Mohabir on Bradbury’s Hsia Yu at Jacket2

Rajiv Mohabir reviews Steve Bradbury’s translation of Salsa, by Hsia Yü , for Imaginative Reading at Jacket2:

Translator Steve Bradbury says in his endnotes that this collection can be seen as a post-impressionist Proustian poème-à-clef that lends itself to “imaginative readings.” For Bradbury, the importance of the poem is in its multiple significations and readings. It’s clear Bradbury preserved the musicality of the line, which is a feature of poetry that can be impossible yet imperative to translate given social distance and dissimilarities between linguistic groups. Preserving or transposing the sonorous quality of Taiwanese Chinese into English, Bradbury realizes Yü’s extraordinary wordplay.

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