Three faculty from the University of Washington’s Department of Asian Languages & Literature will present:

WANG Ping
“Translating “Nature” and the Nature of Translating: Classical Chinese Poetry as a Global Phenomenon”
Poetry written in the Classical Chinese language may have suffered the first setback when China ushered in the twentieth century—an era marked by incessant revolutions and drastic measures to modernize the nation. In recent decades, however, Classical Chinese Poetry has made a comeback through translation and introduction to a global audience. In particular, the discovery of “landscape poetry” aka “nature poetry” seems to have resulted from non-native scholars who utilized translation as a major research tool. 

Paul Atkins
“Translating Medieval Japanese Zen Poetry”
Zekkai Chūshin (1336-1405) was a Japanese Zen abbot and poet who lived in China for eight years at the beginning of the Ming dynasty and left behind about 170 poems in classical Chinese. Atkins will discuss some of the choices—of format, form, and meaning—one faces in translating classical Chinese poetry into English, and the triangualged nature of interpreting Zekkai’s poetry, as nearly all of the extant commentary about it has been published in Japanese.  

Justin Jesty
(Intended) publication creates a horizon wherein typical language-classroom questions of correct/incorrect or competent/incompetent must be supplemented with the more ambitious and nebulous goals of optimization, even perfection. The prospect of judging “perfection,” however, opens up a field of pragmatic considerations such as the context and intended audience of the original production, the age, gender, race of the speaker/writer, and the situation and intentions of translators. Presenting work with advanced Japanese language students, Jesty will discuss how the historical contingency of judgments of quality presents itself most clearly and urgently when singular, finalizing judgments about quality must be made.

Speaker Bio(s):

WANG Ping is Associate Professor of Chinese Literature at the University of Washington, Seattle. Her research focuses on the history of Classical Chinese literature, poetry and poetics, and translation and criticism. She is the author of The Age of Courtly Writing: Wen xuan Compiler Xiao Tong (501-531) and His Circle (Leiden: Brill, 2012) and co-editor of Southern Identity and Southern Estrangement in Medieval Chinese Poetry (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2015). 

Paul S. Atkins is Professor of Japanese in the Department of Asian Languages and Literature at the University of Washington, Seattle.  He is working on an English translation of Zekkai’s selected poetry, with annotations and an introduction, and is author of Teika: The Life and Works of a Medieval Japanese Poet (University of Hawai’i Press, 2017). His translation of Nagamachi onna hara-kiri  was awarded the William F. Sibley Memorial Translation Prize in Japanese Literature and Literary Studies in 2011.

Justin Jesty is Associate Professor in the Department of Asian Languages and Literate at the University of Washington, Seattle. He researches the relationship between art and social movements in postwar Japan. His book Art and Engagement in Early Postwar Japan (Cornell University Press 2018) was awarded the 2019 ASAP Book Prize by the Association for the Study of Arts of the Present. washington.academia.edu…