Why Do I Translate Myself?

What is it about?

“I sometimes call myself a poet writing in both Chinese and English. But perhaps a more accurate description is this: I am a poet writing in Chinese and, from time to time, translating myself into English. Why do I translate myself, then, instead of leaving the job to translators for whom English is their native tongue?” Chinese poet Mai Mang 麦芒 (Huang Yibing) offers a personal and metaphysical answer to this question. He translates himself to discover or excavate the unknown selves or others within himself. He translates himself to assert the rootedness of silence or foreign and excluded voices in his own poetry, and to demonstrate that true poetry often exists beyond the borders of the literary establishment, in the East or in the West, dominated by a hegemonic lingua franca or disguised as a self-centered "world literature" or “the world republic of letters.” Mai Mang uses two of his own poems, “Stone Turtle” 石龟 (2000) and “Copper” 铜 (2013), written in Chinese in the US and in Peru and later translated by himself into English to illustrate his point.

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