Runner-up in Quarto’s 2023 Chapbook Contest
Click here to view the chapbook
Illustration by Mel Wang
Eleanor Lin (林書意) (she/her) is a senior at Columbia College majoring in computer science and linguistics. In addition to writing the occasional poem for Quarto, she has also contributed to The Blue and White Magazine, the Columbia Daily Spectator, the Columbia Science Review, and Columbia Continents human rights magazine. She was selected as a finalist for the 2022 Betty L. Yu & Jin C. Yu Creative Writing Prize from TaiwaneseAmerican.org.
She is interested not only in what is lost in translation, but also what might be gained. In "Four Replies to Sappho," can the poet's grace be grasped without her Greek? How does one capture the balance and conciseness of the original language in "Longing for Jiaoxi"? Is the mother's heart in "Dull Ice Flower" an emblem of self-sacrifice, as the Mandarin-language song suggests, or one of maternal frigidity, as the English connotes? How does the translation of the events of "Ballad of the Street Vendor" across boundaries of language, place, and time affect the lens through which we view those events? Do old songs lose their power once they are no longer "veiled by the mystery of translation," as "Hiraeth" ponders? These are just a few of the questions that the author hopes to raise in this work.