The Poetry of Zheng Xiaoqiong: A Conversation with Translator Eleanor Goodman

Welcome to the Seneca Podcast, a weekly discussion of current affairs in China. In this program, we look at books, ideas, new research, intellectual currents, and cultural trends that can help us better understand what's happening in China's politics, foreign relations, economics, and society. Join me each week for in-depth conversations that shed more light and bring less heat to how we think and talk about China. I'm Kaiser Gua coming to you this week from Madison, Wisconsin. Seneca is supported again this year by the Center for East Asian Studies at the University of Wisconsin Madison, a national resource center for the study of East Asia.

I Just cannot tell you how grateful I am to the good folks at the center there, David, Lori, and all the others for making Seneca possible, and I am hugely grateful to the University of Wisconsin Madison for educating my daughter Guinevere, who graduates in just a couple of days. Today on Seneca, I bring you a conversation with the immensely talented translator Eleanor Goodman, who I will introduce properly in just a bit. I was invited by the Good People at the New York Review of Books and Equator magazine to interview Eleanor on a Zoom webinar thing about the translation of the works of the poet Zheng Xiao Chung, one of China's best-known worker poets. You may have seen a selection of Zheng Xiao Chung's nonfiction that ran in one of the early issues of Equator, for which I wrote the introduction.

There will be a link to that, of course, in the show notes, as well as to Eleanor's other translations. Huge thanks to NYRB poets and to Equator for for making this happen. I hope you really enjoy this conversation. Well, even half as much as I did, you'll see Eleanor is just amazing and truly does justice to Jung's remarkable body of work.

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