Yunte Huang is a professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author of Transpacific Imaginations, Charlie Chan, and Inseparable. Huang has also received fellowships from the Society for the Humanities and the Guggenheim Foundation.

• List of FiguresIntroduction. Serve the People, Read Them Verse: A Transpacific Journey in Poetics and Politics1. Through the Looking Glass: Basic English, Chinglish, and Translocal Dialect2. Listening to Marco Polo: Sound, Money, and Vernacular Imagination3. Words Made in China: Ezra Pound as a Translational Poet4. Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird Too Big to Fail: Wallace Stevens, John Cage, and the Poetics of Risk5. Chinese Whispers: The Future of Meaning in the Age of InformationCoda: The Story of Mr. Shi Eating LionsAcknowledgmentsNotesBibliographyIndex

“An exile writer who fled the massacre of Tiananmen Square to begin a new literary life in American universities, Huang has a unique perspective on what he calls the ‘transpacific crossover’ between China and Anglo-America, particularly between our poetries, poetics, and translations. The Chinese Whispers of Huang’s title are those ‘inscrutable moments’ when poetry determines—and is determined by—political, national, and linguistic difference, dispelling all notions of universal intelligibility and global translatability. Indeed, Huang’s study details the ways our two literary cultures have in fact understood (and misunderstood) one another, using as test cases the works of I. A. Richards, Ernest Fenollosa, Lin Yutang, and Ezra Pound. Huang has produced a superb study that is theoretically sophisticated and yet also highly personal, witty, and deeply moving.”

Yunte Huang is a professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author of Transpacific Imaginations, Charlie Chan, and Inseparable. Huang has also received fellowships from the Society for the Humanities and the Guggenheim Foundation.

• List of FiguresIntroduction. Serve the People, Read Them Verse: A Transpacific Journey in Poetics and Politics1. Through the Looking Glass: Basic English, Chinglish, and Translocal Dialect2. Listening to Marco Polo: Sound, Money, and Vernacular Imagination3. Words Made in China: Ezra Pound as a Translational Poet4. Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird Too Big to Fail: Wallace Stevens, John Cage, and the Poetics of Risk5. Chinese Whispers: The Future of Meaning in the Age of InformationCoda: The Story of Mr. Shi Eating LionsAcknowledgmentsNotesBibliographyIndex

“An exile writer who fled the massacre of Tiananmen Square to begin a new literary life in American universities, Huang has a unique perspective on what he calls the ‘transpacific crossover’ between China and Anglo-America, particularly between our poetries, poetics, and translations. The Chinese Whispers of Huang’s title are those ‘inscrutable moments’ when poetry determines—and is determined by—political, national, and linguistic difference, dispelling all notions of universal intelligibility and global translatability. Indeed, Huang’s study details the ways our two literary cultures have in fact understood (and misunderstood) one another, using as test cases the works of I. A. Richards, Ernest Fenollosa, Lin Yutang, and Ezra Pound. Huang has produced a superb study that is theoretically sophisticated and yet also highly personal, witty, and deeply moving.”

Yunte Huang is a professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author of Transpacific Imaginations, Charlie Chan, and Inseparable. Huang has also received fellowships from the Society for the Humanities and the Guggenheim Foundation.

• List of FiguresIntroduction. Serve the People, Read Them Verse: A Transpacific Journey in Poetics and Politics1. Through the Looking Glass: Basic English, Chinglish, and Translocal Dialect2. Listening to Marco Polo: Sound, Money, and Vernacular Imagination3. Words Made in China: Ezra Pound as a Translational Poet4. Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird Too Big to Fail: Wallace Stevens, John Cage, and the Poetics of Risk5. Chinese Whispers: The Future of Meaning in the Age of InformationCoda: The Story of Mr. Shi Eating LionsAcknowledgmentsNotesBibliographyIndex

“An exile writer who fled the massacre of Tiananmen Square to begin a new literary life in American universities, Huang has a unique perspective on what he calls the ‘transpacific crossover’ between China and Anglo-America, particularly between our poetries, poetics, and translations. The Chinese Whispers of Huang’s title are those ‘inscrutable moments’ when poetry determines—and is determined by—political, national, and linguistic difference, dispelling all notions of universal intelligibility and global translatability. Indeed, Huang’s study details the ways our two literary cultures have in fact understood (and misunderstood) one another, using as test cases the works of I. A. Richards, Ernest Fenollosa, Lin Yutang, and Ezra Pound. Huang has produced a superb study that is theoretically sophisticated and yet also highly personal, witty, and deeply moving.”