* The report was originally published on the author’s personal blog and has been reposted with her permission. For the full translations of Ling Yu’s poetry from the workshop, please visit the “Translations” section on Taiwan Lit website.

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When I stayed for two weeks at the Translators’ House Looren in March 2023, I heard that they regularly held workshops, but I didn’t ask for any details, assuming they would not be about Chinese literature anyway. Feeling very inspired by my visit, I straightforwardly inquired with the Looren administration about organizing a workshop on the translation of Taiwanese poetry myself. I had no idea that their workshops were usually organized with other partners (such as schools) and included all meals for participants, provided by the Translation House—significantly increasing the total costs. So, I proposed that we cook for ourselves, drew up a program, and, whereas the workshops usually involve only two languages (the source language and the target language), I suggested translating from Chinese into several European languages. Despite this unconventional approach, the administration welcomed us, and I carried on with organizing the workshop.

As I enjoy translating poetry, I suggested to several translators in Europe that we organize a practical translation workshop focused on the poetry of Ling Yu from Taiwan, whose work I was translating myself. Ling Yu is a renowned poet in Taiwan and had just won a significant prize in 2022 for her latest collection, Daughters (女兒). I knew that Nicholas Y. H. Wong (University of Hong Kong) was translating this book into English, that a French edition of a selection of her poetry had recently been published, and that in Switzerland, Alice Grünfelder was also deeply interested in her work. Unfortunately, the French translator could not participate, but three Italian translators—Rosa Lombardi (Roma Tre University), Silvia Schiavi (Roma Tre University), and Cosima Bruno (SOAS, University of London) — joined us, along with Dylan Wang (SOAS), a native speaker of Chinese based in London, and Tony Yu (National Taiwan Normal University), Yu-sheng Tsou (University of Munich), and Wen-chi Li (University of Oxford) from Taiwan. I should note that the native speakers in the workshop all had an excellent, near-native proficiency in their second language (English or German).

I had considered inviting the poet herself to the workshop, as I often collaborate with poets whose works I translate, asking questions about the meaning of words or sentence structures that might be unclear to me. Sometimes, they also clarify allusions. On the other hand, some translators explicitly prefer not to contact the poet, wanting the freedom to create their own interpretation. Ultimately, I decided against inviting her. Besides, we had a few native speakers in the workshop, which may have been more useful, as it highlighted how different native speakers read and interpret a text.

We all had different reasons for joining. Most participants work in universities as PhDs, teachers, or professors of literature, translation studies, or philosophy. They translate literature or poetry occasionally, driven by personal interest or as part of their teaching and research. Some also write poetry themselves, while others are more focused on language, have a philosophical background, or approach literature from historical or social perspectives. I was the only independent freelance translator in the group. What I miss most as a translator working from Chinese into Dutch, after years of solitary work from home, are discussions with colleagues. There are only a few people working on Chinese-language literature in the Netherlands, and we rarely meet, especially since I live in France. The group that came together at Looren turned out to be a perfect mix for exchanging ideas.

Many of us didn’t know each other personally. We arrived over the weekend and got acquainted during our first get-together dinner on Sunday, kindly hosted by Alice. Luckily, I must add, as it had completely escaped my notice that shops in the area were closed on Sundays! Our organization of meals for the rest of the week—some more Italian, some more Asian—proceeded much like the workshops themselves: efficient yet relaxed, always interesting, and wonderfully convivial.

Before the workshop began, I had asked all participants to select one or two poems by Ling Yu. We shared these Chinese poems along with our first draft translations in advance, with everyone translating into their own language, including English, Italian, German, and Dutch. This allowed us all to prepare for the discussions ahead. During the workshop, each participant led a half-day session, presenting the specific challenges of the poem they had chosen.

So, who is Ling Yu, and what is her poetry like?

Ling Yu’s Life and Poems

Ling Yu (Taipei, 1952) earned a BA in Chinese Literature at the National University of Taiwan and an MA from the Department of East Asian Languages and Literature at the University of Wisconsin. She has worked as an editor for the book supplement of the Taiwan Times (台灣時報), served as a visiting professor at Harvard University from 1991 to 1992, and taught at Yilan National University from 1992 until her retirement in 2021. Additionally, she was an editor for the poetry journal Modern Poetry (現代詩), a co-founder and editor of the pioneering journal Poetry Now (現在詩, alongside Hsia Yu 夏宇 and others), and deputy editor-in-chief of The World of Chinese Language and Literature (國文天地雜誌社). She has received several major literary awards in Taiwan and has been invited to numerous international poetry festivals.

Ling Yu’s idiosyncratic poetry draws heavily on history, art, philosophy, and mythology. In addition to influences from Taiwanese, Chinese, and Japanese culture, her work often references Western classics. Her poetry can be as surprising as Li Bai, as melancholic as Du Fu, or as intricate as Li Houzhou. Like Tao Yuanming, her poems express a love for simplicity, detached from the bustling rhythm of cities and politics. Her work also references diverse painters, including the Chinese Bada Shanren (eighteenth century), the American Georgia O’Keeffe (twentieth century), and the Mexican Frida Kahlo. Zhuang Zi, whose work she considers a pinnacle of East Asian aesthetics, seems a big source of inspiration. In her own poetry too, Ling Yu emerges as someone who loves contradictions and paradoxes: Themes of light versus dark, day versus night, freedom versus captivity, the hermit versus society, and rock versus water often emerge, as illustrated in lines like:
“I want to dream but not sleep / I want to walk but without feet.”

As observed during the workshop, Ling Yu’s style is calm and contemplative, with an elegant, natural cadence. Her work eschews obvious rhyme, meter, or linguistic play, instead focusing on pure and distilled expressions of emotion and insight. She uses few adjectives and adverbs, emphasizing clarity and restraint. Her sensitive, modest voice often carries a Zen Buddhist undertone. Original metaphors and serial forms distinguish her work. She may well be the poet who has written the most “serial poems” (組詩) in Taiwan, and possibly in the entire Chinese-speaking world.

Since her debut in 1988, Ling Yu has published nine poetry collections, each with a distinct focus. Recurring themes include female emancipation, the destructive impact of capitalism on nature and human life, train travel, the classics, and landscapes. For the workshop, we primarily translated poems from her two most recent collections: The Era of Skin Color (膚色的時光, 2018) and Daughters (女兒, 2022). The former delves into Chinese tradition, while the latter responds to the illness and death of her mother. Daughters explores the roles of daughter, mother, and woman—both as an individual and in familial and social contexts. Additionally, the collection serves as a tribute to the Japanese artist Ando Hiroshige (1797–1858, also known as Utagawa Hiroshige or Andō Tokutarō), whom Ling Yu regards as a symbolic maternal figure. Both “mothers,” she says, have accompanied her throughout her life.

Difficulties in Translation

Part of our time was spent on defining the style, the textual references, and the exact meaning, function, or effect of the Chinese words, to find the accurate words in our respective languages. Some translation problems are not limited to Ling Yu, but are true for translating Chinese into European languages in general. Well-known examples are the choice of whether to use capitals (non-existent in Chinese); the lack of verb conjugations in Chinese (the perception of time is different); significantly different sentence structures; the lack of singular and plural forms and of articles, as well as the lack of demonstrative and possessive pronouns where European languages require them.

Of course, the completely different use of punctuation is also an issue. For example, we struggled with Ling Yu’s frequent use of the dash, which, as we mostly agreed, cannot be used so abundantly in European languages. Additionally, we failed to see consistency in its use. Like most modern poems in Chinese, Ling Yu does not use punctuation at the end of a verse line, nor the full stop to mark the end of a sentence. Enjambments are quite commonly used, but many Chinese poets use them mostly to create tension or emphasis only. Ling Yu, however, regularly has inventive enjambments, using a combination of sentence structures and ambiguous words to create ambiguity in a meaningful way. For instance, in these lines from the 6th poem “Rocks” (岩石) of the series “My Name Is Sea” (我的名字叫海) in Daughters:

Ah, the young—

rocks finally

settle down

啊這些年少的——

岩石終於

定居下來

Here, the word “young” in the first line can be interpreted as a noun, referring to the younger ones, or as an adjective modifying “rocks” in the second line, meaning the young rocks. Or in these two lines from the poem “Exchange” (調換) in Daughters:

Her stomach already can no longer hold me

the food given to her

她的胃已經不能裝我

給他的食物

This whole stanza, when read as an enjambment, can easily be translated very straightforwardly as: “Her stomach can no longer hold the food I gave her.” But the meaning of the isolated first line, “Her stomach can no longer hold me,” also comes into play. This reading can be interpreted as: she is no longer able to deal with me—in other poems from the collection, it is clear that the mother is bedridden and can no longer communicate (see the poem below). The translator must be inventive to reproduce a similar ambiguity in the European language.

Sometimes, the different etymology of words seemed important to a translator. The first lines of the 7th poem in the series “Watching Paintings” (看畫)—based on Hiroshige’s The Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō—provide a good example:

被時光燒成了灰燼的富士山

像一座紅色的海市蜃樓

These lines can be translated as:

The Fuji that has been burnt to ashes by time

seems to be a red mirage.

Literally, the Chinese phrase for fata morgana consists of the characters for see, city, marine monster, and storied buildings. In former times, people assumed that the breath exhaled by a monstrous marine animal created the illusion of cities or buildings in the air above the sea. In European languages, fata morgana was thought to be created by the witchcraft of the Italian fairy Morgane (from the King Arthur legends); however, what the visual illusions looked like is not made explicit. Since the storied buildings in the Chinese seem significant in the series, the translator wanted to find a way to retain them in the translation.

Yet another challenge came with the linguistically quite simple poem “木頭人,” which literally means “Wooden man” and is short for “一、二、三木頭人” (“one, two, three, wooden man”). This is the Chinese name for the children’s game that is known all over the world by different names. The English say “one, two, three, piano,” just like the Flemish; the French say un, deux, trois, soleil; the Germans call it eins, zwei, drei, Ochs am Berg; in Italian it is uno, due, tre... stella; and the Dutch have Annemaria koekoek. The popular (and horrible!) South Korean Squid Game is based on this game, but luckily, that has nothing to do with this poem.

The full Chinese poem goes as follows, with a literal translation:

“Wooden man” 〈木頭人〉

One two, three, wooden man 一、二、三木頭人

I and my childhood 我和我的小時候

playing this game 玩著這個遊戲

One two, three, wooden man 一、二、三木頭人

My mother—I play with her 我的母親──我和她玩

She lies in bed 她躺在床上

I and Wati together help her, sit 我和瓦蒂一起扶她，坐起來

lie, turn 躺下來，翻身

talking with her 和她說話

She does not reply 她不回答

She does not nod or shake her head 也不點頭搖頭

Fortunately, the eyes can move, can see me 還好眼睛會動，會看我

One, two, three, wooden man 一、二、三木頭人

This game is back 這個遊戲回來了

I and my childhood 我和我的小時候

Obviously, the wooden figure here has a richer meaning than just the game because the ill mother is like a wooden doll, unable to move. In the first stanza, Ling Yu again creates a meaningful enjambment in the second and third lines, which can be read as: “I and the game that I played in my childhood,” but the second line also stands by itself: “I and my childhood,” even more so because it is the last line of the poem as well. It seems important because it draws attention to the fact that the serious illness of the mother throws the “I” back into time, back into childhood. In the third stanza, the term Wati (瓦蒂) is interesting. Everyone familiar with Taiwan knows that there are many people from Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines who come to Taiwan to work in households. Wati is the name of such a person of Indonesian origin (Balinese, as Nicholas Y. H. Wong clarified). In other poems, we came across the generic term 外勞, meaning labor from outside Taiwan. This term is very short in Chinese, clear to everyone familiar with the language, but in European languages, it becomes longer, sometimes unnecessarily so, and may even arouse unwelcome associations with discrimination.

Another interesting aspect of the workshop was seeing which poems everyone selected. It seems to me that native Chinese speakers generally had fewer difficulties selecting poems strongly grounded in Chinese (or Asian) traditions, as the titles often indicate, such as “Du Fu, 767” (杜甫（公元767年）), “Dreaming of Classical Chinese” (夢見文言文),”Pine Snow Studio: To Huang Gongwang” (松雪齋：致黃公望), or the series “Watching Paintings,” dedicated to Hiroshige. Personally, I often hesitate to select and translate poems I fear are “too Chinese” for Dutch readers to understand, worrying that it might deter them or require excessive footnotes for explanation. However, these poems turned out to be truly fascinating, so perhaps I am mistaken in my usual approach to selecting works. Maybe I should put more effort into making such poems resonate in translation!

Too soon our week was over, and we all split up again… The breathtaking view looking out of the house, the comfort in the house, the easy-going atmosphere, the generosity of everybody present… The whole experience has led to a very productive week, in which we found a good balance between relaxing and working. Dylan Wang wrote a poem as a memento for this highly inspiring week in which he highlighted the things that we discussed. You can read it here:

At Home in Translation - Alice Grünfelder · literaturfelder

Many thanks to everyone involved, and special thanks to the incredibly supportive team at the Translators’ House Looren for accommodating us!