"POETRY ACROSS BORDERS," AN EVENING OF POETRY AND CONVERSATION AT BARD ON MARCH 25
ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, N.Y.—On Tuesday, March 25, Bard College will present an evening of poetry and conversation with Yang Lian, a visiting professor at Bard. Yang will read his own poetry in Mandarin, followed by translations into English, French, German, Italian, and Japanese, read by Bard students and faculty. A discussion with Yang on poetics, politics, exile, translation, and other issues will follow the readings. The program, free and open to the public, will begin at 7:00 p.m. in Robbins Lounge.
Considered one of the foremost of the new generation of Chinese poets exiled from their native land, Yang Lian was expelled in the wake of the Tiananmen Square massacre and his writing banned from publication in China after 1989. Yang's work, which has been nominated for a Nobel Prize, gained widespread attention in 1983 as a result of the harsh criticism it received during the Anti-Spiritual Pollution Campaign. Yang was born in Bern, Switzerland, grew up in Beijing, and began writing modern poetry while participating in the Beijing Spring democracy movement in 1979. Later, he became a prominent member of a group of experimental poets associated with the underground literary publication of Jintian (Today). He has received the Italian Flaiano International Prize for Poetry. Several collections of his poetry have been published in translation, including Non-Person Singular: Selected Poems of Yang Lian (1994); Masks and Crocodiles: A Contemporary Chinese Poet and His Poetry (1995); Where the Sea Stands Still: New Poems (1999); Yi (2002); and Notes of a Blissful Ghost (2002).
This program is sponsored by a grant from the Mellon Foundation, Bard in China, and the Division of Languages and Literature at Bard. For further information, call Professor Li-hua Ying at 845-758-7392.
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(3.18.03)