Speaker: Lucas Klein
Time: 5.30 CET, 4 and 11 April

Lucas Klein (PhD Yale) is a father, writer, translator, and associate professor of Chinese at Arizona State University. Associate editor of the Hsu-Tang Library of Classical Chinese Literature (Oxford), he is author of The Organization of Distance (Brill, 2018), co-editor of Chinese Poetry and Translation (Amsterdam, 2019) and the Bloomsbury Handbook of Modern Chinese Literature in Translation (2023), and translator of Mang Ke (Zephyr, 2018), Li Shangyin(NYRB, 2018), Duo Duo (Yale, 2021), Xi Chuan (New Directions, 2012, 2022), and Yu Xuanji (Oxford, 2024).

Lecture 1. “En Face & the Face of the Other: On Intersubjectivity and Equivalence in Translating Contemporary Poetry from Chinese”

Does the publication of poetry in translation with the source text printed en face bring us face-to-face with the Other? My “Strong and Weak Interpretations in Translating Chinese Poetry” argues for minimal interventionism in translating contemporary Chinese poetry. Nick Admussen counters that translation be practiced according to “intersubjectivity.” Given that his notion comes from phenomenology, and is inspired by the term en face for bilingual editions, I will respond to Admussen in terms taken from Emmanuel Levinas’s “face-to-face” encounter with the Other. “The face speaks to me and thereby invites me to a relation incommensurate with a power exercised,” Levinas writes (1969, 197–98). Recent translations of poetry from Chinese into English—Tracy K. Smith and Changtai Bi’s translation of poetry by Yi Lei 伊蕾 (1951–2018), Austin Woerner’s translation of poetry by Ouyang Jianghe 欧阳江河 (b. 1956), and Steve Bradbury’s translation of poetry by Amang 阿芒 (b. 1960)—offer an opportunity to test Admussen’s argument against Levinasian ethics, as they demonstrate various ways in which the translators highlight their intersubjective relationships with the poets whose work they have translated. In light of my reading of these translations and their paratexts, I will argue that while intersubjectivity in poetry translation is indeed a worthy goal, it must be done with appropriate accountability and respect for interlingual equivalence, or the face-to-face of poetry translation practice.

Lecture 2. Jazz and the Translation of Classical Chinese Poetry: Against the Grammar-Translation Method and “Western Branch Orthodoxy.”

What is the difference between playing jazz piano and playing classical music on the piano? Are there better and worse ways to translate classical Chinese poetry into English? What do these questions have to do with each other? In this talk I develop my earlier argument that translating premodern Chinese poetry into English necessarily involves what I have called “strong interpretation.” I will develop this argument by introducing the history of debates around classical Chinese poetry translation alongside a look at translations of other classical literatures—namely Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit—followed by a critique of one of the dominant scholarly modes of translating classical Chinese into English. Since the baseline of translating classical Chinese poetry is strong interpretation, the translations that are most successful are the translations that own up to their interpretations, rather than trying to conceal them under the pretense of objectivity, and which necessarily incorporate improvisational techniques as in jazz.