About the Relay

The Concept

The Poem Relay seeks to raise awareness about freedom of expression in China in a unique way – through poetry and translation.

Over the past several months, centres of International PEN have arranged translation and recording of the poem ‘June’ (Liuyue) by the imprisoned Chinese poet and journalist Shi Tao, into over 90 (and counting) of the world’s languages.

Through this website with a map of the world and a relay itinerary (similar to the Olympic Torch Relay itinerary), the poem is virtually “traveling” around the world, from centre to centre, language to language, adding new translations as it goes and ending in Beijing at the time of the 2008 Olympics.

Visitors to the website can:

• Track the poem’s progress and read and hear new translations of the poem as it arrives at each new centre
• Learn more about Shi Tao and the almost 40 other Writers in Prison in China.
• Take Action, by participating in International PEN’s China Campaign.

The Poem Relay draws together several aspects of PEN -- freedom of expression, translation and linguistic diversity -- to send the world a message that only PEN can send:

• It supports Freedom of Expression. The poem is by an imprisoned writer, who is a main case of PEN, and is itself about a forbidden, censored topic.
• It celebrates Poetry and Linguistic Diversity. The translation and "relay" demonstrate the diversity of languages, literatures, and writers in the world.
• The Poem Relay is one of a number of actions organized as part of International PEN’s 2008 China Campaign in the lead up to the Beijing Olympics. Information about other aspects fo PEN’s campaign can be found soon on the International PEN website.

How we did our translations

Every translation is necessarily a departure from the original. To translate from an intermediary language increases the distance a poem must travel to another language. We urged all participating centres to make every possible effort to engage individuals to translate directly from the Chinese. In cases where this was not possible and a translator needed to rely on an intermediary language such as English, we provided centres with a literal word-for-word translation guide, so the translator would be aware of the choices made by the English translator. We also encouraged centres to seek out native Chinese-speaking poets for advice. In all cases, it was left to the centres to decide who should translate the poem and which language(s) they should translate it to and from.

Who set up the Relay

The International PEN Poem Relay was organized and managed by Chip Rolley, Kristin T. Schnider and Zhang Yu. It is based on an idea by Chip Rolley, who translated Shi Tao’s “June” into English, and developed by him and Kristin T. Schnider.

Chip Rolley is an editor and writer, with a special interest in literature and Chinese politics and culture. Chip’s writing has appeared in The Griffith Review, The Wall Street Journal (Asia), The Sydney Morning Herald, The Australian, The Bulletin, Vogue (Australia), Rolling Stone (Australia), and others. A former Vice president of Sydney PEN, he was also Chair of the International PEN Search Committee (member, ex officio, of the International PEN Board). Born in El Paso, Texas, he now lives in Sydney, Australia.

Kristin T. Schnider is a freelance writer who has published four books; her essays and short stories have appeared in anthologies and literary magazines in Switzerland. She is President of the Swiss German PEN Centre and member of the board of International PEN. She was born in London and raised in Switzerland where she lives.

Dr. Yu Zhang, or Zhang Yu in Chinese order, is a Chinese citizen with permanent residence in Sweden. He was born in Wuhan, the capital city of Hubei Province in central China on April 27, 1952, and graduated at the Wuhan Institute of Chemical Technology in 1977, beginning his career as a teaching assistant there. On the last day of 1981, he arrived in Stockholm to study at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), and got a Ph.D in Inorganic Chemistry in 1987 and continued as a research scientist there. In addition to his scientific research, he has been engaged in promoting Chinese culture overseas while defending freedom of expression in China. In the wake of the Beijing Massacre in 1989, he took part in the founding of “Supporting the June Fourth Movement in Sweden”, a human rights association of Chinese students. In 1990, he founded Nordic Chinese, a Stockholm-based monthly newsletter, as its publisher and editing director, and later also as its chief editor until it ceased publication in 1997. In 1999, he joined Tong Xun (later renamed Nordic Chinese Communication), an Oslo-based monthly Chinese magazine, as its editor, and became its chief editor in 2002. In the same year, he joined the Independent Chinese PEN Center (ICPC), a branch of International PEN, as the coordinator of its Writers in Prison Committee (2003 - ), and its Secretary-general (November 2005 - March 2008). Since February 2007, he has been denied re-entry to the China mainland, including flight transit via its international airport; he was twice expelled by the police in Beijing and made to fly back to his original departure region. This was based only on an oral “decision by a superior”, alleging his activism endangered national security. It was said later that such activism referred to his position and activities at ICPC.

BarNet, Sydney PEN's website sponsor, programmed and designed the website. Under the direction of Michael Green, Jack Maggoch plotted the journey of the poem using open source software and Google Maps. Gail Fulton provided legal advice. BarNet, a communications management company serving barristers, also hosts the www.penpoemrelay.org website.

A Memoir of the PEN Poem Relay

by Chip Rolley

On May 2, the Olympic Torch Relay arrived in Hong Kong to begin its three-month journey through every province of China toward Beijing in August. It had already travelled through Europe, North and South America, Africa, the Middle East, South and Southeast Asia, Australia and East Asia to get there.

And every step of the way, “a bit of poetry,” as one blogger put it, has been “doggedly chasing after [it] all across the world.”

That “bit of poetry” is “June” a short poem by the imprisoned Chinese journalist and poet Shi Tao, which has been virtually travelling around the world via the International PEN Poem Relay (www.penpoemrelay.org), a web-based campaign calling for free expression in China.

“June” roughly follows the route of the Olympic Torch (though with many more “stops”). As the poem reaches a new destination – usually a PEN centre – it is published in the languages arranged by that centre. Visitors can read the poem in the new language, hear a recording of it, and via YouTube video sometimes even see it performed in their native language. The campaign has been organised by the Sydney, Swiss German and Independent Chinese PEN Centres with programming and designing of the website provided by Sydney PEN’s website sponsor BarNet.

We were hoping it might be translated into about 60 languages. At the time of writing, we had reached 95. And in this Olympic year of world records, Drew Campbell, a member of Scottish PEN, has applied on our behalf for entry into the Guinness Book of World Records.

Of course record-breaking was not our goal. Rather, we wanted to raise our concerns about freedom of expression in China, not in a hectoring or abusive manner, but in a peaceful and non-confrontational way that showed our respect for Chinese culture and for literature in general – the concern that is the foundation of PEN’s advocacy for writers and freedom of expression around the world.

China has more writers in prison than other country in the world. Statistics fascinate us, but who are these people in jail in China, who fill our email inboxes with pleas for letter-writing?

We wanted to open a little window: to use the writer’s words to rescue the humanity of that writer, so often buried behind statistics or lost in translation.

We knew the Olympics provided an opportunity but also knew that confrontation and calls for a boycott would be counter-productive. Instead, we wanted to softly awaken people’s hearts to the concerns and emotions that often lie at the core of their writing life.

Shi Tao’s poem came to us like a gift. I had been living in Shanghai in 2005 when he was sentenced to prison. Zhang Yu, a colleague from Independent Chinese PEN gave me a sheaf of Shi Tao’s poems, most of which were written around the time he sent that fateful email that ended him up in prison.

I translated “Liu Yue” or “June” for a flier for Sydney PEN to pass out at an event. Shi Tao’s words were quiet and meditative, but they burned with pain underneath the surface. Just a few lines captured so many facets of the China I was beginning to know, the China that was seeping in to my consciousness – the need to search for truth beneath the surface; the patience required for aspirations that must lie in hibernation; the bureaucratism that counts the dead in piles of letters.

Was the fish swimming “toward another place to hibernate” another example of China’s fatalism, which so often cloaks despair? Or did it hold a hope that one day that hibernation would end?

I sent my translation to Swiss German PEN’s Kristin Schnider and other colleagues in Europe and soon there were translations to French, Italian and German. The poem moved people. They responded. Whether it had the same effect on them as it had on me I couldn’t know, but soon PEN centres and other organizations included readings of it in their programs.

It had, as they say, legs. Kristin and I only half joked that it would be great to translate the poem into as many of the world’s language as possible.

The thought tugged at me. June was opening up that window on the living writer behind the statistic of the “writer in prison”. Soon I had the idea of combining the opportunity presented by the Olympics with the poem from a Chinese writer that we knew was moving people. We would use the Olympic Torch Relay as a model and a website as the engine to create a worldwide ongoing performance of the poem in different languages. The translation of the poem would be visually enacted on the website using a map of the world. The poem would become a meme propagating itself, carrying its message across borders, in and out of languages and cultures.

The task before us was daunting. At its core, our idea was simple – ask PEN centres to translate this poem into their local languages – but it needed a website that did not yet exist. How to describe it to people? There were issues of copyright – the poet’s and the translators’. And there were communication difficulties. PEN is necessarily a multilingual environment, which, in addition to reminding me at every turn of my narrow, Anglo-centric upbringing, compounds the number of emails and phone calls required to successfully communicate what you need. Finally there was the obstacle every PEN project faces: centres largely run on a voluntary basis and few interested funders. (Whether due to skittishness about offending China, discomfort with a program not focused on Australian culture or disinterest in a project that involved poetry and translation, in every application for funding the PEN Poem Relay failed.) If it weren’t for BarNet, a communications management company serving barristers, the idea would have remained in the abstract. Michael Green, the barrister who founded BarNet instantly understood what we were trying to do. He and programmer Jack Moggach met the technical challenges and Jack programmed the website, while their colleague Gail Fulton ensured we honoured and protected copyright.

Even so, if it weren’t for Kristin’s persistence and rock-solid faith in the idea, I would have dropped it long before we started. She travelled to the PEN Congress in Senegal last year and presented it to PEN’s 145 centres, signing up the majority of them to participate. Later, she and I split the world roughly in half and started emailing and phoning PEN centres to get them to send in translation texts, recordings and copyright permissions.

The Basque translation and recording came in almost immediately and from then on there was a slow but steady build. Translations to major languages, such as Spanish, German, Japanese, and Russian arrived, but also to Tamazight, Gascon, Cree, Guarani, and Afar.

Translations came in from centres only recently established in cultures torn by war: an Arabic version from the Iraq Centre and a Pashto translation from the Afghan Centre.

There was a translation to Uyghur, the people and language in Xinjiang in northwest China and, on the eve of the protests and military crackdown in Tibet, a translation to Tibetan.

We discovered that this project became a powerful act of solidarity – from poets and translators around the world with Shi Tao and the 39 other writers and journalists imprisoned in China. Included in the relay is a translation to Haitian Creole by Georges Anglade, himself a political prisoner under the Duvalier regime in Haiti and twice forced into political exile. The Spanish translation arranged by the Cuban Writers in Exile Centre based in Miami is read by Angel Cuadra, who was a political prisoner for 15 years in Cuba.

Sydney PEN’s Hugo Bowne-Anderson arranged translations into Indigenous languages Arrernte and Darug, while members of Adelaide PEN connected the relay with the work reviving Indigenous languages there. Visitors to the website can hear the poem in Adnyamathanha, the language and culture of the Flinders Ranges, which has only 20 living fluent speakers, and Ngarrindjeri, another South Australian language, which has not been spoken fluently for years.

Buoyed by a group on Facebook and bloggers around the world, the poem has gone “viral”. It’s been blogged, tweeted, dug and emailed. Renegade translations are popping up on websites all over the world and every step of the way, people have been writing to us to tell us they’ve been moved to tears by reading and hearing the poem.

Anna Blume, a professor in art history at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York used the poem relay in her classes, each of which has students speaking at least least nine languages. “I have rarely seen an ‘action’ that could so well dovetail in an authentic dialectic with an event like the Olympic Torch campaign,” she wrote in an email. “Hearing this poem in so many languages all at once, some of us spontaneously started to cry.” The relay allowed a student discussion about poetry, freedom of expression and human rights. “I could see that it meant a great deal to them to be able to feel something about a series of events and the global crisis of human rights that they hear about, are bombarded with, but rarely can, in their bodies and minds, connect to.”

I was moved by so many moments in this project. Richard Greenthun, whose performance-translation to Darug, the main Indigenous language grouping in Sydney, can be seen on the Sydney PEN section of the website, says there is no word for June in Darug. Instead he translates it as “the coldest month”, opening up a new understanding of the harsh cruelty of those events in 1989 in Beijing.

In Lugosa, one of the languages of Uganda, the word for June, Namwendwa, also means “adored” or “beloved”, as it is the month after the crop harvest when family and friends visit to exchange gifts.

I had been exhilarated by the urgency of the recitation in Catalan, the rolling rhythm of Emile Martel’s reading in French, and the lilting music of recitations in Kyrgyz and Pashto. And the translation to Afar moved me to tears: when I received Saleh Mohamed Hassan’s audio file from Djibouti, I realised, perhaps for the first time, what had been accomplished with this project.

Hassan’s translation to Afar is interlaced with a plaintive, softly sung refrain that places Shi Tao’s Chinese meditation on the June 4 massacre in the culture, rhythm and music of the Horn of Africa. As the Guardian’s Books Blog put it, ours was a “virtual torch of freedom of expression, crossing continents on fibre-optic threads and microwaves” – the same threads and waves that carried Shi Tao’s fateful email and allowed his jailor to track him down. When I heard it in Afar, I realised how, through the labour of poets, translators, organisers, computer programmers and lawyers, Shi Tao’s poem transcended his prison walls and travelled across language, culture and place – and how many people he had moved through his words.