Cover Photo: This photograph shows a stick of incense emerging from the left hand side of the picture. Blue smoke swirls upward from its tip against a black background.
Photograph by Max Michatz/Unsplash

Why We Should Translate Literature About Trauma

Translating trauma and violence is not just about deciphering pain but also about recreating an emotional language that helps us to understand each other better.

Fang Si-Chi’s First Love Paradise

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Fang Si-Chi’s First Love Paradise

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Before I came to America, my cousin passed away prematurely after years of lasting health issues. Traditional funerals in my Taiwanese family are conducted in Sanskrit, Chinese, and Hakka. Sanskrit is the language of power, of transition, and is deemed to be the language of our ceremony, while Chinese and Hakka are languages of home and heritage that bond the living family members with the deceased. Among all the languages spoken at the occasion, it was the unspoken emotional language that truly defined our relationship to my cousin and brought memories in reminiscence of this loved one.

How do they want to give life to their work?Fang Si-Chi’s First Love Paradise

A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Jenna Tang is a literary translator based in New York. She translates from Chinese, French and Spanish. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from The New School. Her translations and essays are published in Restless Books, Latin American Literature Today, AAWW, McSweeney's, Catapult and elsewhere. Her interviews are at World Literature Today and Words Without Borders. She is a selected translator for the 2021 ALTA Emerging Translators Mentorship with a focus on Taiwanese prose.