Thoughts on Jeremy Tiang, then Yi Lei/Tracy K. Smith

I found Jeremy Tiang's talk really engaging and was excited to hear him say that in a lot of ways, he finds translation similar to acting. I agree! What is translation if not interpreting a text, storytelling, and creating voices for your characters? I also think actors would benefit greatly from having translators in the rehearsal room and vice versa. Tiang briefly brought up the idea of "collective dramaturgy"—I meant to ask him to elaborate on that, but it slipped my mind. 

It was a bit disheartening to hear Tiang explain how translators of literal versions feel they've been made invisible (and their work rendered unimportant) by famous playwrights-turned-translators in new adaptations of Chekhov's The Seagull, and therefore I was delighted to see Changtai Bi receive equal billing with Tracy K. Smith on the cover of My Name will Grow Wide like a Tree. From Smith's introduction, it sounds like Bi was invaluable in the translation and revision process instead of simply providing the literal version and then being shut out of the process like the translators Tiang mentioned. A "triangulated" process, as Smith calls it. 

Smith and Bi's translations are beautiful, and I pulled some recurring themes from the poems: love as wild, animal, and carnal; a fixation on ageing and death. Smith was clear in her introduction that she prioritized spirit over literal meaning in her translations. After reading the examples in her intro where she compares the literal translation to her final translation, I wonder how much of the imagery in these poems comes straight from Yi Lei and how much has been reshaped or added by Smith (for example, the line "the mountain of me" in "Love"s Dance" is Smith's addition and not quite Yi Lei's original. I'm also curious to know how much of the Christian imagery in that same poem was there to begin with). To be clear, I don't mean this as a criticism; Yi Lei approved of these translations and worked closely with Bi and Smith, and I loved reading them.  However, I think this collection raises an important question: At what point does a poem stop being a translation of Yi Lei and instead become a new, Yi Lei-inspired, Tracy K. Smith poem?

-Maggie