Lucas Klein in discussion with Nick Admussen, Chris Song, and Jami Proctor Xu, moderated by Tammy Lai-Ming Ho
In “The Force of Forging Words,” a poem in Words as Grain: New and Selected Poems by premier Chinese poet Duo Duo 多多 (Yale University Press, The Cecile and Theodore Margellos World Republic of Letters series), translated by Lucas Klein, Duo Duo writes: “outside force, continuing on / from enough, is insufficient hallucination // … // this is rationale’s wasteland / but the ethics of poetry.”
What are the ethics of poetry? Is poetry the wasteland of the rationale, or of the rational? Is translation a kind of hallucination, and is it sufficient? What care needs to be taken to translate such poetry? Our speakers will discuss these questions with the translator to celebrate the publication of Words as Grain. ▁▁▁▁
INFORMATION
Zoom: Meeting ID: 988 5804 6038 Date: Friday/Saturday 9/10 July 2021 Time: ▚ Arizona—Friday 9 July 2021; 6 pm ▚ HK—Saturday 10 July 2021; 9 am Global Clock: Facebook Event Page:
Missteps, Errata, Discoveries: A Translation Forum
“Missteps, Errata, Discoveries: A Translation Forum” features literary translators Nick Admussen, Eileen Chow, Brian Holton, Joanna Krenz, Chris Song, and Matt Turner, who will talk about how mistranslations might also be ‘portals to discovery’, as Stephen Dedalus put it. There will be a short Q&A session as well.
This discussion will take place online and people from all over the world are welcome to listen in. Moderated by Cha’s Co-editor Tammy Lai-Ming Ho and Cha’s Translation Editor Lucas Klein.
Date: Saturday 21 November 2020 Time: 10:00 – 11:45 p.m. (HK) [Find out what time it will be where you are] Platform: Zoom (Meeting ID: 931 7624 26950) Language: English Speakers: Nick Admussen, Eileen Chow, Brian Holton, Joanna Krenz, Chris Song, and Matt Turner. Moderators: Tammy Lai-Ming Ho and Lucas Klein
BIOS—Speakers: ◒ 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 哑石 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.
◒ BRIAN HOLTON (speaker) Brian Holton translates poetry and prose from modern and classical Chinese into English and Scots. He has published many books of Yang Lian’s 杨炼 work, most recently, Anniversary Snow (Shearsman Books, 2019), Venice Elegy (Edizioni Damocle, 2019), and Narrative Poem (Bloodaxe Books, 2017). His collection of classical poetry in Scots, Staunin Ma Lane, was published by Shearsman Books in 2016, and his Hard Roads An Cauld Hairst Winds: Li Bai an Du Fu in Scots will be published by Taproot Press in 2021. Brian makes regular appearances at conferences and literary festivals, and has lectured at universities in the UK, Europe, the USA, New Zealand, China, and elsewhere. He has won prizes for his translations and his own original poetry. He is currently recording Hassan’s Dream, his first solo album.
◒ JOANNA KRENZ (speaker) Joanna Krenz is an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Oriental Studies of Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland. Her research focuses on contemporary literature in a comparative perspective, in particular literature’s connections with science, technology, and philosophy. She is also an active translator of Chinese poetry and prose into Polish, her recent translations include Yan Lianke’s 阎连科 novels Dream of Ding Village (Sen wioski Ding, 2019) and Explosion Chronicles (Kroniki Eksplozji, 2019). Currently, she is working on two projects: In Search of Singularity: Polish and Chinese Poetry Since 1989 and The World Re-versed: New Phenomena in Chinese Poetry as a Challenge and Inspiration to Literary Studies.
◒ CHRIS SONG 宋子江 (speaker) Chris Song is a poet, translator, and editor based in Hong Kong. He has published four collections of poetry and many volumes of poetry in translation. He received an “Extraordinary Mention” at Italy’s UNESCO-recognised Nosside World Poetry Prize 2013 and the Young Artist Award at the 2017 Hong Kong Arts Development Awards. In 2018 he obtained a PhD in Translation Studies from Lingnan University. More recently he won the Haizi Poetry Award in 2019. Chris is now Executive Director of the International Poetry Nights in Hong Kong 香港國際詩歌之夜 and Editor-in-Chief of Voice & Verse Poetry Magazine 聲韻詩刊.
◒ MATT TURNER (speaker) Matt Turner is the author of Not Moving (2019, Broken Sleep Books) and Wave 9: Collages (2021, Flying Island Books), and is the translator of Lu Xun’s 魯迅 Weeds 野草 (2019, Seaweed Salad Editions). With Weng Haiying he is co-translator of works by Yan Jun, Ou Ning, Hu Jiujiu and others. His essays and reviews have been published in Heichi, Cha, Music & Literature and many other journals. He lives in New York City, where he works as a freelance translator and editor.
BIOS—Moderators:
◒ 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.
◒ LUCAS KLEIN (moderator) Lucas Klein (PhD Yale) is a father, writer, and translator. Executive editor of the Hsu-Tang Library of Classical Chinese Literature from Oxford University Press, his scholarship and criticismhave appeared in the monograph The Organization of Distance: Poetry, Translation, Chineseness (Brill, 2018) and in Chinese Poetry and Translation: Rights and Wrongs (2019), co-edited with Maghiel van Crevel (downloadable for free from Amsterdam University Press), as well as in Comparative Literature Studies, LARB, Jacket, CLEAR, PMLA, and other journals. His translation Notes on the Mosquito: Selected Poems of Xi Chuan (New Directions, 2012) won the 2013 Lucien Stryk Prize; other translations include 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. He is an associate professor in the School of Chinese at the University of Hong Kong and the Translation Editor of Cha: An Asian Literary Journal.
Recently I posted about my translations of poetry by Liu Waitong 廖偉棠 on Hong Kong Protesting. In fact, the site, edited by Tammy Lai-ming Ho, editor as well of Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, is quickly becoming a go-to site for new translations of contemporary Chinese poetry.
Here is an excerpt of one of Ho’s Chung translations:
FORGET NOT
Forgetting is near. What are we rushing to clamber over? Blood and sweat of three million people only to demand a fictive rope? Are there balloons up there? Only billowing clouds As though the screaming across the city has muted its own cries Turning into fists lashing out helplessly
Is our energy running low? Are the long streets still beating? The heavy thump in Pacific Place resounds in Fanling Red and white plastic barriers blossom in Golden Bauhinia Square Taller than the people. Tomorrow, ah, there’s still tomorrow Tomorrow the wealthy and powerful will start feasting Indifferent to the rancid-smelling blood that rises from their heads
The new site Hong Kong Protesting has published four poems by Liu Waitong 廖偉棠 in my translation. The whole site–an offshoot of Tammy Ho Lai-ming’s literary journal Cha–is very much worth digging into, but here are the poem translations as one way in.
From “Two Million and One” 二百萬零一:
After white snow is black snow after two million is two million and one. The numbers that come after will always add onto him tattoos coming after will always seep blood you cannot remove his raincoat.
After yellow is a golden torrent to replace the mud of shopping malls and the central government complex. You cannot pluck his star rays one after two million is always just one pens pierce the armor of the arrogant.
“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.
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.
The Harvard Reviewhas 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!
Nearly every other festival, public lecture, and concert in Hong Kong seems to have been canceled, but International Poetry Nights in Hong Kong will take place as scheduled! (though at a different venue than earlier planned)
Join thirty international poets, plus musicians and esteemed literary translators, for a festival of poetry (and the resilience of culture in Hong Kong), on the theme “Speech and Silence.”
Events will take place at the Jao Tsung-I Academy 饒宗頤文化館, 800 Castle Peak Road, Lai Chi Kok, Kowloon.
Readings are from 6:30 – 8:30 p.m., with music concerts following. For times and information on panel discussions on themes such as “Genre and Gender,” “The State of Resistance,” “Poetry, Translation, Hong Kong,” and “AI, Translating the Mother Tongue of Poetry,” check the full schedule.
Here is the list of participating poets and their places of origin:
Tamim AL-BARGHOUTI (Palestine) Martin SOLOTRUK (Slovakia) TÓTH Krisztina (Hungary) Anastassis VISTONITIS (Greece) Ana BLANDIANA (Romania) Ana RISTOVIĆ (Serbia) Derek CHUNG 鍾國強 (Hong Kong) Forrest GANDER (United States) Miłosz BIEDRZYCKI (Poland) Renato Sandoval BACIGALUPO (Peru) MATHURA (Estonia) Louise DUPRÉ (Canada) Ana Luísa AMARAL (Portugal) HWANG Yu Won (South Korea) Jen BERVIN (United States) Abbas BEYDOUN (Lebanon) Maxim AMELIN (Russia) Sergio RAIMONDI (Argentina) K. SATCHIDANANDAN (India) MAOZI 毛子 (PRC) ZHENG Xiaoqiong 鄭小瓊 (PRC) Ijeoma UMEBINYUO (Nigeria) Aleš ŠTEGER (Slovenia) Jan WAGNER (Germany) Ernest WICHNER (Germany) YANG Chia-Hsien 楊佳嫻 (Taiwan) Yasuhiro YOTSUMOTO (Japan) YU Youyou 余幼幼 (PRC) ZHOU Yunpeng 周雲蓬 (PRC) Maria STEPANOVA (Russia)
And here the list of special guests, including translators and AI poets:
Nick Admussen John Cayley Johannes Göransson David Jhave Johnston Andrea Lingenfelter Yara El-Masri Jennifer Feeley Eleanor Goodman Ting Guo 郭婷 Tammy Ho 何麗明 Viorica Patea Lea Schneider Ulrich Schreiber Zhao Si 趙四 Jordan A. Y. Smith
Announcing the June/July issue of Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, the “Tiananmen Thirty Years On” feature, edited by Tammy Lai-Ming Ho and Lucas Klein, along with a special feature of poems by and in mourning of Meng Lang 孟浪.
The following CONTRIBUTORS have generously allowed us to showcase their work:
❀ REMEMBRANCES Tammy Lai-Ming Ho, Gregory Lee, Ding Zilin (translated by Kevin Carrico), Andréa Worden, Shuyu Kong (with translations of poems by Colin Hawes), Ai Li Ke, Anna Wang, and Sara Tung
❀ POETRY Bei Dao (translated by Eliot Weinberger), Duo Duo (translated by Lucas Klein), Liu Xiaobo (translated by Ming Di), Xi Chuan (translated by Lucas Klein), Yang Lian (translated by Brian Holton), Xi Xi (translated by Jennifer Feeley), Meng Lang (translated by Anne Henochowicz), Lin Zhao (translated by Chris Song), Liu Waitong (translated by Lucas Klein), Chan Lai Kuen (translated by Jennifer Feeley), Mei Kwan Ng (translated by the author), Yibing Huang (translated by the author), Ming Di (translated by the author), Anthony Tao, Aiden Heung, Kate Rogers, Ken Chau, Ilaria Maria Sala, Ian Heffernan, Reid Mitchell, Lorenzo Andolfatto, Joseph T. Salazar
❀ ESSAYS Scott Savitt, Wang Dan (translated by Karl Lund), Hoi Leung, Louisa Lim, Jeff Wasserstrom, Lian-Hee Wee, Jed Lea-Henry, Jason G. Coe, and Guo Ting
❀ INTERVIEW Han Dongfang and Lucas Klein
❀ FICTION Boshun Chan (translated by Garfield Chow, Stephanie Leung and Felix Lo) and Christopher New
❀ PHOTOGRAPHY & ART Daniel Garrett and Anonymous
❀ MENG LANG Denis Mair, Meng Lang (translated by Denis Mair), Liu Waitong (translated by Lucas Klein), Jacky Yuen (translated by Nick Admussen), Tang Siu Wa (translated by Jennifer Feeley), Kwan Tin Lam (translated by Eleanor Goodman)
Click on the link above to read the issue in full.
Matches Polished into Lights: Tiananmen Thirty Years On June 3, 2019, at Bleak House Books, Hong Kong
Speakers: Jennifer Anne Eagleton, Guo Ting, Louisa Lim, William Nee, Mei Kwan Ng, Kate Rogers, and Lian-Hee Wee (with two special guest readers, Jeff Wasserstrom and Andrea Lingenfelter). Moderator: Tammy Lai-Ming Ho
For selected texts by featured speakers, click here.
For Tammy Ho’s piece, published as South China Morning Post‘s “Young Post,” see here:
