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I began my study of Chinese as an undergraduate at Yale, and have also studied at the Middlebury College Chinese School and at Tsinghua University. A serious composer for many years, I was drawn to the Chinese language because of its musicality, and I soon found myself immersed in Chinese poetry and fiction.
As an undergraduate I translated the works of a little-known Tang dynasty poet, Li He, and researched the "root-seeking" writers of the 1980s; meanwhile, I began exploring Chinese aesthetics on my own terms by learning calligraphy and guqin, the classical zither favored by the Chinese literati. In my senior year, I was a member of Yale's winning team in the 2007 International Chinese Varsity Debate, featured on Chinese primetime television.
My projects include a novel, Witching Vale, by the Chinese exile writer Su Wei, and the first English collection of poems by the Chinese poet Ouyang Jianghe, under contract with Zephyr Press. In 2009 I traveled to Beijing on a grant from the Jintian Literary Fund to work directly with Ouyang, and did a joint residency with him at Vermont Studio Center. In fall 2010 I spent three months as a visiting scholar at UC Riverside, completing the manuscript of Witching Vale.
In addition, I am working on a new orchestration and singable English libretto for the symphonic choral suite Ask the Sky and the Earth: A Cantata for the Sent-Down Youth, commissioned by Shinik Hahm of the Yale Philharmonic and supported by COMBA Telecom.
I thrive on the electricity that arises from working directly with my authors—whether dissecting poems line by line with Ouyang, or traveling with Su back to the farm on Hainan Island where his novel is set. I think of translation as collaborative process, like the relationship between the writer and director of a film. When two artists put their minds together, there is no reason why an artistic vision cannot pass undimmed between languages and cultures.
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