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.
