The language of trauma, poetry, and repetition. Translating Liu Xiaobo’s June Fourth Elegies

Translation in itself is an act of repetition. The translation of the poetry collection Niannian liusi 年年六四 (June Fourth Elegies) by Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo 刘小波, died in 2017 under surveillance regime after numerous years of imprisonment, is an act of repetition and preservation of trauma.
The poems included in the collection, written on each anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, spanning twenty years from 1990 to 2009, form a ‘lyrical synthesis of rare balance’ between political denunciation and ritual song, a poetic sharing of human suffering. The elegies sometimes repeat almost unchanged over the years, as noted by the English translator Jeffrey Yang: “this weariness, however, can be said to reflect the static monotony of empty memory” (180, 2013). 
In my talk, I will explore the main strategies of my translation of the collection into Italian (Lantana 2013), including some references and comparisons with the English translation of the work. In my reflection on the translation, I ponder the meaning of the text in relation to trauma and the contradiction between poetry/translation as a compulsion to repeat the trauma and poetry/translation as salvation from oblivion. 

Nicoletta Pesaro is professor of modern Chinese literature and translation at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, where she coordinates the PhD in Asian and African Studies and is the director of the book- series Translating Wor(l)ds. Her research interests include modern Chinese fiction and poetry; theory of narrative and translation theory; the relation between literary genres and gender. She is the principal investigator of a project funded by the Italian government: “Chinese narratives and the narration of China in Italy: literature, cinema and art at the intersection of cultural diplomacy and cultural industry”. 
She has recently published Narrativa cinese del Novecento. Autori, opere, correnti (Twentieth-Century Chinese Fiction: Authors, works and schools, Carocci 2019), a book co-authored with M. Pirazzoli. She co-edited Ecocriticism and Chinese Literature: Imagined Landscapes and Real Lived Spaces (Routledge 2022) with R. Moratto and D. Chao and Littérature chinoise et globalisation: enjeux linguistiques, traductologiques et génériques (Ca’ Foscari Editions 2017) with Yinde Zhang.
She has translated several Chinese novels, Lu Xun’s short stories and Liu Xiaobo’s poetry into Italian.
Currently, she is translating a book by Can Xue and an anthology of modern Chinese poems.