This past July I spent two weeks in the mountain village of Chenjiapu translating a set of poems by the Nanjing-based poet Sun Dong. She was able to join me for a few days toward the end of the residency, and we worked together on drafts of the translations. I finished the residency with drafts of two dozen poems and the preface to her most recent book, Broken Crow (破乌鸦 Pò wūyā), publishing eight of the poems along with an essay for Paper Republic: “Meditations in an Emergency: The Cosmopolitan, the Quotidian, and the Anthropocene Turn in Sun Dong’s 2020 Pandemic Poetry.” The long-term goal is to translate a book-length collection of Sun Dong’s work.
The Chenjiapu Avant-Garde Bookstore (先锋书店) deck overlooking Wuyi Shan in southern Zhejiang. The village has come to host a number of studios for writers and artists and, despite being impassable to cars, Chenjiapu is being developed as a cultural retreat and eco-tourism destination.
Thanks to the Nanjing-headquartered Librarie Avant-Garde (先锋书店 Xiānfēng shūdiàn), the outstanding Paper Republic Chinese literature in translation, and their collaborative Chenjiapu Translator Residency, I was able to spend two weeks working in a beautifully situated apartment overlooking the village and the Wuyi surrounding mountains.
The on-site Librairie Avant-Garde team provided fantastic support in this car-free village nestled at the head of a steep, densly forested ravine. Well-worn stair-stepped lanes ran between and among the village’s several score small buildings overlooked from the side of the ravine opposite my apartment by the beautiful Librarie Avant-Garde bookstore and event space that anchors what has become a writers’ colony and cultural tourism destination.
Unfortunately, none of the writers with studios in the area — including the poet Chen Dongdong, whom I’d met years before in Shanghai — were there during the steamy August weeks I was in residence, but I do hope to return to reconnect with new friends, to further explore the mountains, and connect with more Chinese writers and artists.
If you are a translator of Chinese literature, keep an eye out for future chances — pandemic permitting — to apply to this superb residency, and if you simply find yourself in the vicinity of Lishui, make your way up into the mountains to spend a few days in a guesthouse. It’s a marvelous place, and I hope that it remains so as its profile as a tourist destination grows. (I’ll save more critical thoughts on “ecotourism,” cultural tourism in the PRC, hotel development and related factors for another place and time.)