Jeffrey Yang Is Wrestling with Translation

Posted on October 19, 2009 by

Over on Granta's website, poet, translator, and Two Lines-editor Jeffrey Yang discusses the art of translating from Chinese:

As I embarked on my adventure I immediately started to feel that old hatred for simplified Chinese characters. I had never properly learned them and usually faked my way through when reading, skimpy vocabulary and all. My various dictionaries were beginning to crack. In a panic, I phoned my mother and calmly talked through a few paragraphs with her. I started to feel more at ease, found a slow rhythm, the characters began to bend their syntax into English. Gradually I even enjoyed flowing along with Bei Dao's telegraphic phrasings, peeking into his life in a narrative way that is entirely absent in his crystalline poetry while trying to carry over his balance of playfulness and seriousness. His prose is that of a master poet – clear and subtle, few wasted breaths, fewer wasted words, clauses clipping along like puka shells on a string.

Yang will be one of our two guest editors for the next volume of Two Lines, to publish in the fall of next year. If you're a translator or know one, we're still accepting submissions up through the 25th of November. Details here.