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Category Archives: Translation

philoSOPHIA Forum on Translation: Cycles of Engendered/Endangered Contemporaneity in Han Bo’s China Eastern Railway Poems

I’m grateful and pleased not only to have my own work in the latest issue of philoSOPHIA, but also to share space with the writer and artist Han Bo alongside scholars and translators Sun Dong, Yuan Gao, Yuming Piao, and Yizhong Ning in a special forum focused on Han Bo’s China Eastern Railway 《中东铁路》 cycle of […]

Meditations in an Emergency: The Cosmopolitan, the Quotidian, and the Anthropocene Turn in Sun Dong’s 2020 Pandemic Poetry

This past July I spent two weeks in the mountain village of Chenjiapu translating a set of poems by the Nanjing-based poet Sun Dong. She was able to join me for a few days toward the end of the residency, and we worked together on drafts of the translations. I finished the residency with drafts of two dozen poems […]

Matt Turner’s translation of Lu Xun’s 野草:Weeds with woodblock prints by Monika Lin from Seaweed Salad Editions

Lu Xun’s 1927 collection of modernist experiments in prose poetry,  Yecao《野草》has, until now, been available in English translation only as Wild Grass, a 1974 translation by Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang originating with Beijing’s own Foreign Languages Press. Needless to say, that was quite a while ago and, in a number of senses, a world or two ago. Mao was […]

2019 Shanghai International Literary Festival appearance with Han Bo, Monika Lin and Jacob Dreyer

  We’ll be launching our debut bilingual poetry chapbook, Han Bo’s China Eastern Railway at noon on Tuesday, March 19 at the 2019 Shanghai International Literary Festival. The event will be in Chinese and English, featuring Han Bo reading his poetry alongside my translations. Book designer (and partner extraordinaire) Monika Lin and writer, art critic, and editor Jacob Dreyer will […]

Yang Jian’s Long River out from Tinfish Press

My blurb: Yang Jian composes a poetry of slow erosion and quick frosts, of liminal moments that course through and undermine our human-made world’s crude fabrications, clearing the mind for just as long as necessary before its return. “I need to be more sincere in pain,” he writes, and “I’m fortunate to be born in a country […]

Han Bo’s “Chinese Eastern Railway” | 韩博《中东铁路》

My translation of Shanghai-based poet Han Bo’s nine-poem cycle 《中东铁路》 is up at the Berlin-based lyrikline, accompanying German translations by Daniel Bayerstorfer, Peiyao Chang and Lea Schneider. The poems are densely allusive, experimental and rooted in the complex layered history of the historic Chinese Eastern Railway running through Manchuria (contemporary Dongbei and Inner Mongolia and, in particular, the […]