Michelle Slinger; Madeline Penn; Alex Stern; Hector Roman; Kejia Wang; Malika Kadyrova; Macile Dietrick; Anna Carapellotti; Steph Barron; Michael Karam; Shailly Pandey; Naomi Bernstein; Kristen Pearson
on translating Shu Ting
These renditions were created by students in a seminar on poetry and translation, using numerous published versions of the poem and guided by native speakers in the class, particularly Keija Wang.
about the author
Shu Ting (舒婷) is from Fujian, China. She is usually associated with the Misty Poets. She was born in 1952, and during the Cultural Revolution, was sent to the Chinese countryside because of her family’s political ideology. She returned to Fujian in 1972 and spent time working in factories for her livelihood. Her poems gained popularity in the 1980s, and around that time, she did a joint collection of poetry with Gu Cheng, another prominent Misty poet. Shu is well known in China and the rest of the world for her poems “To the Oak” and “Dear Motherland,” in which conflict and pain are present but positivity blooms.
about the translators
These translators are all undergraduate students at the University of Pennsylvania.
