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.