Chengru He is developing a poetry project that reframes translation not as a secondary or derivative act, but as a central creative and feminist practice. She describes the work as “a book-length creative translation project that rethinks literary canons in a multilingual context from a feministic perspective,” grounded in lived, transcultural experience rather than allegiance to a single literary tradition. Working bilingually and multilingually, He approaches poetry as a site where language, history, and power converge, and where those forces can be actively reimagined.
At the heart of the project are questions that are both literary and political: how might Li Bai and Wang Wei exist in a contemporary multilingual world? Where does Su Hui stand if her woven texts are allowed to speak beyond conventional language? By posing these questions, He challenges fixed notions of canon, authorship, and fidelity, instead treating translation as an expansive space of interpretation, variation, and agency.
Her work situates poetry firmly within present-day conditions shaped by financial instability and environmental crisis, refusing to isolate art from the realities that surround it. At the same time, the project plans to push the poetic form outward using found texts, documentary poetics, experimental structures, and interdisciplinary collaboration. Poetry becomes not only literary, but also visual, historical, typographic, and linguistic.
Built over several years, the project is deeply personal and unmistakably He’s own. Notably, she has already begun bringing its questions and methods into the creative writing classroom, inviting students to engage directly with translation as a living, generative, and critical practice.
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