How can we experience poetry? We can read it, we can write it—and if we’re lucky enough to know more than one language, we can translate it! Down through the ages, translating poetry has been a vital source of inspiration for poets and writers, challenging our creativity to convey those messages that seem the most untranslatable. It can also spark some of the most fascinating conversations between speakers of different languages, and lead us to discover things about our own language that we did not know. Join Chinese-English poetry translator Austin Woerner for a hands-on workshop in poetry translation, where we will discover poetry is not just what is lost in translation—it is what is found in it, as well.

Important: Speakers of all languages are encouraged to come! Though our attention will naturally be drawn to Chinese and English, there will be something for everybody to do, even those who only know English, and I will tailor our activities to the language competencies of the participants who show up.

Speaker bio:

Austin Woerner is a writer and Chinese-English literary translator whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in Ploughshares, Poetry, The New York Times Magazine, and Best American Essays. He is the translator of a novel, The Invisible Valley by Su Wei, and two volumes of Ouyang Jianghe’s poetry, as well as the editor of Chutzpah!: New Voices from China. He has taught creative writing and translation in China for many years, first at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou and then at Duke Kunshan University in Suzhou, and he is currently a Teaching Fellow in Translation Studies at the University of Leeds.