11/21 and 11/22/24
Special Programming
On Thursday, November 21 from 1:30 to 3:00 pm, Tammy Lai-Ming Ho will offer a poetry reading from her latest collection If I Do Not Reply at Center of East Asian Studies Room 319, 1155 East 60th Street. Dr. Ho has kindly provided an excerpt of her book, which can be accessed HERE with the password “Reply.” Please do not circulate the materials without the author’s permission.
And on Friday, November 22 from 3:00 to 6:00 pm, the “Translating the Multilingual” Symposium featuring Jennifer Feeley, Tammy Lai-Ming Ho, and May Huang will be held at Room 122, Joseph Regenstein Library. The symposium will comprise two parts: a 90-minute panel introduced by Professor Paola Iovene (EALC) featuring short presentations by the speakers, with a Q&A section moderated by Nicole Liu (Ph.D. student in EALC); and a keynote lecture by Tammy Lai-Ming Ho at 5 pm. The symposium discussion will focus on the following books:
- Tongueless (Lau Yee-Wa, trans. by Jennifer Feeley)
- Mourning a Breast (Xi Xi, trans. by Jennifer Feeley)
- If I Do Not Reply (Tammy Lai-Ming Ho)
- A Cha Chaan Teng That Does Not Exist (Derek Chung, trans. by May Huang)
The Seminary Co-op Bookstore will have a bookseller on-site to sell copies. While the symposium discussion does not require attendees to read pre-circulated materials, we encourage attendees to purchase these books from the Seminary Co-op Bookstores ahead of time.
Both events are open to the public, so invite your friends! Please register via the provided links so that we have an accurate gauge of attendance!
11/21 Are You Becoming Critically Endangered? Poetry of Exile, Protest and Reparation
Speaker: Tammy Lai-Ming Ho is a Hong Kong-born scholar, editor, poet, and translator. She is editor-in-chief of Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, the first English editor of Voice & Verse Poetry Magazine, translation editor of The Shanghai Literary Review, and founding co-editor of Hong Kong Studies. Her poetry collections are Hula Hooping (2015), which earned her the Young Artist Award in Literary Arts from the Hong Kong Arts Development Council, Too Too Too Too (2018), and If I Do Not Reply (2024). Her academic book Neo-Victorian Cannibalism was published in 2019. Tammy’s translations have appeared in World Literature Today and Chinese Literature Today. She was a writer-in-residence at the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program in 2023 and a fellow at the Käte Hamburger College for Cultural Practices of Reparation (CURE) at Saarland University in 2024.
★This event is co-sponsored with Translation Studies, the Arts and Politics of East Asia (APEA) Workshop, the Seminary Co-op Bookstores, and the Center for East Asian Studies with support in part by grant funding from the U.S. Department of Education’s Title VI National Resource Centers program. This event’s content does not necessarily represent the policy of the U.S. Department of Education, and one should not assume endorsement by the Federal Government.★
11/22 Translating the Multilingual Symposium
“Translating the Multilingual will focus on the translation of texts that are not linguistically homogeneous: texts that mingle Mandarin with Cantonese and English, for instance, and as such present peculiar challenges to the translators. The aim of the symposium is to learn about the diverse strategies adopted by the translators and to brainstorm on how to reconceptualize translation in light of these practices.”
Speakers:
Jennifer Feeley holds a PhD in East Asian Languages and Literatures from Yale University and currently serves as a part-time Faculty Mentor in the International MFA in Creative Writing & Literary Translation Program at Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her original writings and translations from Chinese have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including Two Lines, PEN America’s Glossolalia, Epiphany, Cha, Mekong Review, Chinese Literature Today, World Literature Today, and Creating Across Cultures: Women in the Arts from China, Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan, among others. In 2019, she was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Translation Fellowship to translate Xi Xi’s semi-autobiographical work Mourning a Breast.
May Huang is from Hong Kong and Taiwan. She graduated from UChicago in 2019 with degrees in comp lit and English. Her translation of Derek Chung’s A Cha Chaan Teng That Does Not Exist, which she started translating at UChicago, was published in 2023 via Zephyr Press. The book won the Northern California Book Award for Poetry in Translation and has been shortlisted for the Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize. She is the recipient of the 2020 ALTA Emerging Translator Mentorship and a 2021 PEN/HEIM Translation Fund Grant. Her writing and translations have appeared in Words Without Borders, World Literature Today, Circumference, Electric Literature, the Massachusetts Review, and elsewhere. She is also a crossword constructor, and her day job is in corporate communications.
Tammy Lai-Ming Ho (see bio from 11/21 event.)
Organizer and Moderator:
Paola Iovene is a Professor of Chinese Literature and the Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations. Her current research interests converge around three themes: the intersections between literature, labor, and social inequality; the ways in which the dichotomy of realism and modernism shapes contemporary Chinese literary historiography; and the use of actual locations in cinema. She is now working on a project on the Shaanxi writer Lu Yao, particularly on the radio broadcasts of his fiction and other media adaptations of his life and work.
Nicole Liu is a 3rd-year PhD student of modern and contemporary Chinese literature in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations. She is broadly interested in poetry, translation/theory, and the publishing scene of contemporary China. She also writes and translates poetry in her spare time. Her works are featured or forthcoming in Couplet Poetry, Mouse Magazine, and elsewhere.
★ This event is co-sponsored with the University of Chicago Library, the Seminary Co-op Bookstores, Translation Studies, the Arts and Politics of East Asia (APEA) Workshop, and the Center for East Asian Studies with support in part by grant funding from the U.S. Department of Education’s Title VI National Resource Centers program. This event’s content does not necessarily represent the policy of the U.S. Department of Education, and one should not assume endorsement by the Federal Government. ★