Poet-translators A. E. Stallings and Jeffrey Yang have worked across diverse sets of text – from ancient didactics and illustrated epics to Modern Greek activists in Stallings’ work, to translations of Tang-Song Dynasty poets and contemporary Chinese and Uyghur activists in Yang’s work, and much more. Beyond the textual and semantic, how do they translate across time, societal structures and norms, and their varying degrees of personal proximity with the source text and its culture?

In this panel discussion, we’ll explore how the contextual can (or cannot) be translated and what clues these poet-translators leave in their work to guide readers to a deeper appreciation of what otherwise might be a foreign, inaccessible world.

Anita Ngai is a poet and artist and a poetry MFA student at Manchester Metropolitan University. Her work bears witness on lives in between. Drawing on past lives as an engineer, strategy consultant and marketer, she works with different media, including the poetic word, data and space. Born in Hong Kong and raised in North America, Anita’s writing was long-listed for The National Poetry Competition 2021 and commissioned for the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination.

A.E. Stallings is the Oxford Professor of Poetry. Her poetry collections include Like (2018), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; Olives (2012), which was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award; Hapax (2006); and Archaic Smile (1999), winner of the Richard Wilbur Award and finalist for both the Yale Younger Poets Series and the Walt Whitman Award. Her poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry anthologies of 1994, 2000, 2015, 2016, and 2017, and she is a frequent contributor to Poetry and the Times Literary Supplement. Stallings’s latest verse translation is the pseudo-Homeric The Battle Between the Frogs and the Mice (2019), in an illustrated edition with Paul Dry Books, and her latest volume of poetry is a selected poems, This Afterlife (2022, FSG). She is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation. She lives in Athens, Greece.

Jeffrey Yang is the author of the poetry collections Line and Light (Graywolf Press, 2022), Hey, Marfa (Graywolf Press, 2018), Vanishing-Line (Graywolf Press, 2011), and An Aquarium (Graywolf Press, 2008). He is the translator of Bei Dao’s Sidetracks (New Directions, 2024); Ahmatjan Osman’s Uyghurland, the Farthest Exile (Phoneme Media, 2015), cotranslated with the author; Liu Xiaobo’s June Fourth Elegies (Graywolf Press, 2012); Su Shi’s East Slope (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2008); and Bei Dao’s autobiography City Gate, Open Up (New Directions, 2017). He edited the anthologies Birds, Beasts, and Seas: Nature Poems (New Directions, 2011), Time of Grief: Mourning Poems (New Directions, 2013), and the collection The Sea Is a Continual Miracle: Sea Poems and Other Writings by Walt Whitman (University Press of New England, 2017). Yang works as an editor at New Directions Publishing and the New York Review of Books. He lives in Beacon, New York.