Translating the Mysterious

Translating the Mysterious

HUM Space (AB1075A)

Monday 11 November, 6:30-8:00pm

Translating from one language to another is made more difficult when the terms in question relate to the unseen world of gods, ghosts, and ancestors. Is a Chinese gui 鬼 really the same as the English “ghost” or “devil”? Is a xian 仙 a “fairy” or an “immortal”? How can translate these terms when we don’t know exactly what they refer to?

Join Professor James Miller to read some spooky stories together and delve into the mysterious world of Chinese spirits. Refreshments will be provided.

Migratory Ghosts Series: Open Call for Student Works

Calling all writers with a creative (and optionally spooky) spark!

Submit 3-5 poems or 2-5 pages of prose to be judged by our visiting writers, Juli Min and Zhou Sivan. A winner from each genre will be chosen to read alongside them on November 22. Let your words haunt us!

Bio:

Juli Min is the author of Shanghailanders.

Zhou Sivan has published three poetry chapbooks, which address poetic form (Zero Copula, Delete Press, 2015), Malaysia’s policies on refugees and migrants (Sea Hypocrisy, co-published by DoubleCross Press and Projective Industries, 2016), and trees as metaphor (The Geometry of Trees, Sputnik & Fizzle, 2022).

Deadline: November 22, 2024

Send your submission to: yl984@duke.edu

Migratory Ghosts Series: A Reading By Megan Mcdowell

Megan McDowell has translated many of the most important Latin American writers working today, including Alejandro Zambra, Samanta Schweblin, Mariana Enríquez, and Lina Meruane. Her translations have won the National Book Award for Translated Literature, the English PEN award, the Premio Valle-Inclán, and two O. Henry Prizes, and have been nominated for the International Booker Prize (four times) and the Kirkus Prize. Her short story translations have been featured in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The New York Times Magazine, Tin House, McSweeney’s, and Granta, among others. In 2020 she won an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, She is from Richmond, KY and lives in Santiago, Chile.

Zooming in from New York, Megan McDowell will read from her newest work of translation, A Sunny Place for Shady People, by Mariana Enríquez. “A diabolical collection of stories featuring achingly human characters whose lives intertwine with ghosts, goblins, and the macabre, by ‘Buenos Aires’s sorceress of horror.’ ” (Samanta Schweblin, The New York Times). The reading will conclude with a Q&A. Bubble tea will be provided.

Please RSVP here: https://duke.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_6saDBs3eAJRUZeK

Student Report on Migratory Ghosts – Poetry Translation Workshop

Report by Rebecca Combs, class of 2025 & Photos by Ruixiang Hu, Class of 2027

On September 20th, 2024, HRC’s Migratory Ghosts reading series welcomed previous DKU Professor and University of Leeds Teaching Fellow Austin Woerner for an interactive discussion and workshopping of Chinese-English poetry translation. About 25 students and 3 faculty members attended the event at the HUM Space.

 

Prof Woerner started the event asking each student how many languages they knew, with the audience being filled with a thorough distribution of native Chinese and English speakers. He then began a discussion of how and why he became interested in poetry translation in the first place. He talked about his post-undergrad interests and perspectives, specifically esteemed contemporary Chinese poet Ouyang Jianghe and his desire to assist translating some of his poems into English. Prof Woerner had heard that Jianghe’s poetry was really hard to translate, some even saying his poetry was untranslatable.

His initial thoughts on the prospect were: “that’s what I want to do, I want to be the guy that translates the untranslatable poetry, and I want to be the first one to do it well”. Prof Woerner got the opportunity to fly out to Beijing where the poet lived, spending several weeks working with him in person to understand his poetry better in order to translate it better. “Maybe I could even do a version in English that is better than the original!” Prof Woerner thought at the time.

 

What he learned from that experience was that his  desire to inhabit the author’s vision and channel it, a perfect version of translation, actually doesn’t male a lot of sense. What is powerful about a poem is not what it is in the author’s mind, but what is in the readers’ minds; “it was the conversations I had about the work I was translating that was the most interesting”.

 

Students were then given two poems and two choices: Sunday’s Empire by Peter Gizzi to translate into Chinese, or to edit an initial Chinese-to-English translation of Fake House by Lu Dong. They split off into groups to work for the rest of the event, coming together at the end to review each other’s work alongside Prof Woerner.

Migratory Ghosts: An Autumn Reading Series – Poetry Translation Workshop

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 PloughsharesPoetryThe 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.