As part of a three-day retrospective event to mark the 25th Anniversary of the Tiananmen Student Movement of 1989, Yang Lian 杨炼 will be giving a reading at the University of Michigan as part of The Struggle of Memory Against Forgetting: Tiananmen 25 Years On.

Location: Stern Auditorium
University of Michigan Museum of Art
525 S. State Street, Ann Arbor, MI 48109

Description:
6:00pm:  Reception ~ UMMA Commons Area
7:00pm:  Poetry Reading ~ UMMA Stern Auditorium

Yang Lian will be introduced by Kelly Askew, Director of the African Studies Center, and moderated by Professor San Duanmu, U-M Dept. of Linguistics.

Yang Lian was born in Bern (Switzerland) in 1955, where his parents were in the diplomatic service, and grew up in Beijing…
A recent passion and project of Yang Lian is to encourage the production and translation of poetry written in dialects of Chinese: Sichuan dialect, Shanghainese and Beijing dialect. There is currently no vehicle for writing poetry in these languages since Chinese orthography supports Mandarin only. Yang has been closely involved with a collective of Slovenian poets who, despite the small population of their country, support poetic production in nine Slovene dialects. He is currently working with Kelly Askew (U-M) and a formerly exiled Kenyan poet, Abdilatif Abdalla, on translating poetry composed in various dialects of Swahili into English and from English into dialect forms of Chinese. The idea is ultimately to produce a volume on ‘dialect poetry’, written in the shadows of dominant, politically powerful, languages (Mandarin and Standardized Swahili being but two examples).

Organized by the African Studies Center and co-sponsored by the Center for Chinese Studies, the International Institute, and the Confucius Institute at the University of Michigan.