MM: Do you prefer translating poems from English to Chinese or vice versa? ) should be reflected in the translation. What drives the poem forward (the motif and echoes, the rhythm and variations, the passion or reasoning, the word play, the visual shifting, etc. There are always several choices to translate a line, I would try to bring out the implied, the suggested, the hidden meaning and show the intention, the emotion, the mood. Usually one can get it right linguistically in the first few drafts but it takes more time to get the tone right. For instance, if the poet hated rhythm and musicality in poetry, making the translation musical would be misleading. I like to present ambiguities and multiple readings but I also try to avoid misrepresentation. Ming Di: The hardest part of translation is to go inside the mind of the poet and find out what he did NOT intend to say. Masashi Musha: What is the most challenging aspect of translating poetry? She is co-founder and editor of Poetry East West, a Chinese-English bilingual literary magazine published in Los Angeles and Beijing. The Book of Cranes, which she co-translated from Chinese into English, will be published by Tupelo Press (USA). She has completed four volumes of translation from English to Chinese, including: The Writer as Migrant (2010), Missed Time (2011), and The Book of Things (to be published), and two more in progress. She is the author of six collections in Chinese: D Minor Etudes (poetry), Berlin Story (photo-poems), Days Floating on Footage (poems and essays on movies), Chords Breaking (poetry), Art of Splitting (poetry), and Selected Poems of Ming Di. She writes in Chinese and publishes in China and Taiwan. Born and raised in China, she moved to the US to pursue a graduate degree at Boston University before moving to California. Ming Di (pen name for Mindy Zhang) is a Chinese poet and translator.
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