Poetry Inside Out

The Center for the Art of Translation spotlights Andrea Lingenfelter, who has helped students in the Bay Area translate Chinese poetry into "concrete poetry":

Poetry Inside Out has been offering Spanish-English poetry translation workshops to students in the Bay Area and beyond. The Center for the Art of Translation had long wanted to add Chinese poetry to its in-school programming, and that goal was finally realized last summer when I came on board and began designing a Chinese poetry curriculum for PIO.

While building the curriculum poem by poem, I have also guest taught at a few schools, where I have introduced modern Chinese poetry into another new PIO program, the World Poetry Curriculum. This has been a perfect fit to test my hunches about what Chinese poems would with resonate with elementary students. My first students were 4th and 5th graders at Sutro Elementary in San Francisco’s Richmond district. They were an ideal group to try out a couple of Chinese poems, as many—but not all—of the children spoke Chinese at home and had reading knowledge as well.

The first Chinese poem I gave the class was a concrete poem by the experimental Hong Kong poet, Xi Xi, “Striped Tiger in a Clump of Green Grass.” After guiding the students through the translation of the title (some of them could read almost every character and understand the meaning of the title), I asked the class to find the “tiger" . . .