2019 Northern California Book Award for Translation in Poetry

On June 23, 2019 in San Francisco, California, the Northern California Book Reviewers (NCBR) honored Wild Geese Sorrow with a Northern California Book Award for Translation in Poetry. The program booklet describes the nomination as follows:

“Wild Geese Sorrow: The Chinese Wall Inscriptions at Angel Island are new translations by Jeffrey Thomas Leong (Calypso Editions)

These anonymous poems carved in a wooden wall by nonliterary writers educated in classical Chinese tradition are compelling testimony of an earlier episode of U.S. history (1910-1940) when Chinese immigrants in search of a better life were inhumanely detained. The mixture of elegance and directness in the English translation feels true to the original in a way that is completely convincing—a work of painstaking scholarship and artistic re-creation of intimate histories resonant with current themes of “alien” exclusion. The writers have nothing to prove but their own humanity, with their lives (fortunes, destinies) on the line. Jeff Leong, in this, his first translated collection, brings us an important historical document of rescued literature, the first Chinese-American poetry written at the threshold of this country.”

Download Calypso Editions Press Release here.