Reading and Discussion with Wu Ming-yi and Catherine Xinxin Yu

8 July (online)

 

Taiwanese author Wu Ming-yi 吳明益 is one of the internationally most renowned voices in Sinophone ecocritical literature. As an author of factual and fictional literature and an artist whose works often combine drawings and images with text, Wu Ming-yi's literary worlds draw attention to the endangered lifeworlds in and beyond Taiwan. In these stories, lifes become entangled, be it of humans, animals and plants, of people with different ethnic and social backgrounds within Taiwan, or of living beings all across the globe that are all threatend by international chains of production and exploitation. At the same time, these works try to disrupt the reader's (and viewer's) habitual ways of perceiving, thinking and remembering: They try to trace the multiple voices and senses of beings beyond the human.

While some of his works have been translated into,among others,English and German, much of his work is still unknown internationally. It was thus a great opportunity for the students and general audience to get a chance of discussing with Wu Ming-yi and his translator Catherine Xinxin Yu the possibilities of ecocritical writing and the challenges of transmitting a work that already tries to 'translate' non-human languages into words and images into yet other languages. The writer and translator offered glimpses into their ways of working and their motivation and read sections of The Sea Breeze Club and the picture book The Three-Legged Crab-Eating Mongoose and the Giant as well as the short story Cloudland.