- finally, the author of 《创造丰盛》create abundance's representative committed last night to a major joint translation project with me.
more specifically, for the past couple of weeks, i have found a group of qualified chinese translators (working for china's most prestigious translation company based in beijing); in the next 4 months or so, i will supervise the translation of the book into 6 target languages (other than english, french, spanish and japanese), which are: german, portuguese, italian, russian, arabic and hindi.
as i know nothing about either of these languages, it will be a challenging job to make sure that the translated text is up to a high professional or publishing standard. to ensure the quality of the jobs, i will try to meet the translators in person in beijin in may. i need to develop a close working relationship with them, since the author may want her other 5 or 6 books to be translated into the world's 10 major languages (in terms of the number of native speakers or areas/countries) at a later time.
once all the translation jobs are done, it is likely that the author/representative will hire my press to publish all of them, and even delivered to international destinations, as in the cases of the chinese-engish version and the chinese-french version.
- 10,000 hard-cover copies of the chinese-french version of create abundance are to arrive at vancvouer harbour today, and will be delivered to the author's house in langley next week, while the other 10,000 copies are due to arrive in paris early next month.
- since my visit to china last october, i have been unable to write poetry as before: i used to write about 12 pieces on the monthly average, but for the past 5 months, i picked up my pen only several times. in fact, the deep fear that my poetic inspirations can run out any day has been haunting me from bad to worse in recent years. nevertheless, it is interesting to note that no matter how hard i try to write poetry, i cannot write a single a word for several months in a run if not inspired, but once inspired, i could write 'profusely': on jan 1, 2016, i wrote 33 poems on a single day (sunday, no teaching). while i draw my inspirations mostly from my reading experience, the pieces i have written in recent months are very disappointing to myself.
only when i read 'better' poetry by others can i write 'better' poetry of my own. in other words, i have been unable to write satisfactory poems in recent years simply i was unable to find any good poetry to read either in english or in chinese.
where else can i find good poetry to read?
- i got 23 acceptances in jan; 15 in feb, and 8 thus far in march. in particular, my sixth chapbook titled wordscaping was released on feb 29 by fowlpox press based in halifax, with which our Poetry Pacific Press will have a joint publishing venture later this year. here is the link to my new echapbook: http://fowlpoxpress.yolasite.com/resources/Wordscaping.pdf
- so i have been very busy with such translation-coordinating, publishing, printing, importing and delivering jobs while i have to prepare for filing my own and my family's tax returns, the most frustrating and hateful thing for me to do in my life.
