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Hardly mindly endlessly6/29/2023 ![]() ![]() PI: Do you prefer translating poems from English to Chinese or vice versa? What drives the poem forward, the motif and echoes, the rhythm and variations, the passion or reasoning, the word play, the visual shifting, etc., should be reflected in the translation. There are always several choices to translate a line, I would try to bring out the implied, the suggested, the hidden meaning and show the intention, the emotion, the mood. Usually one can get it right linguistically in the first few drafts but I would spend more time to get the tone right. For instance, if the poet hated rhythm and musicality in poetry, making the translation musical would be misleading. I like to present ambiguities and multiple readings but I also try to avoid misrepresentation. MZ: The hardest part of translation is to go inside the mind of the poet and find out what he did NOT intend to say. PI: What is the most challenging aspect of translating poetry? She is co-founder and editor of Poetry East West, a Chinese-English bilingual literary magazine published in Los Angeles and Beijing. The Book of Cranes that she co-translated from Chinese into English will be published by Tupelo Press (USA). She has completed four volumes of translation from English to Chinese: The Writer as Migrant (2010), Missed Time (2011), The Book of Things (to be published), etc., and two more in progress. Author of six collections in Chinese: D Minor Etudes (poetry), Berlin Story (photo-poems), Days Floating on Footage (poems and essays on movies), Chords Breaking (poetry), Art of Splitting (poetry), and Selected Poems of Ming Di. ![]() Ming Di (penname for Mindy Zhang) is a Chinese poet and translator living in the United States, born and grew up in China, pursued graduate studies at Boston University before moving to California where she writes in Chinese and publishes in China and Taiwan. ![]()
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