Three Chinese poets, Tang Siu Wa, Zang Li, and Yang Xiaobin read poems written at Vermont Studio Center during their month-long residency in January 2016, along with their paired translators Jennifer Feeley, Eleanor Goodman, and Canaan Morse, who share their translations of each piece. The group discussed the context of the work, and also held a conversation afterward about poetry and the nature of translation. The conversation/readings are in English, Mandarin, and Cantonese. The six were on residency together supported by a generous grant from the Luce Foundation. A link to the new fellowship application: http://www.vermontstudiocenter.org/lit-the-literature-in-translation-program.
(photo––standing l to r: Yang Xiaobin, Canaan Morse, Jennifer Feeley, and Zang Li; sitting: Eleanor Goodman and Tang Siu Wa)
Tang Siu Wa 鄧小樺is a poet, prose writer, curator, and human rights activist from Hong Kong, as well as the founding editor of the literary magazine Fleurs des Lettres and co-founder of the House of Hong Kong Literature. She is the author of the poetry collections Unmoved Bottle and The Opposite of Sound, the essay collections A Motley of Banalities and As If Nothing Happened, and a collection of interviews Asking Directions from the People. She is also the editor of the collections Wait and See: Collected Works of Six New Hong Kong Writers, The Tomb of Film, and The Same Darkness Befalls Dawn: Hong Kong June Fourth Poetry. She teaches creative writing at various institutions in Hong Kong and writes columns and criticism for a variety of local media.
Jennifer Feeley holds a PhD in East Asian Languages and Literatures from Yale University and has taught at the University of Iowa. She has published poetry, translations of poetry and prose from Chinese into English, and articles on Chinese literature and cinema in various journals and anthologies, including FIELD, Epiphany, Tinfish, Journal of Chinese Cinemas, and Chinese Writers on Writing, among others. She is the translator of Not Written Words: Selected Poetry of Xi Xi (Zephyr Press and MCCM Creations, 2016) and co-editor of Simultaneous Worlds: Global Science Fiction Cinema (University of Minnesota Press, 2015).
Zang Di 臧棣, a poet, critic, translator, and editor, was born in Beijing in 1964. Now a professor at Peking University, he has taught in the US, Japan, and Taiwan. Widely acknowledged as the leading poet-critic of his generation, Zang has published many books of poetry and edited several major anthologies of modern and contemporary Chinese poetry.
Eleanor Goodman’s book of translations, Something Crosses My Mind: Selected Poems of Wang Xiaoni (Zephyr Press, 2014) was the recipient of a 2013 PEN/Heim Translation Grant and winner of the 2015 Lucien Stryk Prize. The book was also shortlisted for the International Griffin Prize. Her first collection of poetry, Nine Dragon Island (Enclave/Zephyr, 2016), was a finalist for the Drunken Boat First Book Prize.
