I guess fear of death is more cross-cultural than I thought.Ĭhenxin Jiang: Yau Ching and I exchanged several drafts of the translations. She managed to translate not only the intersectionality of proverbism and absence/taboo but also the humor that underlines the whole poem. I was surprised when she picked “Trial Run” to work on because, first, it was a poem that had never been discussed or even mentioned by critics, and second, I thought it was a poem that would only work in Chinese! I was even more surprised when she showed me the translation draft. Later, when we met for the first time in Hong Kong, she offered to translate more of my poems. Yau Ching: The first time I heard from Chenxin was when she was editing a feature on Hong Kong poetry for Asymptote, an online journal of international literature. WWB: Were you in conversation about the translation? If so, what was the process of working together like, and were there particular issues you ended up discussing? Yau Ching’s deft use of Cantonese idioms challenged me to hunt down all kinds of playful English phrases on this grim subject, ranging from rhyming slang to ordinary clichés. Each unexpected twist the poem takes is fatal. WWB: Chenxin, what drew you to Yau’s work? What were the challenges and pleasures of translating “Trial Run”?Ĭhenxin Jiang: Yau Ching's writing is characterized by a precision of language inspired, perhaps, by the precision required to navigate a city as densely populated and culturally layered as Hong Kong. “Trial Run” was an attempt to understand how the Chinese literary tradition uses death as a metaphor while simultaneously evading it and fetishizing it. Many poems from this collection were processes to think through the issue of death, to find ways to cope with it, obsess over it, disentangle from it and/or embrace it. A collection of my poems, Da Mao Dan (this title could be literally translated as “Big Hairy Egg”), which “Trial Run” is from, came out in 2011. Yau Ching: I was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2009. WWB: Yau, in your work, do you find that you return to particular ideas or themes? What was the catalyst/inspiration for your poem “Trial Run”? Yau Ching and Chenxin Jiang will be participating in WWB and AAP's virtual event celebrating the contest winners, “World in Verse: A Multilingual Poetry Reading,” on October 7. The winning selections will be published in 's Poem-a-Day series and in Words Without Borders every Saturday this September, which is National Translation Month, and into the first week of October. “Trial Run” by Yau Ching, translated from Chinese by Chenxin Jiang, was one of four winners of WWB’s 2020 Poems in Translation contest, presented in partnership with the Academy of American Poets.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |