Page last updated: April 20, 2020

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CLOUD SEEDING AGENT

AMERICAN LITERARY TRANSLATOR’S ASSOCIATION

NATIONAL TRANSLATION AWARD NOMINATION

Yin Xiaoyuan’s book, Cloud Seeding Agent, will be nominated for an American Literary Translator’s Association National Translation Award.

From the American Literary Translator’s Association’s Website:

The National Translation Award is awarded annually in poetry and in prose to literary translators who have made an outstanding contribution to literature in English by masterfully recreating the artistic force of a book of consummate quality. Established in 1998, the NTA is the only prize for a work of literary translation into English to include an evaluation of the source language text. 2015 was the first year in which the NTA was awarded separately in poetry and prose.

Recent winners include Richard Wilbur (2008), Norman Shapiro (2009), Alex Zucker (2010), Lisa Rose Bradford (2011), Sinan Antoon (2012), Phillip Boehm (2013), Eugene Ostashevsky and Matvei Yankelevich (2014), Pierre Joris (2015 Poetry), William Hutchins (2015 Prose), Hilary Kaplan (2016 Poetry), Elizabeth Harris (2016 Prose), Daniel Borzutzky (2017 Poetry), Esther Allen (2017 Prose), Katrine Øgaard Jensen (2018 Poetry), Charlotte Mandell (2018 Prose), Bill Johnston (2019 Poetry), and Karen Emmerich (2019 Prose).

The winning translators and books are featured at the annual conference of the American Literary Translators Association.

“The web of metaphors has intertwined particles into dense branches of various greenery in the rhetoric forests in which Nature manifests itself in the form of a threat: “mass will inevitably function as / A source of light ... A universe suffused with gluons, photons, and mesons— … Just in the way souls combine with bodies, / They were blessed with gravity and speed.” Instead of finding the originality of this poetry in its rhythm—the translation from Chinese has set barriers for us in doing so—we find originality in the concept of the poem itself. The author has given us indication of her “Quantum Ways,” and only by diving deep into the energy fields and the vibrations within could we find the beams of spooky voices and men classified into various archives by scores set according to their structures, so the reader imagines those supernormal, surrealist forms, navigating themselves across the spaces stretching within the poem.”

—Concha García

winner of prizes awarded by Universidad de León (1987), Barcarola (1988), Jaime Gil de Biedma (1995), and Dama de Baza.

Yin Xiaoyuan (Yīn Xiǎoyuán, “殷媛” in Chinese) is an avant-garde, crossover epic poet as well as a trans-genre & multilingual writer, founder of Encyclopedic Poetry School (est. 2007), initiator of Hermaphroditic Writing Movement and chief drafter of Declaration of Hermaphroditic Writing, Editor and visual designer of “Encyclopedic Poetry School A.I. Papercube” (10th Anniversary Special Edition), “12th Anniversary Poetry ~ Photography ~ Manuscripts Album” and “2020 Yearbook: Poetry ~ Photography,” director and visual designer of “12th Anniversary Poetry ~Tea Deluxe Gift Set” and “12th Anniversary Commemorative Medallions.” She also directs “Encyclopedic Poetry School Creative Writing & Integrated Art Workshop”, members of which include poets, writers, dramatists, musicians and visual/installation/photography/calligraphy artists.

Yin Xiaoyuan graduated from Beijing International Studies University. She is a member of Writers’ Association of China, Translators’ Association of China and Poetry Institute of China. She has published 11 books including 5 poetry anthologies: Ephemeral Memories (Dazhong literature & art publishing, 2010), Beyond the Tzolk’in (China Federation of Literary and Art Publishing House, 2013), Avant-garde Trilogy (Tuanjie Publishing House, 2015) , Agent d’ensemencement des nuages (Encyclopedic Poetry School’ 10th Anniversary Series) (Beiyue Literature & Art Publishing House, 2017), and Cloud Seeding Agent (Pinyon Publishing, USA); and 6 translations, including The Ruby in Her Navel (Tsinghua University Press, 2014) by Booker Prize winner Barry Unsworth, a translation of contemporary New York poet/artist Bill Wolak’s poetry anthology Become a River (New Feral, 2018), two novels from Japanese, and a haiku anthology.

T.V.Petrusenko, Head of Acquisition Department, National Library of Russian, referred to the works by Encyclopedic Poetry School as “a new trend of contemporary Chinese poetry”, and Glennys Reyes Tapia, Head of Collection Department, BNPHU, described them as “bibliographical treasure of their (Chinese) culture”.

She has written 18 epics (which add up to a total of 70 thousand lines) and 24 volumes of encyclopedic poems.

Her works were written in Chinese, English, Japanese, German and French and translated into Italian, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Galician, Finnish, Estonian, Russian, Bengali and Bulgarian, published home and abroad. She is cooperating with 100+ contemporary poets in U.S., U.K., Sweden, Ireland, Australia, Spain, Portugal, Russia, Germany, France, Finland , Canada, Argentina, Japan, India, Estonia, Cuba, Honduras, Columbia, Chile, Bulgaria, Bolivia and Ecuador, etc.

She has travelled around China by her own, challenging mountains including Mount Huang, Mount Hua, Mount Heng (Hunan) and Mount Tai, which she summited on foot.

Page last updated: April 20, 2020