Kejia Wang
on translating Li Jizong
I came across this poem of Li Jizong’s while browsing another Chinese amateur translator’s blog (黎历/Lily) and was immediately struck by its lyricism and theme. As an international student living far away from home, I was touched by the melancholy of the (implied) parental speaker of the poem, especially since the poem was composed in my mother tongue. I want to bring this poem to Penn because I want to remind everyone in the Penn community of their aging parents and how they may miss us — even if the parent-child relationship is fraught, as it often turns out to be and often for good reason.
To begin the translating process, I first produced a rough draft on my own, then compared it to the other translator Lily’s work. I anguished over “truly” versus “really” and “actually,” I anguished over the parallel structures in the original poem, I anguished over the long lines and over the use of time. The Chinese language’s employment of past and future tenses is quite ambiguous and I chose to value clarity over retaining the multitude of potential meanings. I owe my translation of line 14 (“the world turns and time goes on flying”) to Lily. The original Chinese has five characters (“world / change / time / move / location”) but Lily’s interpretation (“while the world is changing and time is flying”) reminded me of W. S. Merwin’s “Unknown Age” (“the bird lies still while the light goes on flying”), one of my favorite English-language poems, and gave me the inspiration to come up with my own translation of the line.
about the author
Li Jizong (李继宗) is a middle-aged contemporary Hui Chinese poet. Born and raised in Gansu in Northwestern China, he has been published in prestigious Chinese poetry journals from Shikan and Shanhua to People’s Literature and Fangcao. He is referred to as one of “Gansu Poetry’s Eight Riders.” Li’s poems are loved for their conciseness, lyricism, subtlety, and examination of the human condition. He is often compared to Li Bai at his most mundane introspective, and the absence of punctuation in his poetry reminds many of the work of W. S. Merwin.
about the translator
Kejia Wang spent half of her life speaking Chinese and half of her life speaking English. She graduated from Penn in 2016 with a BSE in bioengineering and a minor in English. She is now studying English and science and technology studies at the University of British Columbia.
photo by Vivian Yuxin Wen
