Ye Chun BY Shawn Flanagan Born in Luoyang, China, YE CHUN is a poet, fiction writer, literary translator, and visual artist. She writes and translates in both English and Chinese. After graduating from the Luoyang Foreign Languages University in 1994, with a BA in English, she worked in cultural journalism, as a journalist, translator and editor. Ye moved to the United States in 1999, earning an MA in English/ Writing from the University of Missouri-Kansas City and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Virginia. In addition to publishing a book of original poetry in English, Travel Over Water (The Bitter Oleander Press, 2005), her work has appeared in American journals such as The American Poetry Review, The Bitter Oleander, Indiana Review, Mid-American Poetry Review, New Letters, Poetry International, and Salamander, as well as in Chinese publications such as Shi Xuan Kan (诗选刊), Shi Chao(诗潮), and Mang Yuan (莽原). Her second manuscript, Lantern Puzzle, was a finalist for the 2009 Dorset Prize. As a literary translator since 2001, Ye Chun has recently completed a book of translations of Hai Zi, Wheat Has Ripened with Fiona Sze-Lorrain, forthcoming from Tupelo Press in 2012. With Melissa Tuckey and Fiona Sze-Lorrain, she has also translated the Chinese poet, Yang Zi. In collaboration with Fiona Sze-Lorrain and Paul Roth, she translates the award-winning Chinese poet, Yang Jian. Currently, she is also working with Sze-Lorrain on the translations of Lan Lan and Yi Lu, two major contemporary Chinese female poetic voices. Other completed translation work includes The Book of Nightmares by Galway Kinnell, and selected writings by Duo Duo, Charles Simic and Duane Locke. As a fiction writer, Ye Chun has just completed a novel and a novella in Chinese. Her paintings include mostly oil charcoal on canvas or mixed media. Recent awards and fellowships include the Poe-Faulkner Fellowship, Friends of Literature Fellowship, and others. She lives in Virginia with her husband, writer Shawn Flanagan, and their daughter.

You work in more than one art form, expressing imagination through both visual and written methods. How is it different to render similar topics or idea in both forms? Which creative process feels the most conducive or accessible to you? Several years ago, I took a drawing class with Elizabeth Schoyer. One of the assignments was to make a map of the place we grew up. At that time, I’d just written a poem about my hometown Luoyang, so when I pictured the city I saw the images that appear in my poem — bicycles, smokestacks, ancient tombs, peach flowers, Chairman Mao statue, sunset — they hung at various degrees of latitude and longitude, connected by roads like strands of a spider web. And each time I thought of Luoyang, I saw the color gray, and then a reddish purple slowly emerge. So gray and purple became the background of the map. After I finished the assignment, I thought of other places I’d lived. What if I made a map for each of them, with words instead of pencil and paint? I started to write a poem sequence titled “Map,” in which each poem is a place and consists of two stanzas — the one on the left pockets traces of experience; the one on the right serves as notes on the experience. Together they work like lines of latitude and longitude to locate the experience… Luoyang Map, 2005 (Gouache pencil, 24 x 30 in) BY Ye Chun But to answer your question, I feel when I paint, I try to visualize the intangible connections between things, and when I write, I try to connect seemingly disparate images. Images and words alternately build upon each other for my perception to climb along. Writing is more conducive to me if I compare the two, mostly because it’s more flexible and portable. Having worked in charcoal as well as mixed media, do you find that the subject of a work determines the choice of materials? It depends. Sometimes I get an idea first and then pick the materials. Sometimes there are materials I want to experiment with or make use of. I’ll play with them for a while before any clear subject comes to mind. For example, once I had a piece of vellum paper left from a previous project. I wanted to do something with it. I traced my feet on it, then colored them with a blue highlighter, cut some thin wires and glued them on top of the feet. While doing these, I started to wonder what my feet meant to me. They bear the weight of my body and at times have to step on rough ground. The next day, I bought more vellum to continue my wondering about “this lowliest of tongues,” as Galway Kinnell calls it in The Book of Nightmares. There’re also times when an idea and a material seem to run into each other. Once, I saved some small chocolate boxes, at a time when I also wanted to paint birds. It then occurred to me it would be nice to paint them on those boxes (the size of a little bird), so that I could hold them entirely in my hand as I painted.

Ye Chun
BY Shawn Flanagan

When did you first discover poetry?

When I was little, my father would ask me to recite Tang poetry. I had no idea what I was reciting, but remember liking how the short rhythmical lines felt on the tongue. During my teenage years, most of my time was spent preparing for the college entrance exams, which as a result didn’t help me discover anything inspiring or comforting. I kept a journal throughout the time, and occasionally would write things with line breaks. In college, I majored in English. I remember reading in a class Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” and was moved to tears. It must be the first time a poem spoke to me so directly. Later, I got a job as a translator/journalist for an English newspaper. It was the kind of career job that made me see a straight line to retirement. So I asked myself, Is that what I want to do with my life? The answer was no. I applied for some writing programs in America. In 2001, I took a workshop with Michelle Boisseau and discovered I could write poetry.

Hai Zi, French Surrealism, Rilke, James Wright, Paul Celan, Jack Spicer’s After Lorca, Virginia Woolf, Tony Morrison, Calvino, Michael Ondaatje, William Faulkner, and James Joyce have all inspired me a great deal at different stages of my writing.

My favorite artist is Bada Shanren, a Ming Dynasty ink and brush painter, whose work looks incredibly simple and spontaneous, yet conveys an amazing sense of permanence. I also admire Alberto Giacometti’s agonizing lines, Marc Chagall’s colors, and Edward Gorey’s humor, though his drawings of dead babies frighten me now. Great movies such as those by Andreï Tarkovsky and Federico Fellini are my muse too.

Most creative work derives from the human condition, and could be described as a combination of experience, understanding, and imagination. Do you think the imagination seems a more transcendent aspect of mind or is it a more penetrating kind of power? How would you define imagination?

I picture imagination as a room of mirrors and flowing water in the house of the mind. What we see or perceive is reflected and connected with other existing images and reflections, and together they form a series of new images. But the mirrors may turn dull and water run dry, if we’re blind to the wonderful transformations they present to us.

Many readers would generally assume that concrete images are easier than abstractions to translate, or that poetry is more difficult than prose to render from one language to another. Could you comment on some of the challenges of translating? Do you consider translation an art form?

I think by translating my own poems back and forth between Chinese and English, I’ve become more sensitive to the reciprocal relationship between the two languages, especially when rendered into poetry. I do agree concrete images are easier to translate, as with abstractions you’re less certain what the poet wants to say. Fortunately, so far I’ve only translated poems that I like and believe can stand well in English. Those are usually not poems with a lot of abstractions.

The biggest challenge for me is to make sure a translation reads as organically as possible. Rather than a mechanical reproduction or taxidermy, it has to be vividly alive in the target language. Not being a native-speaker, I know what sounds perfect to my ear may not have the same effect on a native, so I collaborate with other poets whose first language is English.

Yes, I consider literary translation an art form. It’s not pouring water from one jar to another. It’s to create a new version of something you like and have given the closest reading possible, and work on it till it reads no less original than the original.

What in your opinion makes a “successful” translation?

I think a “successful” translation is one that doesn’t make readers wonder what the original says. It makes them forget there’s an original.

You translate important contemporary Chinese poets, most of whose work are still little known in the Anglophone world. Can you speak more about the poets you translate? What is it about their work that attracts you?

The first poet I translated is Hai Zi, who had a huge influence on my poetry. I wanted to know why his poems were at once fantastic and enormously touching, so besides reading them again and again, I translated the ones I loved most as a way of “decoding” them. Later, it occurred to me I could share these translations with people who don’t read Chinese. While translating more of his work, I also started to translate other poets I like.

I came across Yang Zi’s poetry through friends’ recommendation. He writes passionately and beautifully about the ugly and grotesque of contemporary urban life. There’s always an urgency in his poems which is artfully combined with a wild imagination. His voice is often powerful and haunting, and I think it captures a prevalent mood of today’s China.

Around the same time (2003-2004), all my Chinese poet friends were talking about Yang Jian, who has since become even more influential in the country. Later I found out he’s actually Yang Zi’s younger brother, though they write quite differently. Yang Jian’s voice is gentle, contemplative, and his poems are often set in rural China. What attracts me most about his work is the scope of compassion and depth of vision. Reading him makes me feel nurtured somehow. I want to call him the Chinese Walt Whitman.

Also thanks to a friend’s recommendation, I read Yi Lu’s book, See. Everything in her poems that has been “seen” by her — the construction ground in front of her window, cows’ swishing tails in a field, a plant, a slant of sunlight — becomes luminous with meanings. She explores familiar experiences with a tuned insight and loving attentiveness. There’s also a distinct architectural beauty in her work, which I believe has something to do with her profession as a theater art designer for the last thirty years.

Lan Lan is another well-liked poet in China today. What I love about her poems is probably what everybody else loves about them — a profound serenity and innocence, and a heightened sense of spirituality bordering on gratitude — qualities that strike me as especially unique in this time and age of restlessness. Reading her poems is a tender, peaceful experience.

Travel Over Water
BY Ye Chun
(The Bitter Oleander Press, 2005)

How do you feel about the choice of Chinese poetry in translation that exists in the so-called mainstream poetry scene today?

I’ve noticed most of the contemporary Chinese poets who have a book in translation are expatriates. They live in the West and have more access to translators, so understandably they were translated first. Though in recent years, I’ve seen more and more translations of non-expatriate Chinese poets in American literary journals. The choice is quite diverse. But very few of them have yet to publish a book in translation.

How has your writing changed since Travel Over Water?

It has changed quite a bit. When I wrote Travel over Water, I had just discovered poetry as my way of expression, so there’s a rawness and excitement in those poems. While working on my second manuscript Lantern Puzzle, I was more conscious of what I wanted to write and how I wanted to write them. I also did a lot of art work at the same time, especially mixed media and collage, which has channeled into my writing as well.

In the poem “March,” you write, “I’ve been looking for three ways / to say a sentence.” Bilingualism enriches your work; has speaking and writing in Chinese/English lead to a third experience, one that bridges between them?

Writing poems bilingually was out of necessity in the beginning. I had attempted to write directly in English, but the words simply wouldn’t flow. So I decided to write in Chinese first, and then translate them into English. After that, I revise and translate the new drafts back to Chinese, and so on. It’s not as troublesome as it sounds, since much of the translation is done in my head. When I eventually believe a poem works well in both languages, I feel it has reached a state of transparency, where language is no longer a confinement. Maybe I can call this transparency “a third experience.”

Feet II, 2006
(Mixed media on vellum, 18 x 24 in)
BY Ye Chun

Would you consider your writing “dark”?

As a parent, I really want to see the world bright and beautiful. But when I write, I can only write what I have to write, which doesn’t exclude the dark and painful.

Parent, author, artist, translator, poet — many creative women balance multiple roles; how do you negotiate or integrate them?

I’m not a fan of multi-tasking. I would rather concentrate on one thing at a time. When I need a break from writing, I’ll usually translate and spend most of my free time doing so, at least for a couple of months. Then I may want to go back to my own writing again, and will shift focus. I haven’t painted much since my daughter was born, as it takes more time than I currently have. But raising a child itself can be quite a creative endeavor.