Decapitated Poetry: The 2024 Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize Book Talk
Key information
- Date
- Time
-
5:00 pm to 7:00 pm
- Venue
- Main Building, SOAS University of London, 10 Thornhaugh St, London WC1H 0XG
- Room
- R201
About this event
In this event, we will in conversation with the prize-winning translators Dr Li Wen-chi and Colin Bramwell on their recent translation Decapitated Poetry by Ko-hua Chen.
Ko-hua Chen’s Decapitated Poetry was the first explicitly queer book of poems published in Taiwan and remains a foundational work in Taiwanese poetry. Decades after it first appeared in 1995, this collection retains the capacity to shock, appall, and jolt readers into recognizing homosexuality as its own specific category of being.
Wen-chi Li and Colin Bramwell have brought the two strains of Chen’s oeuvre into a dynamic tension, and their illuminating translators’ foreword reflects on the “fascinating interplay between queer identity and technology.” Though the content is so widely disparate, both halves of this volume contain the same vital assertions of selfhood. - Sylee Gore, Poetry Foundation
Behind Chen’s depictions of the disjunctive realities of queer erotic life, a formidable and uncompromising poetic intelligence can be seen at play. Alongside the erotic, satirical offerings from Decapitated Poetry, this volume includes selections from Chen’s remarkable sci-fi sequences that offer further transcorporeal meditations on forbidden queer love. Excoriating, heretical, tender, and always alive to the transgressive potential of language, this exhilarating volume from Seagull’s Pride List is the perfect introduction to one of Taiwanese poetry’s most daring voices.
This event is co-hosted by SOAS Centre of Taiwan Studies (CTS) and SOAS Centre for Cultural, Literary and Postcolonial Studies (CCLPS).
Meet the speakers
Dr Wen-chi Li
Dr Wen-chi Li holds a post as the Swiss National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Mobility Fellow at the University of Oxford. He has co-edited the Chinese anthology Under the Same Roof: A Poetry Anthology for LGBTQ (Dark Eyes, 2019) as well as Taiwanese Literature as World Literature (Bloomsbury, 2022) and Identity, Multiplicity, and Resistance in Taiwanese Poetry (Routledge, forthcoming).
As a translator, he collaborates with Colin Bramwell, and together they received first prize in the 2018 John Dryden Translation Competition for their translation of Yang Mu’s poetry. He is a co-founder of the “World Literature from Taiwan” series with Balestier Press.
Colin Bramwell
Colin Bramwell is a poet and translator from the Black Isle in the north of Scotland. He holds a doctorate in creating writing from St Andrews, and came second in the 2020 Edwin Morgan Poetry Award. His poems have been published in journals such as Poetry Review, Irish Pages, PN Review, The London Magazine and Magma.
Outside of translating Taiwanese poetry in partnership with Wenchi Li, he translates poetry from Spanish and Portuguese into the Scots language. His first full volume of Scots translations, Fower Pessoas, will be published by Carcanet in February of 2025.
(Image via seagull books)
