Showing posts with label Chen. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Chen. Show all posts

Friday, January 21, 2011

How a Poet Translates His Own Poetry

Yihai Chen writes his poems in English and Chinese. In How a Poet Translates His Own Poetry (you have to scroll down for the English version) he tells about his experience of editing a bilingual edition of his poems and therefore translating a selection of his poems in both directions. As a self-translator he feels privileged because he "knows the author and the text much better than anyone else". Although he rises some important questions: "Which is more faithful, the poet’s own translation or a professional translator’s? Does a poet translator encounter the same problems of cultural transfer as other translators do? Is his or her strategy in solving such problems different from that of other translators?", he unfortunately does not answer them.

Sibila Petlevski: Is Translating Your Own Writing Really “Translation”?

In an essay published on Literary Hub in April 2025, the Croatian poet Sibila Petlevski (*1964 in Zagreb, Croatia) reflects on self-transla...