Transparent Mornings: an Evening of Readings and Variations with Chenxin and Stine
Doors: 6:30pm | Readings: 7:00pm
Join award-winning literary translators Chenxin Jiang and Stine An for an evening of bilingual readings, experimental variations, and literary friendship—part book launch, part celebration of how poems, translations, and our relationships to texts evolve over time and through publication!
Featuring selections from Chenxin’s translation from the Chinese of For now I am sitting here growing transparent by Yau Ching (Zephyr Press), and from Stine’s translation from the Korean of Yoo Heekyung’s Today’s Morning Vocabulary (Zephyr Press), the event explores how translations shift through languages, drafts, mediums, publication, and time.
In addition to standard readings of poetry in translation, the evening will feature the following experimental readings in variation:
👯 “Poetry Pairs”: Chenxin and Stine read pairs of poems that reveal unexpected resonances between For now I am sitting here growing transparent by Yau Ching and Today’s Morning Vocabulary by Yoo Heekyung.
🎹 “Variations”: Stine reads multiple versions of a single poem while Chenxin plays several variations on an aria by Bach.
🎶 “Notes”: The translators share selections from personal essays, translator’s notes, and ephemera to provide a glimpse into the translation process.
Books will be available for purchase. The reading will be followed by a reception and book signing.
Meet the Readers
Chenxin Jiang is a PEN/Heim-winning translator from Italian, German, and Chinese. She was born in Singapore and grew up in Hong Kong. Her translations include Tears of Salt: A Doctor’s Story by Pietro Bartolo and Lidia Tilotta (W. W. Norton), shortlisted for the 2019 Italian Prose in Translation Award, Volatile Texts: Us Two by Zsuzsanna Gahse (Dalkey Archive), and The Cowshed: Memories of the Chinese Cultural Revolution by Ji Xianlin (NYRB). Chenxin Jiang’s translation of Yau Ching’s poem “Trial Run” was a winner of the 2020 Words Without Borders–Academy of American Poets Poems in Translation Contest. She serves on the board for the American Literary Translators Association.
Stine An is a poet and translator based in New York City. She received a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant and an NEA Translation Fellowship for her translations of Yoo Heekyung. Her work has appeared in Best Literary Translations 2024, Best American Experimental Writing 2018, Words Without Borders, Poem-a-Day, World Literature Today, Poetry Daily, Asymptote, The Southern Review, Electric Literature, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA in Literary Arts from Brown University and a BA in Literature from Harvard College. Her debut poetry collection, B-Dragon Suite, is a winner of the 2023 Nightboat Poetry Prize.
About the Books
For now I am sitting here growing transparent by Yau Ching, trans. from Chinese by Chenxin Jiang
Preview book on Zephyr Press Website
Yau Ching is an award-winning film/video artist, scholar, writer and poet. Her poetry—simultaneously erudite and earthy—is shaped by Hong Kong’s cultural position on the margins of mainland China and at the centre of the Cantonese-speaking world. Time spent in New York, London, Michigan, Taiwan, and elsewhere also informs her work, as did a breast cancer diagnosis in 2009, as well as her long-time work advocating for sexual minorities.
Yau’s oeuvre explores gender, aesthetics, colonialism, relationships, and illness with a wide range of emotions and registers, and frequently employs wordplay. This debut bilingual collection includes astute political poems, understated love poems, urban anti-eclogues, and prose poems. The book also includes eight still images from her films/videos.
Born in Hong Kong, Yau Ching spent years teaching both in Hong Kong and Taipei, while also founding and programming several film and theatre festivals dedicated to telling the stories of sex workers and the queer community. She has authored more than thirteen books, and produced and directed more than ten films and videos. Her poems have been featured in such publications as World Literature Today, Asymptote, Catamaran, Transpacific Literary Project, and at the Center for the Art of Translation. More information is available at www.yauching.com.
Today’s Morning Vocabulary by Yoo Heekyung, trans. from Korean by Stine An
Preview book on Zephyr Press Website
Yoo Heekyung is an acclaimed younger South Korean poet, playwright, and essayist who also runs Wit N Cynical, a popular poetry bookstore and project space in Seoul. Yoo writes poems that invite readers to reflect upon daily sorrows, while also illuminating single moments full of strange and arresting images that suggest the passage of time—a hardened piece of bread, a train about to arrive, a crumpled piece of paper. This debut collection in English chronicles contemporary life in a minor key where loneliness and existential ghosts thread the pieces. But Yoo's title also points to his fascination with language, and how each day offers chances to understand new vocabularies and new meanings—of words, of living.
Born in 1980, Yoo is the author of several collections of poetry and prose that query subjects such as photography, poetry, stories, presence and absence, and clouds. His publications include the essay collection Poetry and Photography (Achimdal Books, 2024) and the poetry collection Winter Night Rabbit Worries (Hyundae Munhak, 2023). Yoo is a recipient of Today’s Young Artist Award (2023) from the South Korean Ministry of Culture, the Hyundae Munhak Literary Award (Contemporary Literature Award, 2020), and the Gosan New Writer Award (2019). He studied poetry under Kim Hyesoon (Autobiography of Death, trans. by Don Mee Choi), who has provided a blurb for the book, as have Sawako Nakayasu and Joyelle McSweeney.