ABSTRACT
This book first took shape during a two-day workshop on Chinese poetry and translation at Leiden University in June 2018. About halfway through, Nick Admussen said he found the community represented at the event to be inspirational to his work as a translator and a scholar of Chinese poetry. As an example he mentioned the recent Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese double (JMLC, issues 14-2 and 15-1, edited by Maghiel van Crevel), with papers given at Lingnan University in 2017 by several of those who had now come to Leiden. What Nick said about community echoed Eleanor Goodman’s earlier observation that her paper was inspired by an essay in which Nick digs into a mistake he made while translating a poem by Ya Shi 哑石and into the ensuing correspondence with Ya Shi – who did not consider it a mistake. “Translators translate through their libraries,” Joseph Allen said after Eleanor’s paper, and he is right; but it is equally true that translators translate, and poets and scholars write, through personal relationships with one another. The topic of Chinese poetry and translation is a case in point. And the workshop reaffirmed that the community in question is, well, kind of happening right now. Nick later called it a ragged family (Admussen 2019, 122).
