Translating Hong Kong: A City In Between

In this panel, translators from a range of backgrounds will read and contextualize their translations of Hong Kong poetry and prose written in the 1950s through the present, including texts that straddle genre classifications and bridge the literary / popular divide. These works explore various types of “in-betweenness,” negotiating among Cantonese, Mandarin, written Chinese, and English, along with British colonialism/post-colonialism, competing Chinese nationalisms, global cosmopolitanisms, and hybridized local spaces.

Event handout: https://bit.ly/33Zw1PB (opens in new tab)

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Moderator

Jennifer Feeley is the translator of Not Written Words: Selected Poetry of Xi Xi and the White Fox series by Chen Jiatong. She is the recipient of the 2017 Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize and a 2019 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Translation Fellowship.

Presenters

Frederik H. Green is Associate Professor of Chinese at San Francisco State University. He has published widely on the literature and culture of 19th- and 20th-century China. His translation Bird Talk and Other Stories by Xu Xu: Modern Tales of a Chinese Romantic was published in 2020. May Huang was born in Taiwan and raised in Hong Kong. She graduated from the University of Chicago and is a member of the Third Coast Translators Collective. Her work has appeared in InTranslation, Asymptote, Cha, and elsewhere. She is a mentee in ALTA’s 2020 Emerging Translator Mentorship Program. Andrea Lingenfelter is the award-winning translator of The Changing Room: Selected Poetry of Zhai Yongming, Hon Lai Chu’s The Kite Family, Li Pik-wah’s Farewell My Concubine, and Mian Mian’s Candy and Vanishing Act. Her translations have appeared in Mano, Granta, Words Without Borders, Asian CHA, Two Lines, and Chicago Review.