What Translation Teaches Us
This blog post is generously provided in kind by Wendy Chen. The Double Down blog is also supported by Nevada Humanities’ donors.
By Wendy Chen
Image courtesy of Wendy Chen.
Growing up in a bilingual Chinese American household, I was a translator long before I called myself one. Daily acts of translation shaped my understanding of language and transformed my approach toward my own writing. My most recent book, The Magpie at Night: The Complete Poems of Li Qingzhao (1084-1151) (FSG, 2025), is a culmination of my experience as a translator, writer, and teacher.
The Song-dynasty woman writer Li Qingzhao is considered one of the greatest poets in Chinese history but is relatively unknown in America. When I first encountered Li Qingzhao’s poems, I could hardly believe they were written almost a thousand years ago. The images in her poems are fresh and exciting, and the depth of emotions greatly moving. She writes poignantly about heartbreak, desire, grief. For example, in one existing fragment, she writes: You burn my hand, / but your heart is cold. In another poem, she describes the speaker as “thinner than a yellow flower,” having withered away from longing.
In her writing, Li Qingzhao also reflects upon her own legacy as a writer, and she certainly held an unusual position in society. She wrote and published during a time when women were discouraged from doing so, as sharing and exposing one’s words and inner thoughts was considered improper and unchaste. However, these social expectations were not able to restrict Li Qingzhao; by the time she was a teenager, she had already gained fame and respect for her writing.
I began translating Li Qingzhao in college, trying my hand at one poem, then another. Each translation was a puzzle that could only be solved through language. On one side, there was the original Chinese text. A hazy web of connotations, emotional associations, sonic textures, literary references surrounded that text. On the other side, there was the blank page of the translation; in other words, possibility.
“ In classes, we consider what it might mean to translate a visual experience into a textual one, or how one could translate birdsong into human language.”
The process of translation is defined through questions. For example, which threads might a translator draw on and pull over to the blank page? Should a translator focus on a literal translation or one that captures the effect of the original for a modern-day audience? Should a translator try their hand at a sonic translation, one that evokes the sounds of the original language? If there are multiple readings of the text, which one should the translator prioritize? These decisions were challenging to make but taught me so much about my own sensibilities as a writer and artist.
Now, as a teacher in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, I guide my graduate students through their own translation projects. In classes, we consider what it might mean to translate a visual experience into a textual one, or how one could translate birdsong into human language. Every semester, I am delighted by the ways that my students question, challenge, and transform their understandings of what it means to be a translator. In doing so, my students bring these new understandings to writing and language and, ultimately, to the world around them.
Wendy Chen is the author of the novel Their Divine Fires (Algonquin) and the poetry collection Unearthings (Tavern Books). Her poetry translations of Song-dynasty woman writer Li Qingzhao are published in The Magpie at Night from Farrar, Straus & Giroux. She is the editor of Witness, associate editor-in-chief of Tupelo Quarterly, and prose editor of Tupelo Press. She earned her MFA in poetry from Syracuse University and her PhD in English from the University of Denver. She is an assistant professor of creative writing at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.