ContactAbout Me
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.
I began translating because I saw it as a way to combine my obsession with Chinese with my nascent interest in creative writing. While at Yale, I translated the works of a little-known Tang dynasty poet, Li He, and wrote a thesis on 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 of old. In my senior year, I was a member of Yale’s winning team in the 2007 International Chinese Varsity Debate, which was featured on Chinese primetime television.
Since 2008 I have been working freelance in Brooklyn, New York. My current projects include a novel by the Chinese writer-in-exile Su Wei and the first English collection of poems by the Chinese poet Ouyang Jianghe, under contract with Zephyr Press. I thrive on the artistic electricity that arises from working directly with my authors: Su Wei is a longtime friend and mentor of mine, and I have even traveled with him to Hainan Island to visit the setting of his novel; in addition, I have had opportunities to work directly with Ouyang Jianghe through a travel grant from the Jintian Literary Fund and a writing fellowship at Vermont Studio Center.
It is said that much is lost in translation, but I believe much can be gained as well. I like to view a foreign text as inspiration, not limitation—the same way the constraints imposed by sonnet form might spur a poet to greater creative innovation.