Salsa
by Hsia Yu (China)
Translated from the Chinese by Steve Bradbury
(Zephyr Press)
The poems in Salsa feature titles like “Fusion Kitsch,” “The Ripest Rankest Juiciest Summer Ever,” and “She sleeps as deep as a pair of sabot,” and allude to Che Guevara and Jack Kerouac or narrate flash histories of post-impressionist painting. A best-selling 1999 volume by Taiwanese avant-garde poet and pop songwriter Hsia Yü (the edition in Chinese is now in its tenth printing), Salsa is finally available in English by the poet’s longtime translator Steve Bradbury. With the translator’s afterword and notes, the poems of Salsa record a networked island’s end-of-millennium dance.
The Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize recognizes the importance of Asian translation for international literature and promotes the translation of Asian works into English. Lucien Stryk was an internationally acclaimed translator of Japanese and Chinese Zen poetry, renowned Zen poet himself, and former professor of English at Northern Illinois University. Information about the prize is available on the ALTA website. Judges for the 2015 Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize are Lucas Klein, Janet Poole, and Stephen Snyder.
The award-winning book and translator for 2015 will be announced on October 28th at the 38th annual conference of the American Literary Translators Association in Tucson, AZ and receive a $5,000 award. Information on the conference is available online: www.literarytranslators.org/alta38
Follow our blog (www.literarytranslators.org/blog), on Twitter (@LitTranslate), or on Facebook (www.facebook.com/literarytranslation) for the announcement of the winn
