The celebration this year of the twentieth anniversary of Hong Kong’s return to Chinese sovereignty has apparently renewed critical interest in the issues of identity and self-fashioning, among the locals as well as international scholars. The lecture “Killing Time: Queering the Handover and Its Afterlives” by Professor Carlos ROJAS at the Department of Linguistics and Translation (LT) on 9 October 2017 was timely both in terms of responding to the current concerns and revisiting the anxieties over “identity” as reflected in the works straddling the “handover” of local novelist DUNG Kai Cheung and filmmaker Fruit CHAN.

Most of the audience attending his lecture at LT were postgraduate students of translation and not surprisingly, most of their questions for him related to his experience as a major translator of Chinese literature for the English speaking world. They were impressed by his literary insights, and excellent command of Chinese, in analysing the stylistic differences between the authors he translated, including Dung Kai Cheung, whose Chinese may sometimes be Cantonese inflected and problematic to non-native speakers. Professor Rojas’s lecture was the first on the subject of culture and translation in the lecture series of LT Research Forum 2017-18 .

Professor Rojas is Professor of Chinese Cultural Studies at Duke University, known for his widely acclaimed research in Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies and Diaspora Studies. He is also a prolific translator of celebrated Chinese authors, such as YU Hua, and most recently, YAN Lianke.

Cover photo: Professor Rojas shared with the audience his experience as a major translator of Chinese literature for the English speaking world.