Source: School of Foreign Languages
Written by: Nazli ?NAL
Edited by: Wang Dongmei

The first Literary Tea of the semester, sponsored by the Department of English, took place on Friday, October 16, 2015. Austin Woerner, who has recently joined the faculty of the School of Foreign Languages as a foreign instructor, gave a Book Club talk titled “Reversing the Tapestry: Adventures of a Literary Translator”. Woerner has earned his BA in East Asian Studies from Yale University and his MFA in Creative Writing from The New School, where he was the assistant to the program director Robert Polito. The event was attended by a dozen undergraduates and as well as members of the department, including the department head, Professor Dai.

Not only the intimate setting of the event, but also Woerner’s opening remarks comparing himself as a student of Chinese in the United States to the students who major in English in China immediately created a congenial atmosphere. Woerner then took up describing the challenges he faced while translating The Invisible Valley by Su Wei, a project that took him about six years, and almost as many drafts, the latest of which he projected on the screen, side-by-side with the Chinese original. Going back and forth between the Chinese and the English texts, Woerner gave his audience a chance to see the difficulties of translating not only the language but also the culture and the cultural and linguistic associations that an English-speaking reader would not be able to catch on had the text been translated word-by-word. Woerner did not neglect to provide an example of English to Chinese translation, which reinforced his point that the easiest thing a translator could do is to translate words, and that he has to explain numerous historical facts as well as socio-cultural relationships in every sentence he commits himself to translate.

Austin Woerner giving a Book Club talk titled "Reversing the Tapestry: Adventures of a Literary Translator" 

No matter the difficulties, Woerner emphasized that translating The Invisible Valley has nonetheless been a rewarding and fun experience, and engaged his audience by sharing riveting personal stories he heard from Su Wei, with whom he had studied in college and worked closely during the translation project. The audience had many comments and questions, as a result of which the later part of the Literary Tea was an intellectually stimulating group discussion. Woerner answered as many questions as he could before the time ran out, and urged the students to take his class next semester, where he will focus on literary translation.

Woerner is also the translator of Doubled Shadows: Selected Poetry of Ouyang Jianghe (Zephyr Press, 2012); Phoenix, by Ouyang Jianghe (Zephyr Press, 2014); as well as work published or forthcoming in Poetry, Kenyon Review Online, Zoland Poetry, Asymptote, Asian American Literary Review, Pathlight, Chinese Literature Today, and The New York Times Magazine.