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From Ghazal to Zuihitsu:
A Conference on Translating Asian Languages and Culture
Biographies of Conference Participants
Keynote Reader: Li-Young Lee
LI-YOUNG LEE was born in 1957 in Jakarta, Indonesia, to Chinese parents. His father had been a personal physician to Mao Zedong while in China, and relocated the family to Indonesia, where he helped found Gamaliel University. In 1959, the Lee family fled the country to escape anti-Chinese sentiment and after a five-year trek through Hong Kong, Macau, and Japan, they settled in the United States in 1964. Lee attended the Universities of Pittsburgh and Arizona, and the State University of New York at Brockport. He has taught at several universities, including Northwestern and the University of Iowa.
He is the author of Behind My Eyes (Norton, 2008); Book of My Nights (2001), which won the 2002 William Carlos Williams Award; The City in Which I Love You (1991), which was the 1990 Lamont Poetry Selection; and Rose (1986), which won the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Poetry Award. His other work includes Breaking the Alabaster Jar: Conversations with Li-Young Lee (Edited by Earl G. Ingersoll, BOA Editions, 2006), a collection of twelve interviews with Lee at various stages of his artistic development; and The Winged Seed: A Remembrance (Simon and Schuster, 1995), a memoir which received an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation.
With regard to Lee's work, the poet Gerald Stern has noted that "what characterizes [his] poetry is a certain humility... a willingness to let the sublime enter his field of concentration and take over, a devotion to language, a belief in its holiness."
He has been the recipient of a Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets, a Lannan Literary Award, a Whiting Writer's Award, the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Award, the I. B. Lavan Award, three Pushcart Prizes, and grants from the Illinois Arts Council, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship. In 1998, he received the honorary degree of Doctor of Humane Letters from State University of New York at Brockport. He lives in Chicago, Illinois, with his wife, Donna, and their two sons.
Organizers:
Conference Coordinator: Roger Sedarat
ROGER SEDARAT is a poet and translator. His first collection of poetry, Dear Regime: Letters to the Islamic Republic (Ohio UP), won the 2007 Hollis Summers Prize. In addition to publishing articles on American poetry, Middle Eastern-American literature, and writing pedagogy, he has placed poems and translations in such journals as The New England Review, Atlanta Review, and Iranian.com. A recipient of scholarships to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and a St. Botolph Society Grant, he is Assistant Professor in the MFA program.
QC Distinguished Professor and CUNY MFA-liason: Kimiko Hahn
KIMIKO HAHN is the author of seven collections of poetry, including, The Unbearable Heart which received an American Book Award; Earshot, a Theodore Roethke Memorial Prize and an Association of Asian American Studies Award; and most recently, The Narrow Road to the Interior (W.W. Norton, 2006). The latter—whose title is stolen from the great haiku master, Basho—consists of work inspired by Japanese classical forms. Such as the tanka and zuihitsu. She has also written for film, including Everywhere At Once, narrated by Jeanne Moreau and which premiered at The Cannes Film Festival. Hahn is the recipient of fellowships such as The National Endowment for the Arts, the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Foundation, the Shelley Memorial Prize and the PEN/Voelker Award. Her work has been widely anthologized (Contemporary American Poetry edited by Poulin and Waters, The Heath Anthology of American Literature edited by Lauter et al., The Best American Poetry 1996 edited by Rich, etc.) and has been the subject of scholarly writing by Traise Yamamoto, Xiaojing Zhou, Mihaela Moscaliuc and others. She is a Distinguished Professor in the English Department and MFA Program at Queens College, The City University of New York.
MFA Director: Nicole Cooley
NICOLE COOLEY, Associate Professor and Director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing and Literary Translation, grew up in New Orleans, Louisiana. She is the author of two books of poetry and a novel. Her fourth book, Breach, a collection of poems about Hurricane Katrina and the Gulf Coast, is forthcoming from Louisiana State University Press. She received her BA from Brown University, her MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and her PhD in American Literature and Women’s Studies from Emory University. Her awards include The Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets for her first book, Resurrection, a Discovery/The Nation Award, an NEA, a Creative Artists fellowship from The American Antiquarian Society, and the Emily Dickinson Award from the Poetry Society of America.
She has published scholarly work on women’s writing and experimental poetics in Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, The American Poetry Review and Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition and Culture as well as in the edited collections Devouring Institutions: The Life Work of Kathy Acker and We Who Love to Be Astonished: Innovative Women Writers and Performance Artists. Her non-fiction essays appear in Toddler, The Best of Literary Mama, and the recently published Mama PhD; Women Write about Motherhood and Academic Life. She is currently completing a new collection of poems, Milk Dress, as well as a cross genre project, The Flood Notebooks. And she is co-editing, with Pamela Stone, the “Mother” issue of the journal Women’s Studies Quarterly.
Participants by Area of Interest
Korean: Heinz Insu Fenkl
HEINZ INSU FENKL is an author, editor, translator, mythic scholar, and the director of the Creative Writing Program at the State University of New York, New Paltz. He is also the director of ISIS: The Interstitial Studies Institute at SUNY, New Paltz. His fiction includes Memories of My Ghost Brother, an autobiographical, Interstitial novel about growing up in Korea as a bi-racial child in the '60s. On the strength of this book he was named a Barnes and Noble "Great New Writer" and Pen/Hemingway finalist in 1997. His second novel, Shadows Bend (a collaborative work, published under a pseudonym) was an innovative, dark 'road novel' about H.P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, and Clark Ashton Smith. He has also published short fiction in a variety of journals and magazines, as well as numerous articles on folklore and myth.
Heinz was raised in Korea and (in his later years) Germany and the United States. Graduating from Vassar, he studied folklore and shamanism as a Fulbright Scholar in Korea and dream research under a grant from the University of California. Before his appointment to his current position at SUNY, he taught a range of courses at Vassar, Bard, Sarah Lawrence, and Yonsei University (Korea), including Asian/American Folk Traditions, East Asian Folklore, Korean Literature, Asian American Literature, and Native American Literature, in addition to Creative Writing. He has published translations of Korean fiction and folklore, and is co-editor of Kori: The Beacon Anthology of Korean American Literature. Currently he is at work on a sequel to Memories of My Ghost Brother, and on a volume of Korean myths, legends, and folk tales: Old, Old Days When Tigers Smoked Tobacco Pipes. He also writes regular columns on mythic topics for Realms of Fantasy magazine.
South Asian: Vijay Seshadri
VIJAY SESHARDI was born in India and came to the United States in 1959, at the age of five. He grew up in Columbus, Ohio, and has lived in many parts of the country, including the Northwest, where he spent five years working in the fishing industry, and the Upper West Side, where he was a sometime graduate student in Columbia’s Ph.D. program in Middle Eastern Languages and Literature. His poems, essays, and reviews have appeared in AGNI, Antaeus, Boulevard, The Nation, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Shenandoah, The Southwest Review, The Threepenny Review, Verse, and Western Humanities Review. Graywolf Press published collections of his poetry: Wild Kingdom and The Long Meadow. He is a professor in the Creative Writing MFA Program at Sarah Lawrence College.
Japanese: Hiroaki Sato
HIROAKI SATO A leading translator of Japanese poetry into English, Hiroaki Sato, with Burton Watson, won the 1982 PEN American Center Translation Prize for From the Country of Eight Islands: Anthology of Japanese Poetry (Anchor Books, 1981; reprint, Columbia University Press, 1986) and the 1999 Japan-United States Friendship Commission Japanese Literary Translation Prize for Breeze Through Bamboo: Kanshi of Ema Saikō (Columbia University Press, 1997). Among his prose translations are Legends of the Samurai (Overlook, 1995) and My Friend Hitler and Other Plays of Yukio Mishima (Columbia University Press, 2002). His recent books are Miyazawa Kenji: Selections (University of California Press, 2007), Nishiwaki Junzaburō: Poems (Green Integer, 2007), and Japanese Women Poets: An Anthology (M.E. Sharpe, 2007). His books on haiku include One Hundred Frogs: From Renga to Haiku to English (Weatherhill, 1983) and Eigo Haiku (Haiku in English: A Poetic Form Expands, Simul, 1987). He was president of the Haiku Society of America, from 1979 to 1981. Sato, senior research fellow at JETRO New York, writes a monthly column, “The View from New York,” for The Japan Times.
Japanese/Chinese: Micheline Soong
MICHELINE M. SOONG is a 4th-generation Chinese-American, born and raised in Honolulu, Hawaii, and whose mother tongues are English and Hawai'i Creole English. She has studied Cantonese and Mandarin and Japanese in Honolulu, Los Angeles, Beijing, Taiwan, and Yokohama. Her doctorate in Comparative Literature is from the University of California at Los Angeles, in the areas of Japanese, Chinese, and Asian-American Literatures. She is currently Associate Professor of English at Hawai'i Pacific University.
Tagalog (Philippines): Luis Francia
Manila-born LUIS H. FRANCIA is a poet, essayist, playwright, critic, and translator from Tagalog to English, and English to Tagalog. Among his books of poetry are The Arctic Archipelago and Other Poems and Museum of Absences. His poems have been included in a number of anthologies. Nonfiction books include Eye of the Fish: A Personal Archipelago (Kaya, 2001)—winner of the 2002 PEN Open Book and the 2002 Asian American Writers Literary awards—and Memories of Overdevelopment. He has edited two anthologies of literature, the seminal Brown River, White Ocean: Twentieth Century Philippine Literature in English (Rutgers University Press, 1993), and, with co-editor Eric Gamalinda. Flippin': Filipinos on America (Asian American Writers Workshop, 1997). He is included in Becoming Americans: Four Centuries of Immigrant Writing, to be published by the Library of America later this year. Two of his plays have been given staged readings by Ma-Yi Theater Company and Diverse City Theater. He has written for the Village Voice, The Nation, Asiaweek, and The San Francisco Chronicle. A tale of two cities, he teaches at New York University and writes online for the Philippine Daily Inquirer.
English (Philippines): Sarah Gambito
SARAH GAMBITO is the author of Matadora (2004) and Delivered (forthcoming in 2009). Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Iowa Review, The Antioch Review, Denver Quarterly, The New Republic, Field, Quarterly West, Fence and other journals. She holds degrees from The University of Virginia and The Creative Writing Program at Brown University. A recipient of grants and fellowships from The New York Foundation for the Arts, Urban Artists Initiative and The MacDowell Colony, she teaches at New York University and Baruch College and is co-founder of Kundiman, a non-profit organization that promotes Asian-American poetry.
English (Philippines): Joseph O. Legaspi
JOSEPH LEGASPI is the author of Imago (CavanKerry Press). Born in the Philippines, he was raised there and in Los Angeles where he immigrated with his family when he was twelve. Currently, he lives in Manhattan and works at Columbia University. A graduate of New York University’s Creative Writing Program, recent works appeared in Callaloo, North American Review, Poets & Writers, New York Theater Review, Crab Orchard Review, Gay & Lesbian Review and the anthology Language for a New Century (W.W. Norton). A recipient of a poetry fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts, he co-founded Kundiman (www.kundiman.org), a non-profit organization serving Asian American poets. Visit him at www.josepholegaspi.com.
Chinese: Mary Anne Cartelli
MARY ANNE CARTELLI received her PhD in East Asian Studies from Columbia University; professor of Chinese literature at Hunter College, City University of New York. Cartelli has published her poems and translations (from the Chinese) in variety of magazines over the years and is working on a scholarly book of Chinese Buddhist verse from the Dunhuang manuscripts.
Persian: Niloufar Talebi
Award-winning translator, NILOUFAR TALEBI received a BA in Comparative Literature from UC Irvine, and an MFA in Writing and Literature from Bennington College. She studied theater with Jean Shelton and Cyril Clayton and has produced and performed nationally. She founded www.TheTranslationProject.org in 2003 to bring contemporary Iranian literature to worldwide audiences through events and innovative book and multimedia projects. She edited and translated BELONGING: New Poetry By Iranians Around the World (North Atlantic Books, July 2008), and created ICARUS/RISE, a multimedia show based on the peotry in BELONGING and inspired by the Iranian spoken-word tradition of ‘Naghali’. She is a member of ALTA and PEN American Center. Visit her at www.niloufartalebi.com.
Arabic (Syria): Admer Gouryh
ADMER GOURYH received his PhD in Theatre from the CUNY Graduate Center, specializing in the translation of modern Arabic drama. His publications include the following: The Prague Semiotics of Theatre, Syria: Ministry of Culture Press, 1997; Walid Ikhlasi, Pleasure Club 21, Trans. Admer Gouryh & Christopher Tingley, in Short Arab Plays. Ed. Salma Khadra Jayyusi. Mass: Interlink Books, 2003; Al-khoury, Touma. A Stranger at the Door: Lebanese Short Stories, Trans. Admer Gouryh, New Jersey, Gorgias Press, 2003; Walid Ikhlasi, Oedipus, Trans. Admer Gouryh, in The Arab Oedipus. Ed. Marvin Carlson, New York: Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, 2005.
Persian: Maryam Habibian
MARYAM HABIBIAN, a native of Iran, received her Ph.D. in Educational Theater at New York University. In 2001, she was awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship to the Institute on “Cities and Public Spaces in Comparative Cultural Contexts” where she researched “Writing the City: Forugh Farrokhzad’s poetry and its significance to the Intellectual Milieu of Tehran during the Pahlavi Era (1926-1979).” Archival work at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. and extensive conversations with young people in Iran in Summer 2002 formed the basis of her research for her play Forugh’s Reflecting Pool: The Life and Work of Forugh Farrokhzad (published in Shattering the Stereotypes: Muslim Women Speak Out in 2005) and her first documentary “FORUGH FARROKHZAD: Young Revolutionary Poetess of Tehran” and her other works on the life and work of the Iran’s legendary poet, Forugh Farrokhzad. aryam Habibian's latest work is a feature documentary, THE MIST, which follows the filmmaker/theater artist on a journey of discovery in the land of her birth, Iran.
Persian: Richard Newman
RICHARD NEWMAN RICHARD NEWMAN Richard Jeffrey Newman, a poet, essayist and translator, is the author of The Silence Of Men (CavanKerry Press, 2006), a book of his own poetry, and two books of translations from classical Persian literature, Selections from Saadi’s Gulistan and Selections from Saadi’s Bustan (both from Global Scholarly Publications, 2004 and 2006 respectively). His essays and poems have appeared in Salon.com, The American Voice, The Pedestal, Circumference, Prairie Schooner, ACM, Birmingham Poetry Review and other literary journals. His work has been anthologized in Access Literature (Thomson Wadsworth, 2005) and his poetry has been translated into Dutch. His verse translation of a portion of Shahnameh, the Persian national epic, The Teller of Tales Tells You This, is forthcoming from Junction Press. A Bird in the Garden of Angels, a new Rumi anthology on which he collaborated with Professor John Moyne, was published in 2007 by Mazda Publishers. Richard Jeffrey Newman is the Literary Arts Director of the Persian Arts Festival, sits on the advisory board of The Translation Project and is listed as a speaker with the New York Council for the Humanities. He is an Associate Professor in the English Department at Nassau Community College in Garden City, New York, where he coordinates NCC’s Creative Writing Project.
Persian: Salar Abdoh
SALAR ABDOH is a graduate of the University of California at Berkeley and of the Creative Writing program at City College of New York. Born in Iran, he now lives in New York City where he teaches creative writing in the MFA Program at CCNY, CUNY. He is the author of The Poet Game: A Novel (Picador), Opium (Faber and Faber), and Urban Iran (Mark Batty).
Hebrew and Arabic (Israel and Palestine): Rosebud Ben-Oni
ROSEBUD BEN-ONI has been a Rackham Merit Fellow, a Rudin Scholar, a Leopold Schepp Scholar and the recipient of a Horace Goldsmith Grant, given so she could complete her first novel The Annex Jew, which deals with her experiences as a Jew of mixed race who survives the bombing of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 2002. She is currently finishing up her novel and has had recent poems in Arts & Letters, The Rialto (UK), and The Texas Poetry Review. Aside from writing, she loves ballet, basketball, and any excuse to go clubbing in the middle of the week.
Queens College Foreign Language Faculty Participants
Hebrew: Ammiel Alcalay
AMMIEL ALCALAY is a poet, translator, critic, scholar and activist; he teaches in the Department of Classical, Middle Eastern & Asian Languages & Cultures at Queens College and is a member of the faculties of American Studies, Comparative Literature, English, and Medieval Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center where is also Deputy Chair of the PhD Program in English. His latest work, Scrapmetal, recently came out with Factory School. from the warring factions, a book length poem dedicated to the Bosnian town of Srebrenica, came out in 2002. Poetry, Politics & Translation: American Isolation and the Middle East, a lecture given at Cornell, was published in 2003 by Palm Press. Other books include After Jews and Arabs: Remaking Levantine Culture (University of Minnesota Press, 1993), the cairo noteboooks (Singing Horse Press, 1993), and Memories of Our Future: Selected Essays, 1982-1999 (City Lights, 1999). He has translated widely, including Sarajevo Blues (City Lights, 1998) and Nine Alexandrias (City Lights 2003) by the Bosnian poet Semezdin Mehmedinovic , and Keys to the Garden: New Israeli Writing (City Lights, 1996). He has also been involved as an activist on many domestic and international issues. His latest projects include co-translation of a Hebrew novel (with Oz Shelach), Outcast, by Shimon Ballas (City Lights, 2007), and two books forthcoming from Beyond Baroque: A Little History, a book of essays on politics and poetics, and a collective translation of the Syrian poet Faraj Bayraqdar. City Lights will publish a novel, Islanders, in 2010.He has been a regular contributor to the Village Voice and his poetry, prose, reviews, critical articles and translations have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, Time Magazine, al-Ahram, The New Republic, Grand Street, Conjunctions, Sulfur, The Nation, and various other publications in the United States and abroad. Along with Anne Waldman and others, he was one of the initiators of the Poetry Is News Coalition, and he organized, with Mike Kelleher, the OlsonNow project.
Hebrew: Sami S. Chetrit
SAMI S. CHETRIT is a Assistant Professor of Hebrew. A renowned Hebrew poet and writer, Professor Chetrit is an inter-disciplinary scholar and teacher. He's been teaching for the last fifteen years courses on Hebrew modern language and literature, culture and politics of Israel. Here at Queens College he teaches Hebrew language on all levels, Hebrew Literature and Israeli Media, both in Hebrew and in translation. He is also the coordinator and advisor for the Hebrew language Major and Minor programs.
Japanese: Lewis Cook
LEWIS COOK is Associate Professor of Japanese, teaching advanced Japanese reading courses, Classical Japanese, Classical Chinese, East Asian Literature in translation, and developed a writing intensive course on the Tale of Genji and Japanese women writers. His research specialties are the editing of Classical manuscripts, poetics, Classical Japanese hermeneutics, and literary theory, and he translates Classical Japanese.
‘My research in recent years has been devoted to editing and translating the textbooks of the so-called 'Secret Teachings of Ancient and Modern Poetry,' an institution for training teachers of poetry that flourished in late medieval Japan. Apart from rote memorization of canonical texts, the tools of the trade for poetry teachers at the time were commentary and criticism. Their objective was to provide instruction not only in the arts of making but in those of reading and judging poetry. The 'Secret Teachings' was a remarkably successful institution. Its graduates enjoyed great prestige and often substantial financial rewards, despite the fact that few of them achieved lasting acclaim as poets. Perhaps there are some lessons here for our contemporary institutions of literary education.’
Chinese: Yunzhong Shu
YUNZHONG SHU is Associate Professor of Chinese whose research interests include modern Chinese literature, mainly fiction and the literary relations between Chinese and English literature. He has published articles on contemporary Chinese fiction, China's image in Victorian literature, the Chinese influence on contemporary American poets Kenneth Rexroth and Gary Snyder. He has published a book Buglers on the Home Front: The Wartime Practice of the Qiyue (July) School. His book is a study of a group of dissident writers active in the 1930s and 1940s in the Chinese leftist literary circles.
Chinese: Gopal Sukhu
GOPAL SUKHU is Assistant Professor teaching Classical Chinese (introductory and poetry, especially), and has participated in teaching the elementary courses; he teaches the pre-modern portions of the East Asian literature and culture in-translation courses and developed the writing-intensive course on Asian Religion. His research centers on Classical poetry and its Classical interpretations, to which he brings special interests in religion (especially shamanism and Buddhism) and the relation of ritual and ideology. He also translates Classical Chinese.
English: Jason Tougaw
JASON TOUGAW is Assistant Professor of English at Queens College, CUNY. He is the author of Strange Cases: The Medical Case History and the British Novel and co-editor of Extremities: Trauma, Testimony, and Community (with Nancy K. Miller). His essays have appeared in JAC, Auto/Biography Studies, The Scholar and the Feminist, and From Boys to Men: Gay Men Write about Growing Up (Da Capo Press).