Ron Padgett:

A Note on Translating Yu Jian

I first met Yu Jian at a poetry festival in Sweden in the summer of 2002. He was one of the five Chinese poets taking part. They read in Chinese, followed by translations into Swedish, so my impression of their work was based solely on the manner and presence of the readers. Yu Jian’s first reading was in a mysterious, highly charged whisper, which I imagined to be secretly comic. Afterward I approached the Chinese group and asked one of them, who was serving as interpreter, to tell Yu Jian that although I understood no Chinese, I liked his reading very much. He smiled, said thank you, and handed me an anthology of his work in English.

Late that night I browsed through it, until I came to a poem that seemed oddly familiar. The next poem had this same aura, and the third one had lines that I seemed magically to anticipate, almost verbatim. My sudden prescience became eery, and then came the credit: “Translated by Wang Ping and Ron Padgett.”

About seven years earlier Wang Ping had asked me to collaborate on some translations for an anthology of contemporary Chinese poetry she was preparing. I was happy to do so, and I found working with her a pleasure, partly because I liked the poems we were translating. But I had paid little attention to the name of their author—of course, Yu Jian.

The next morning he found this story highly amusing, saying, “Maybe I have translated your poems without knowing it too!” Aha! I quickly foisted a copy of my New & Selected Poems on him.

Once he had returned to China and I to the US, we began an email correspondence, thanks to the translation program on his computer. Our messages came through in a somewhat cryptic language (in one instance he referred to a borough of New York as “Her Imperial Highnesses Neighborhood,” i.e., Queens). This gave me the idea of writing poems with him via email, using the computer’s translation program virtually as a third collaborator. About fifteen poems ensued.

Meanwhile Wang Ping, hearing of my new friendship with Yu Jian, suggested that she and I do more of his poems. And so we set out on his modestly titled Anthology of Notes. From time to time she emails me a rough draft from the Chinese and I tart it up. Sometimes I ask her to clarify words or passages, but her versions don’t require a lot of work on my part. On the few occasions that we both have found the original poem perplexing, we have asked Yu Jian for clarification. His answers are invariably along the lines of “Ah, yes, a mystery!”

One of the continuing questions for me is how much to turn Yu Jian into an American poet—sometimes he does sound like a combination of William Carlos Williams, Gary Snyder, Frank O’Hara, and me. The opposite temptation is to make him sound “Chinese.” My aim is right between these two extremes.

Periodically I send a group of new and polished versions to Wang Ping for approval. She is a highly agreeable co-translator. Thus far we have completed around 100—about half the Anthology. Some day we hope to publish a collection of them in book form, but there is no pressure and no deadline, only the pleasure of the work.

Last year Yu Jian visited the US for the first time. He and I went to the top of the Empire State Building alone. I had warned him that all I can say in Chinese is Hello, chop sticks, and thank you. He had replied that the only things he can say in English are Hello, chop sticks, and thank you. So before an interpreter joined us later that afternoon, we walked around New York, speaking our respective languages, gesturing, and cracking up.