The 2024 Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize Shortlist Citations

A Cha Chaan Teng That Does Not Exist
By Derek Chung

Translated from Chinese by May Huang

Zephyr Press

A Cha Chaan Teng That Does Not Exist vividly captures Hong Kong through a time-lapse of language: the reader feels the city’s slowly-shifting, changing landscape in each poem. Derek Chung is one of Hong Kong’s acclaimed living poets, his wide lines and architectural stanzas give a quiet, cozy warmth to the collection. May Huang’s English-language voice for Chung is precise and crisp, with moments of deep sadness and nostalgia. Huang meets each poem’s challenges with originality: The festival is here we dive into the Cross-Harbor Tunnel // Thankful for the whir of engines // Hypnotizing us like waves.

Decapitated Poetry

By Ko-Hua Chen
Translated from Chinese by Wen-Chi Li and Colin Bramwell

Seagull Books

Decapitated Poetry is the glorious new collection of selected works by Ko-Hua Chen, Taiwan’s first openly-gay poet. Chen’s poetry achieves transcendence through a daring combination of depth, revelation and lightheartedness. Playfully filthy at times, gently mocking at others, Chen’s humor and vulnerability come through in poems like Song of Dumbbells, The Necessity of Anal Sex, Twelve Love Poems for an Android. Co-translators Wen-chi Li and Colin Bramwell selected these poems from Chen’s prolific lifetime of work, and created a lyrical English-language voice that is approachable and welcoming like the poetry itself, favoring deceptively-simple language and a colloquial tone.

Phantom Pain Wings
By Kim Hyesoon
Translated from Korean by Don Mee Choi

New Directions | And Other Stories (forthcoming)

Don Mee Choi soars to the edges of the English language and back in her mesmerizing and unsettling translation of Kim Hyesoon’s “bird language” in Phantom Pain Wings. In Kim’s “I-do-bird” sequence, we traverse the landscape of collective grief and trauma, of systemic violence and Sisyphean resistance to power, through overlapping contemporary and historic voices that speak in puns and homonyms. Breathlessly, we witness the coalescence of noun with verb; the sensory with the imaginary; the past with the present; the organism with the world. Through Kim’s alchemy, rendered doubly potent by Choi’s translation, we experience the “dormant sorrow” and “uncontrollable cosmic madness” at the heart of Kim’s bird ventriloquy. This is an unforgettable collection and an equally exceptional transcreation. 

Since Fukushima
By Wago Ryoichi
Translated from Japanese by Judy Halebsky and Takahashi Ayako

Vagabond Press

To read Wago Ryoichi's Since Fukushima is to wake up in a hall of mirrors. Not the kind Bruce Lee enters in Enter the Dragon. In Halebsky & Takahashi’s astounding translation of Wago's world, the mirrors face the walls, while their opaque sides stare at you. And while in Bruce Lee's room you would be lost among your doppelgangers, in Wago's you will be alone. This is not to say he has wrought a language of nihilism. Quite the opposite. Wago's speaker, like a water diviner, locates hope in the aftermath of the nuclear disaster. There is no greater achievement than this.