Julie Landau is a writer, translator, critic, and poet, who has focused on bringing the timeless thoughts, emotions, and imagery of ancient Chinese Poetry to English readers. Her translations have been published in numerous magazines and anthologies, and her book Beyond Spring: Tz’u Poems of the Sung Dynasty is part of the Columbia University Translations from the Asian Classics series. She is currently finishing up her new project For a Snail Horn of Fame: Songs of Liu Yong, which for the first time brings the work of Liu Yong, the black sheep of literati poets, to an English speaking audience.
As a translator she tries to convey the emotional essence of each lyric. The challenges of translating Chinese poetry are many and begin with meaning. However precise the images, however clear the underlying emotion, what is actually being said may not be clear at all. Chinese has built-in ambiguities. There is no tense, no number, no case. Verbs are often omitted. Adjectives can function as verbs. Pronouns are rarely used; virtually never in poetry. There is no Aristotelian commitment to a single point of view; there are no unities of time and place.
For Julie, the emotional content features prominently in the process of unraveling these ambiguities. Once the emotional content is captured, the lyrics are translated as simply as possible.
When just married and living in New York City her husband suggested that they should do something “New Yorkie”. “Great,” she thought, “we are going to go to the opera,” but what he said was “let’s learn Cantonese”. So they did. They studied at night while working during the day; Julie as a writer and art critic, her husband as a mathematician. Two years and one child later they took off for Hong Kong. For a year they immersed themselves in the language, and of course, the food. Julie had always been drawn to Ezra Pound’s translations of Chinese poetry and she wanted to learn to read the poetry in the originals. Back in New York, she enrolled at Columbia and over time took every imaginable course in Chinese poetry, literature, history, and art and slowly began translating herself. Her translations have been published in numerous literary magazines and anthologies and her book Beyond Spring: Tz’u Poems of the Sung Dynasty provided to an English speaking audience one hundred and fifty of the greatest lyrics from the Golden Age of ci. Her current project is a For a Snail Horn of Fame: Songs of Liu Yong, (read more)
Julie Landau 