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.