Title: Risk, Trust, and the Paradox of Loss and Gain in Literary Translation

Speaker: Prof. Wang Xiulu, Sun Yat-sen University

Time: 11:00-12:30, Monday, 22 September 2025

Venue: T7-105

Abstract: This lecture examines literary translation through the intertwined lenses of risk, trust, loss, and gain. Translation is never a neutral transfer but a precarious act: it entails inevitable losses of nuance yet also opens possibilities for renewal, enabling texts to endure in what Walter Benjamin terms their “afterlife”. The case of Nick Admussen’s English rendering of Ya Shi's poems in Floral Mutter demonstrates how loss and gain function not as opposites but as interdependent forces shaping the very texture of translation, and how trust—between translator and author, between languages and readers—transforms risk into a generative force, turning the hazards of loss into opportunities for poetic renewal.

Speaker Bio: Wang Xiulu is Professor in the Department of English at Sun Yat-sen University. She earned her PhD in Translation Studies from the University of Warwick in 2010 and completed a second PhD in Modern and Contemporary Chinese Literature at Sun Yat-sen University in 2024. Her research focuses on literary translation, translation history, with recent work exploring the history of cultural and intellectual exchange between China and the West. She is the author of Description, Interpretation and Critisim (Commercial Press, 2024), How Foreign Translators Think about Contemporary Chinese Literature (Sun Yat-sen University Press, 2023), The Mirror of Translation (Yilin Press, 2021), and Bridging the Political and the Personal: Literary Translation in Contemporary China (Peter Lang, 2016).