Translation Encounters: A Dialogue Between Authors and Translators

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Translation Encounters: A Dialogue Between Authors and Translators

“Translation Encounters: A Dialogue Between Authors and Translators” features translators Jeffrey Angles, Jennifer Feeley, and Lucas Klein, who will be joined by their writers Hiromi Itō 伊藤 比呂美, Eva Wong Yi 黃怡, and Xi Chuan 西川 to talk about their various collaborations: How long have they been collaborating? How did they ‘find’ each other? How are the translation processes? Have the collaborations changed over time? How much input do the writers provide to the translations, and in what way is this input essential, or not? Were there notable times when translators and writers were in disagreement? Our speakers will also read selected texts, followed by a Q&A session. This discussion will take place online and people from all over the world are welcome to listen in. [Find out what time it will be where you are: https://bit.ly/31IbNun] Moderated by Cha’s co-editor Tammy Lai-Ming Ho.

TRANSLATION ENCOUNTERS
Date: Saturday 25 July 2020
Time: 10:00 – 11:30 a.m. (GMT+8)
Platform: Zoom https://bit.ly/3eYq7CP
(Meeting ID: 958 9545 0608)
Languages: Cantonese, English, Japanese, and Mandarin
Speakers: Jeffrey Angles, Xi Chuan 西川, Jennifer Feeley, Hiromi Itō 伊藤 比呂美, Lucas Klein, and Eva Wong Yi 黃怡
Moderator: Tammy Lai-Ming Ho

BIOS:

◓ JEFFREY ANGLES (speaker)
Jeffrey Angles (1971- ) is a professor of Japanese literature at Western Michigan University in the US. He is the author of Writing the Love of Boys (University of Minnesota Press, 2010), These Things Here and Now: Poetic Responses to the March 11, 2011 Disasters (Josai University Press, 2016), and the award-winning translator of dozens of Japan’s most important modern Japanese authors and poets. He believes strongly in the role of translators as social activists, and much of his career has focused on the translation into English of socially engaged, feminist, and queer writers. His own book of poetry in Japanese, Watashi no hizuke henkō sen (My International Date Line, Shichōsha, 2016) won the Yomiuri Prize for Literature, making him the first non-native speaker ever to win this highly prestigious award for a book of poetry.

◓ XI CHUAN (speaker)
Xi Chuan 西川 is a poet, essayist, and translator. He was born in Jiangsu in 1963 and raised in Beijing, where he still lives. A graduate of the Department of English at Peking University in 1985, he was formerly a professor of literature and head librarian at the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) and is now a professor at the International Writing Center of Beijing Normal University. In China, he has been awarded the National Lu Xun Prize for Literature (2001), named Cultural China’s Person of the Decade (2001–2011) by Shanghai’s Oriental Morning Post, and Author of the Year by the Chinese Book Industry (2018). He was also one of the winners of the Germany’s Weimar International Essay Prize Contest (1999), the recipient of Sweden’s Cikada Prize (2018), and the winner of the Tokyo Poetry Prize (2018). His Notes on the Mosquito: Selected Poems, translated by Lucas Klein, was published by New Directions in 2012 and won the Lucien Stryk Asian Translation award.

◓ JENNIFER FEELEY (speaker)
Jennifer Feeley’s original writings and translations from Chinese have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including FIELD, Epiphany, Mekong Review, Chinese Literature Today, World Literature Today, Chinese Writers on Writing, and Creating Across Cultures: Women in the Arts from China, Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan, among others. She is the translator of Not Written Words: Selected Poetry of Xi Xi (Zephyr Press and MCCM Creations, 2016), for which she won the 2017 Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize and which received a 2017 Hong Kong Publishing Biennial Award in Literature and Fiction. With Sarah Ann Wells, she is the co-editor of Simultaneous Worlds: Global Science Fiction Cinema (University of Minnesota Press, 2015). Additionally, she is the translator of the first two books in the middle-grade series White Fox by Chen Jiatong (Chicken House Books and Scholastic) and the selected works of Shi Tiesheng (forthcoming from Polymorph Editions), as well as Wong Yi’s libretto for the Cantonese chamber opera Women Like Us, which will premiere at the 2021 Hong Kong Arts Festival. At present, she is translating Xi Xi’s semi-autobiographical novel Mourning a Breast, a project funded by a 2019 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Translation Fellowship. She holds a PhD in East Asian Languages and Literatures from Yale University. (Photography of Jennifer by Shi Lessner.)

◓ HIROMI ITŌ (speaker)
Hiromi Itō 伊藤 比呂美 (1955- ) emerged in the 1980s as the leading voice of Japanese women’s poetry with a series of sensational works that depicted women’s psychology, sexuality, and motherhood in dramatic new ways. In the late 1990s, she relocated to southern California, and since then, she has written a number of important, award-winning books about migrancy, relocation, identity, linguistic alienation, aging, and death. A selection of her early work appears in Killing Kanoko: Selected Poems of Hiromi Itō, translated by Jeffrey Angles (Action Books, 2009). Angles has also translated her wildly imaginative, book-length narrative poem about migration Wild Grass on the Riverbank (Action Books, 2014).

◓ LUCAS KLEIN (speaker)
Lucas Klein (PhD Yale) is a father, writer, and translator. His scholarship and criticism have appeared in the monograph The Organization of Distance: Poetry, Translation, Chineseness (Brill, 2018), as well as in Comparative Literature Studies, LARB, Jacket, CLEAR, PMLA, and other venues. His translation Notes on the Mosquito: Selected Poems of Xi Chuan (New Directions, 2012) won the 2013 Lucien Stryk Prize; other publications include his translations of the poetry of Mang Ke, October Dedications (Zephyr and Chinese University Press, 2018), and contributions to Li Shangyin (New York Review Books, 2018). His translations of the poetry of Duo Duo, forthcoming from Yale University Press, won a PEN/Heim Translation Fund grant, and he co-edited Chinese Poetry and Translation: Rights and Wrongs (2019) with Maghiel van Crevel, downloadable for free from Amsterdam University Press [LINK: http://bit.ly/2DrmfZN]. He is an associate professor in the School of Chinese at the University of Hong Kong. (Photograph of Lucas by Zhai Yongming.)

◓ EVA WONG YI (speaker)
Eva Wong Yi 黃怡 is a Hong Kong writer, librettist, and editor-at-large at the literary journal Fleurs des Lettres. The recipient of the Hong Kong Arts Development Awards 2018 Award for Young Artist (Literary Arts), she is the author of three short story collections: The Four Seasons of Lam Yip (林葉的四季, 2019), Patched Up (補丁之家, 2015), and News Stories (據報有人寫小說, 2010). Additionally, she is the librettist for the Cantonese-language chamber opera Women Like Us (兩個女子), commissioned and produced by the Hong Kong Arts Festival. She has served as a columnist for various Hong Kong newspapers and magazines and currently co-hosts the program “Book Review” for Radio Television Hong Kong. In 2019, she participated in the Singapore Writers Festival and Los Angeles Architecture Exhibition “Island__Peninsula.” She holds a Master of Arts in English from King’s College London and a Bachelor’s degree in Psychology and Comparative Literature from the University of Hong Kong.

◒ TAMMY LAI-MING HO (moderator)
Tammy Lai-Ming Ho is the founding co-editor of the first Hong Kong-based international Asia-focused journal, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, an editor of the academic journals Victorian Network and Hong Kong Studies, and the first English-language Editor of Voice & Verse Poetry Magazine (聲韻詩刊). She is an Associate Professor at Hong Kong Baptist University, where she teaches poetics, fiction, and modern drama. She is also the President of PEN Hong Kong, a Junior Fellow of the Hong Kong Academy of the Humanities, an advisor to the Leeds Centre for New Chinese Writing, and an Associate Director of One City One Book Hong Kong. Tammy’s first collection of poetry is Hula Hooping (Chameleon 2015), for which she won the Young Artist Award in Literary Arts from the Hong Kong Arts Development Council. Her first short story collection Her Name Upon The Strand (Delere Press), her second poetry collection Too Too Too Too (Math Paper Press) and chapbook An Extraterrestrial in Hong Kong (Musical Stone) were published in 2018. Her first academic book is Neo-Victorian Cannibalism (Palgrave, 2019). Tammy edited or co-edited seven literary volumes having a strong focus on Hong Kong, the most recent one being Twin Cities: An Anthology of Twin Cinema from Singapore and Hong Kong (Landmark Books, 2017). She guest-edited a Hong Kong Feature for World Literature Today (Spring 2019), the Hong Kong special issue of Svenska PEN’s PEN/Opp (formerly “The Dissident Blog”), and an e-chapbook of Hong Kong poetry published by Cordite Publishing. She is currently co-editing 2020: A Bilingual Anthology of Hong Kong Poetry with Chris Song. Tammy is also a translator and her literary translations can be found in World Literature Today, Chinese Literature Today, Pathlight: New Chinese Writing, among other places, and International Poetry Nights in Hong Kong (香港國際詩歌之夜) volumes (2015, 2017 and 2019). Her own poems have been translated into a number of languages, including Chinese, French, German, Latvian and Vietnamese.

Four Duo Duo Poems in new Paris Review

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The Paris Review
Four poems by Duo Duo 多多 in the Paris Review

Paris Review No. 233, Summer 2020 is now available, featuring four poems by Duo Duo 多多 in my translation: “If No Echo, No Monologue” 没有应和就没有独白, “Where Phrase Blooms” 在词语的开花之地, “See the Smoke in the Bottle, the Sail in the Bottle” 看瓶子里的烟， 瓶子里的帆, and “No Home in Words” 词内无家.

Follow the links to read excerpts of them them online, or the link above to order the issue.

Zoom Event—Translators Speak: Translating Chinese Poetry

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Translators Speak: Translating Chinese Poetry

ZOOM: https://bit.ly/2YHxitE (Meeting ID: 959 2591 8289)
Saturday June 13, 11:00 a.m. Hong Kong time (click here to find the date & time for you)

Congratulations to Zephyr Press! They are celebrating their 40th anniversary this year, and “Translators Speak: Translating Chinese Poetry” is part of the celebrations.

“Translators Speak: Translating Chinese Poetry,” co-sponsored by Zephyr Press, features several translators from Zephyr’s Jintian Series of Contemporary Chinese Poetry. Nick Admussen, Lucas Klein, Andrea Lingenfelter, and Jami Proctor Xu will talk about and introduce the poets they translated, the translation process, their views on translating Chinese poetry (as opposed to translating other genres), and advice and suggestions they would give other translators. They will also read from their books and contextualise the poems and their translations. We will have a Q&A session as well. This discussion will take place via Zoom and people from all over the world are welcome to listen in. [Find out what time it will be where you are: https://bit.ly/2W8O57q] Moderated by Cha’s co-editor Tammy Lai-Ming Ho.

TRANSLATORS SPEAK: TRANSLATING CHINESE POETRY
Date: Saturday 13 June 2020
Time: 11:00 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. (GMT+8)
Platform: Zoom https://bit.ly/2YHxitE
(Meeting ID: 959 2591 8289)
Languages: English
Speakers: Nick Admussen, Lucas Klein, Andrea Lingenfelter, and Jami Proctor Xu
Moderator: Tammy Lai-Ming Ho

BIOS:

◓ NICK ADMUSSEN (speaker)
Nick Admussen is an associate professor of Chinese literature and culture at Cornell University. He is the author of Recite and Refuse: Contemporary Chinese Prose Poetry, the translator of Ya Shi’s poetry collection Floral Mutter, and a poet whose most recent chapbook is titled Stand Back, Don’t Fear the Change. He was the recipient of a 2017 grant from the PEN/Heim fund for translation, has been anthologized in Best New Poets 2018 and Best Short Fictions 2017, and was a 2018 National Poetry Series finalist.

◓ LUCAS KLEIN (speaker)
Lucas Klein (PhD Yale) is a father, writer, and translator. His scholarship and criticism have appeared in the monograph The Organization of Distance: Poetry, Translation, Chineseness (Brill, 2018), as well as in Comparative Literature Studies, LARB, Jacket, CLEAR, PMLA, and other venues. His translation Notes on the Mosquito: Selected Poems of Xi Chuan (New Directions, 2012) won the 2013 Lucien Stryk Prize; other publications include his translations of the poetry of Mang Ke, October Dedications (Zephyr and Chinese University Press, 2018), and contributions to Li Shangyin (New York Review Books, 2018). His translations of the poetry of Duo Duo, forthcoming from Yale University Press, won a PEN/Heim Translation Fund grant, and he co-edited Chinese Poetry and Translation: Rights and Wrongs (2019) with Maghiel van Crevel, downloadable for free from Amsterdam University Press. He is an associate professor in the School of Chinese at the University of Hong Kong.

◓ ANDREA LINGENFELTER (speaker)
Andrea Lingenfelter is a writer and translator whose published books include The Changing Room: Selected Poetry of Zhai Yongming (Northern California Book Award winner), Hon Lai Chu’s The Kite Family, (NEA Translation Fellowship grantee), Li Pik-wah’s Farewell My Concubine and The Last Princess of Manchuria, and Candy and Vanishing Act by Mian Mian. Her poetry and prose translations have appeared in Manoa, Granta, Chinese Literature Today, Pathlight, Zoland Poetry Annual, Words Without Borders, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, Two Lines, Chicago Review, and elsewhere. Her own work has appeared in various publications, including Strix and Cha. Current book-length translation projects include a collection of poems by Wang Yin, Zhai Yongming’s Following Huang Gongwang Through the Fuchun Mountains, and Wang Anyi’s novel Scent of Heaven. She is a contributor to the Los Angeles Review of Books and its affiliated China Channel, and is a two-time Vermont Studio Center Luce Translation Fellowship recipient (with Wang Yin [2017) and Cao Shuying [2019] respectively). Currently based in Northern California, she teaches literary translation and literature and film of the Asia Pacific at the University of San Francisco.

◓ JAMI PROCTOR XU (speaker)
Jami Proctor Xu is a poet, mother and translator. She writes in English and Chinese and splits her time between Northern California, Arizona, and China. Her publications include, among others, a Chinese chapbook, Shimmers (EMS, 2013) a Chinese poetry collection Suddenly Starting to Dance (Yi, 2016), an English chapbook, Hummingbird Ignites a Star, the translated collection of Jidi Majia, Words from the Fire (Manoa, 2018), and the translated collection of Song Lin, Sunday Sparrows (Zephyr, 2020). Her current translation projects include translations of poetry collections by Zhao Ye, Xiao Xiao, and Shu Cai. Jami is also editing an anthology of Chinese translations of US poets born in the 1970s as well as anthologies of international poets forthcoming from Beijing Normal University. Since 2016, she has co-organised an annual international poetry exchange at Beijing Normal University’s International Writing Center, and since 2019, she has collaborated with Zolani Mkiva to co-organise international poetry events in South Africa. Jami frequently reads at festivals around the world, and her poetry and translations have been published in anthologies in several languages. She is a recipient of the Zhujiang Poetry Award (2013) and the First Reader Best Poet Award (2016).

◒ TAMMY LAI-MING HO (moderator)
Tammy Lai-Ming Ho is the founding co-editor of the first Hong Kong-based international Asia-focused journal, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, an editor of the academic journals Victorian Network and Hong Kong Studies, and the first English-language Editor of Voice & Verse Poetry Magazine 聲韻詩刊. She is an Associate Professor at Hong Kong Baptist University, where she teaches poetics, fiction, and modern drama. She is also the President of PEN Hong Kong, a Junior Fellow of the Hong Kong Academy of the Humanities, an advisor to the Leeds Centre for New Chinese Writing, and an Associate Director of One City One Book Hong Kong. Tammy’s first collection of poetry is Hula Hooping (Chameleon 2015), for which she won the Young Artist Award in Literary Arts from the Hong Kong Arts Development Council. Her first short story collection Her Name Upon The Strand (Delere Press), her second poetry collection Too Too Too Too (Math Paper Press) and chapbook An Extraterrestrial in Hong Kong (Musical Stone) were published in 2018. Her first academic book is Neo-Victorian Cannibalism (Palgrave, 2019). Tammy edited or co-edited seven literary volumes having a strong focus on Hong Kong, the most recent one being Twin Cities: An Anthology of Twin Cinema from Singapore and Hong Kong (Landmark Books, 2017). She guest-edited a Hong Kong Feature for World Literature Today (Spring 2019) and the Hong Kong special issue of Svenska PEN’s PEN/Opp (formerly “The Dissident Blog”). She is currently editing a Hong Kong chapbook for Cordite Poetry Review and she will be co-editing 2020: A Bilingual Anthology of Hong Kong Poetry with Chris Song. Tammy is also a translator and her literary translations can be found in World Literature Today, Chinese Literature Today, Pathlight: New Chinese Writing, among other places, and International Poetry Nights in Hong Kong (香港國際詩歌之夜) volumes (2015, 2017 and 2019). Her own poems have been translated into a number of languages, including Chinese, French, German, Latvian and Vietnamese.

New Poetry by Duo Duo in Harvard Review

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Duo Duo’s “That Time” 那时, translated by
Lucas Klein, in Harvard Review

The Harvard Review has just published my translation of “That Time” 那时, by Duo Duo 多多, a section from his series The Desire of the Rose Now the Same as the Desire of Swords 玫瑰的欲望已经与剑的欲望一致.

In the brief introduction, I write:

The sequence as a whole is about the vicissitudes of memory: its pains but also its joys. The images that end “That Time,” horses and gravestones, are familiar throughout Duo Duo’s oeuvre, but here they are defamiliarized. The whole sequence ends with “remembrance” being the pursuit of “what is ahead,” while “the moment of happiness is the moment of memory.”

Here is how the poem begins:

why does the camel need twin humps to make it through the desert?

I look at you, you only look at yourself
I look there, I only see you

I look at things I cannot see
I see time—that long, long rose

at that time the lion could still think, no flames of fury in the beauty’s eyes
at that time we could still walk into things we could not understand

it’s the heart that creates the invisible, between riddle
and its four walls, letting the parable of life pass through the ring

the way my sunlight might pierce your eyes
to see some even farther place

为什么骆驼需要双峰才能穿越沙漠?

我望着你,你只望着自己
我望着那里,我只望到你

我在看我看不到的事物
我看到了时间——那朵漫长的玫瑰

那时狮子还会思考,美人眼中还没有怒火
那时我们还能走进不可理解的事物

是心灵创造不可见的,在谜
和它强大的四壁之间,容生活的寓言穿过指环

如我的日光能够穿透你的眼睛
就会看到更远的地方

Many thanks to Tammy Lai-ming Ho for her suggestions on my translations!

Click on the link above for the poem in full.

Elizabeth Briel reads Xi Chuan

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While the coronavirus is keeping most of us indoors, artist Elizabeth Briel has been reading poems and posting them to Instagram and Facebook. Here she is reading my translation of Xi Chuan’s new poem, “Ode to Facemasks” 口罩颂.

Elizabeth Briel reading Xi Chuan’s “Ode to Facemasks” 口罩颂

“Ode to Facemasks” will be published in the forthcoming “Masks” feature, edited by Tammy Ho 何麗明, in the Hongkong-based literary journal Voice & Verse 聲韻詩刊 (edited by Chris Song 宋子江). Voice & Verse is accepting submissions on the theme of Masks until May 15.

Click here for the video.

Translating Asian Languages: Prejudices and Privileges — International Zoom Meeting

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Translating Asian Languages: Prejudices & Privileges

TRANSLATING ASIAN LANGUAGES: PREJUDICES & PRIVILEGES
Date: Wednesday 15 April 2020
Time: 8:00-9:30 p.m. (GMT+8)
Platform: ZOOM
(Meeting ID: 514 122 177)
Languages: English
Speakers: Lucas Klein, Grace Ting, and Matt Turner
Moderator: Tammy Lai-Ming Ho

‘Every translation sparks / another translation.’ In the discussion “Translating Asian Languages: Prejudices and Privileges”, Lucas Klein (Cha‘s Translation Editor), Matt Turner and Grace Ting will talk about the issues pertaining to the translation of Asian literary texts.

They will ponder, among other questions, the following: What are the prejudices, if any, faced by translators of Asian texts? What are the potential privileges some translators may have? Are ‘academic translators’ more privileged? If yes, in what ways? Why are certain Asian languages/writers/texts translated but others are left out? Who make translation decisions? Under what circumstances do we see translators occupying a more visible position than the writers they translate? Is it ever possible to have too many translators translating a particular genre of texts? The three speakers will also read from either their own translations or those of others. There will also be a Q&A session. This discussion will take place via. ZOOM and people from all over the world are welcome to tune in. Moderated by Cha’s co-editor Tammy Ho.

If you would like to participate in a Cha reading, or if there are topics you would like to suggest, please write to us (t@asiancha.com)! Here is the list:

Cornell Chronicle on Admussen’s Ya Shi

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Kate Blackwood on Nick Admussen’s translation of Floral Mutter 花的低语, by Ya Shi 哑石

Nick Admussen’s translation of Floral Mutter 花的低语, by Ya Shi 哑石, is now out from Zephyr and Chinese University Presses, and to announce the publication the Cornell Chronicle has published an article under the headline “Translation opens a thriving world of Chinese poetry“, by Kate Blackwood. She writes:

Now, Ya Shi – a pen name meaning “mute stone” – teaches university-level mathematics in his home province, Sichuan, but he is also an award-winning poet. Nick Admussen, associate professor of Asian studies in the College of Arts and Sciences, has translated into English selections of Ya Shi’s poetry in the newly published “Floral Mutter.” Admussen’s research and teaching center around contemporary Chinese literature, and he is also a published poet.

For English readers, the book is an introduction to this unique poetic voice and a glimpse into Sichuan’s vibrant poetry scene.

“The arrangement of Ya Shi’s work in this volume is a tiny fraction of his writing, intended to foreground his intellectual restlessness and independence,” Admussen wrote in the introduction. “I have seen no other contemporary poet think so deeply and patiently about the intellectual uses of wild space in China today.”

The article ends with Admussen quoted as saying:

“If you want to have interesting and exciting poetry, you need to be moving between cultural traditions,” he said. “It’s true in music, it’s true in fiction. It’s true in all the other arts, too.”

Click on the link above to read the article in full.

Yang Lian on Chinese and Arabic Poetry, for Adonis

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Yang Lian. Photo by Li Yanan
Yang Lian on Chinese poetry, for Adonis

The United Arab Emirates paper The National, the Middle East’s leading English-language news service, has published an investigation by Yang Lian 楊煉 into Chinese and Arabic poetry, in honor of Syrian poet Adonis.

The philosophical truths of the language and the immovability of verbs has confused many translators of Chinese poetry. But at the same time, don’t you think it provides also a great opportunity to write something more profound than just describing a concrete happening?

Du Fu’s Climbing High was a masterpiece about a poet universally in exile. The poem went far beyond himself. It was in the traditions of Ovid, Dante, Cvitayeva, Adonis, Yang Lian – all poets in exile across space and time.

Who is not in exile now? Therefore, who has in reality not been written about in Du Fu’s Climbing High 1253 years ago? It is the same as my poem written in the year 1989.

It was not wrong for that poem to be translated into the past tense (1989 is past), but if you read carefully the last line “this is no doubt a perfectly ordinary year”, then my point was clear, to challenge the changeless fate and forgetful nature of human beings. Therefore, I have to agree with the translations of Brian Holton in the present tense that contextualise poems in the eternal now. The same pleasant surprise came to me from the Syrian poet Adonis.

He examines the Du Fu 杜甫 poem “Climbing High” 登高, written in 767. Then:

Click here to read the article in full.

Goodman’s Zang Di wins 2020 Patrick D. Hanan Book Prize from AAS

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Image result for Roots of Wisdom, by Zang Di
Goodman’s translation of Zang Di’s Roots Wisdom wins the 2020 Hanan Prize

The Hanan Prize for Translation (China and Inner Asia) was established in 2015 and is given biennially to an outstanding English translation of a significant work in any genre originally written in Chinese or an Inner Asian Language, from any time period.

This year’s winner is Eleanor Goodman, for The Roots of Wisdom by Zang Di 臧棣 (Zephyr Press).

The Awards Ceremony was going to be at the upcoming AAS annual conference in Boston, MA on Friday, March 20, but the conference has been canceled.

Click here for all this year’s AAS awardees.

Feeley interviewed at Chinese Books for Young Readers

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Jennifer Feeley interviewed at Chinese Books for Young Readers

Poetry translator Jennifer Feeley is the featured interviewee at Chinese books for young readers:

Could you tell us a bit about yourself, how you came to learn Chinese and start translating?

I attended an arts high school, where I majored in Creative Writing, and we were encouraged to read as many books of poetry as we could get our hands on, so I spent a lot of time in the school library. One day, I stumbled upon Kenneth Rexroth’s One Hundred Poems from the Chinese, which then led me to One Hundred More Poems from the Chinese, and then two volumes he co-translated with Ling Chung: Women Poets of China and Li Ch’ing-chao: Complete Poems. On the same shelf, I also found Rexroth’s One Hundred Poems from the Japanese and One Hundred More Poems from the Japanese, as well as David Young’s Five T’ang Poets. I fell in love with these poems and wanted to be able to read them in their original languages.

Click on the link to read the rest.