other languages.