MTI Online Translation Practicum

SYNOPSIS:

Professor Li Wai-yee will offer brief reflections on the challenges and rewards of translating different genres of classical Chinese literature. She will be joined by Uganda Kwan and Wang Mengqiao in a discussion of the translator’s choices and approaches, using various translations of excerpts from The Peach Blossom Fan by Kong Shangren as example.

SPEAKER:

Professor Li Wai-yee, Harvard University 

Li Wai-yee is the 1879 Professor of Chinese Literature at Harvard University. Her most recent book is “The Promise and Peril of Things: Literature and Material Culture in Late Imperial China” (2022) She translated the Zuozhuan in collaboration with Stephen Durrant and David Schaberg, and has also translated Ming-Qing prose, poetry, and drama.

She is also the two times awardee of Patrick D. Hanan Book Prize for Translation in 2022 and 2018 for: 

Plum Shadows and Plank Bridge: Two Memoirs about Courtesans (Columbia University Press, 2020)

Zuo Tradition / Zuozhuan: Commentary on the Spring and Autumn Annals  (annotated translation of Zuozhuan), co-authored with Stephen Durrant and David Schaberg. 3 vols. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2016 (Chinese Classics in Translation Series).