Poet-translators A. E. Stallings and Jeffrey Yang have worked across diverse sets of text – from ancient didactics and illustrated epics to Modern Greek activists in Stallings’ work, to translations of Tang-Song Dynasty poets and contemporary Chinese and Uyghur activists in Yang’s work, and much more. Beyond the textual and semantic, how do they translate across time, societal structures and norms, and their varying degrees of personal proximity with the source text and its culture?  

In this panel discussion, we’ll explore how the contextual can (or cannot) be translated and what clues these poet-translators leave in their work to guide readers to a deeper appreciation of what otherwise might be a foreign, inaccessible world. 

Anita Ngai is an MFA student in poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University. She was born in Hong Kong and was a 2023/24 Comino Poet in Residence. Her writing has been longlisted for The UK National Poetry Competition and shortlisted for the Creative Future Writers’ Award. She has been published in the Shearsman magazine, Two Thirds North, Ricepaper, Windsor Review, Stonecrop, League of Canadian Poets – Leap Chapbook, and others. She is also currently serving as UNESCO Manchester City of Literature’s Creative Producer for the International Artist Exchange Programme with Nanjing, China. In previous lives, she was a structural engineer, and a marketing and strategy executive in the tech industry. 

A.E. Stallings is the Oxford Professor of Poetry. Her poetry collections include Like (2018), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; Olives (2012), which was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award; Hapax (2006); and Archaic Smile (1999), winner of the Richard Wilbur Award and finalist for both the Yale Younger Poets Series and the Walt Whitman Award. Her poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry anthologies of 1994, 2000, 2015, 2016, and 2017, and she is a frequent contributor to Poetry and the Times Literary Supplement. Stallings’s latest verse translation is the pseudo-Homeric The Battle Between the Frogs and the Mice (2019), in an illustrated edition with Paul Dry Books, and her latest volume of poetry is a selected poems, This Afterlife (2022, FSG). She is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation. She lives in Athens, Greece. 

Jeffrey Yang is the author of the poetry collections Line and Light (Graywolf Press, 2022), Hey, Marfa (Graywolf Press, 2018), Vanishing-Line (Graywolf Press, 2011), and An Aquarium (Graywolf Press, 2008). He is the translator of Bei Dao’s Sidetracks (New Directions, 2024); Ahmatjan Osman’s Uyghurland, the Farthest Exile (Phoneme Media, 2015), cotranslated with the author; Liu Xiaobo’s June Fourth Elegies (Graywolf Press, 2012); Su Shi’s East Slope (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2008); and Bei Dao’s autobiography City Gate, Open Up (New Directions, 2017). He edited the anthologies Birds, Beasts, and Seas: Nature Poems (New Directions, 2011), Time of Grief: Mourning Poems (New Directions, 2013), and the collection The Sea Is a Continual Miracle: Sea Poems and Other Writings by Walt Whitman (University Press of New England, 2017). Yang works as an editor at New Directions Publishing and the New York Review of Books. He lives in Beacon, New York. 

This event is part of the 2025 Manchester Translation Series.

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