Selected Poems from Contemporary China: The Homings & Depatures Project
23 Sept 2020
The China Australia Writing Centre (CAWC) are excited to announce the upcoming publication on October 1, 2020, of a digital chapbook by Cordite Poetry Review. The poems selected for this chapbook by our director, Lucy Dougan, and Cordite Translations Editor, Alice Whitmore, were drawn from Volume 1 of the Homings & Departures (2018) translation project.
Homings & Departures is a poetry translation project of the China Australia Writing Centre (CAWC) at Curtin and Fudan Universities, and the International Poetry Studies Institute (IPSI) at the University of Canberra. As worldwide borders close and movements are restricted, the project’s title has gained a pressing new relevance. If bodies cannot travel then words, at least, can. In a spirit of nuanced exchange, CAWC at Curtin and Fudan, along with IPSI, continue their creative collaboration at a time when it is increasingly vital, and are pleased to partner with Cordite Poetry Review on this further publication.
The selected poems in this chapbook were first published in the Chinese volume of Homings and Depatures: Selected Poems from Contemporary China and Australia (Qinghai: Qinghai People’s Publishing House, 2018) edited by Bao Huiyi and Hai An. Later this year, an Australian companion volume of Homings & Departures will be published by Recent Work Press, edited by Lucy Dougan and Paul Hetherington with Chinese translations of Australian poets by Iris Fan Xing.
The chapbook includes work from Wang Ao, Fang Na, Zhao Si and Fan Xing, with English translations from the Chinese by Eleanor Goodman, Austin Woerner, Heather Inwood and Cui Yuwei.
CAWC would like to thank all the Chinese and Australian poets and translators involved; Paul Hetherington for the overall conception of the project; the Director of CAWC at Fudan University, Linjing Jiang; editors of the original volume Huiyi Bao and Li Dingjun (Hai An) and their publisher Ma Fei, Editor-in-Chief of Qinghai People’s Publishing House; and the editors of Cordite Poetry Review, particularly Kent MacCarter and Alice Whitmore.