创意写作中心第八期读书俱乐部活动

The Sun Yat-sen University Center for English-language Creative Writing is pleased to announce its 8th Book Club event

Reversing the Tapestry: Adventures of a Literary Translator

   by Austin Woerner, School of Foreign Languages

Time: 7:00 pm, Oct. 16, 2015

Venue: Room 301, School of Foreign Languages Building, South Campus, Sun Yat-sen University

Please sign up with Ms. DENG Liyu 邓丽羽 at dengly5@mail.sysu.edu.cn or call 020-84113602.

“Reversing the Tapestry: Adventures of a Literary Translator”

Austin Woerner

When Austin Woerner graduated university with a degree in East Asian Studies, he thought he would dabble in Chinese translation for a year. Little did he know that he would spend the next six years translating into English Chinese poetry, stories, a symphonic choral suite, and at the center of it all, the novel The Invisible Valley by the Guangdong author Su Wei. In this talk, he will tell the story of how he became involved with the novel and its creator, explaining the challenges he met and how he overcame them in a mixture of personal stories and “talking shop.” He’ll tell how his experience as a translator has shaped the way he thinks as a practitioner of literature, giving attendees an appreciation of what goes into translating a work of fiction—what goes on “under the hood”—that will illuminate their own reading of translations in the future.

Austin Woerner is the translator of two books of poetry, Doubled Shadows: Selected Poetry of Ouyang Jianghe and Phoenix, and a novel, The Invisible Valley by Su Wei. From 2011 to 2014 he served as translation editor for the innovative Chinese literary journal Chutzpah!《天南》. He holds a BA from Yale and an MFA in creative writing from the New School.