Baihua Wang
Election
Position
Name
Baihua Wang
Candidate statement
My curiosity about Dickinson was intrigued when I was a college student reading a Chinese translation of her poems. Later when I had a chance to read them in English, I began to pay attention to the gap between her original power and my first impression of her in Chinese. Thanks to the invitation from Professor Cristanne Miller, whom I met in the year 2008 in Buffalo, I set out a historical survey on Dickinson’s reception in China which resulted in two review essays and a statistic report. Meanwhile I completed (with two students) a Chinese translation of Alfred Habegger’s My wars are laid away: The Life of Emily Dickinson (2013), the first trusty biographical work on Dickinson ever translated into Chinese.
In the following year, sponsored by Center for Literary Translation Studies of Fudan University & co-organized in cooperation with EDIS (esp. with the great help of Martha Nell Smith and Cristanne Miller), we held a Dickinson Symposium “Emily Dickinson Dwells in China―Possibilities of Translation and Transcultural Perspectives”. We also brought together nearly 50 experts from China and abroad to collaborate on a Dickinson translation project. This diversity of backgrounds and perspectives led to lively — sometimes heated — discussions about how best to understand and translate Dickinson’s poetry. Many earlier translations of Dickinson into Chinese struggled to capture her ambiguity and originality, an oversight we hope to correct. As the person in charge, it was difficult to get everyone on the same page, but most discussions were ultimately amiable and productive. This annotated compendium of 104 new Chinese translations of Dickinson’s poems was published in 2018.
https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1002851/reading-dickinson-in-shanghai
What excites me about the success of the Dickinson project is not that our work is definitive or perfect — it’s not — it’s that we have stimulated renewed literary interest in Dickinson in China. In the past 6 years, I have edited five special columns on Dickinson (12 articles and a group of new translations of her poems) for five different influential journals published in China. I was invited to give a planetary talk on Dickinson in the first Female Poets Festival in China (Sihui, 2019). In the 8th International Conference of Chinese/American Poetry and Poetics (2019, Hangzhou), I chaired (with Eliza Richards) a special panel “Emily Dickinson: Her poetry and Poetics,” the only panel on single poet in the conference.
Currently, I am working on a new project: “ED's Experimental Poetics and Its Legacy”, and two translation works of Dickinson’s poems: the envelope poems edited by Marta Werner and a commentary by Helen Vendler, which will be published in a year or two. I just got a national endorsement on Humanities for my research on Dickinson. Backed by this funding, I hope I will go to New England to update my own study on Dickinson as well as to participate more in EDIS’s conferences and activities. I will also try my best to apply for some extra funding from Fudan University to hold an international conference in Shanghai in the next three years. There is a big Dickinson group in China which I have been networking with since 2014. Maybe it is time to start a local chapter of EDIS in China now. If elected, I would like to try to help increase EDIS membership in China at least. In any case, it is my great pleasure to contribute to the society especially in promoting various interests in Dickinson as well as working on more collaborative projects in China as I have been trying to do all along.
In the following year, sponsored by Center for Literary Translation Studies of Fudan University & co-organized in cooperation with EDIS (esp. with the great help of Martha Nell Smith and Cristanne Miller), we held a Dickinson Symposium “Emily Dickinson Dwells in China―Possibilities of Translation and Transcultural Perspectives”. We also brought together nearly 50 experts from China and abroad to collaborate on a Dickinson translation project. This diversity of backgrounds and perspectives led to lively — sometimes heated — discussions about how best to understand and translate Dickinson’s poetry. Many earlier translations of Dickinson into Chinese struggled to capture her ambiguity and originality, an oversight we hope to correct. As the person in charge, it was difficult to get everyone on the same page, but most discussions were ultimately amiable and productive. This annotated compendium of 104 new Chinese translations of Dickinson’s poems was published in 2018.
https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1002851/reading-dickinson-in-shanghai
What excites me about the success of the Dickinson project is not that our work is definitive or perfect — it’s not — it’s that we have stimulated renewed literary interest in Dickinson in China. In the past 6 years, I have edited five special columns on Dickinson (12 articles and a group of new translations of her poems) for five different influential journals published in China. I was invited to give a planetary talk on Dickinson in the first Female Poets Festival in China (Sihui, 2019). In the 8th International Conference of Chinese/American Poetry and Poetics (2019, Hangzhou), I chaired (with Eliza Richards) a special panel “Emily Dickinson: Her poetry and Poetics,” the only panel on single poet in the conference.
Currently, I am working on a new project: “ED's Experimental Poetics and Its Legacy”, and two translation works of Dickinson’s poems: the envelope poems edited by Marta Werner and a commentary by Helen Vendler, which will be published in a year or two. I just got a national endorsement on Humanities for my research on Dickinson. Backed by this funding, I hope I will go to New England to update my own study on Dickinson as well as to participate more in EDIS’s conferences and activities. I will also try my best to apply for some extra funding from Fudan University to hold an international conference in Shanghai in the next three years. There is a big Dickinson group in China which I have been networking with since 2014. Maybe it is time to start a local chapter of EDIS in China now. If elected, I would like to try to help increase EDIS membership in China at least. In any case, it is my great pleasure to contribute to the society especially in promoting various interests in Dickinson as well as working on more collaborative projects in China as I have been trying to do all along.