Large language models now translate between languages in seconds, reviving an old anxiety: is translation a solved problem? This talk argues that for understanding a culture, fluency was never the difficulty. Taking the great Tang poet Li Bo as its case, it follows a singularly iconic word, xian 仙, the term behind his epithet “poet-transcendent,” as it passes into English. In medieval China, a xian was not merely a being who does not die; a xian held rank and office in a celestial bureaucracy, and could be demoted from it. To render Li Bo a “banished immortal” keeps the exile but quietly drops that cosmic officialdom, leaving behind a familiar romantic genius. For a century “immortal” was the dominant English choice, canonized in dictionaries and anthologies until it seemed self-evident. Machine translation, trained on that same archive, reproduces the reduction as its frictionless default, laying bare how thoroughly it saturated the record. The question, then, is not whether cultures can be translated, but how a concept, precisely by resisting translation, becomes a shared medium for thinking transcendence.

Speaker:

Ping Wang is Professor in the Department of Asian Languages and Literature at the University of Washington, where she teaches classical Chinese literature and researches the history of Chinese poetry. She has previously held faculty positions at the University of Wisconsin and Princeton University, prior to joining the University of Washington.

Professor Wang’s scholarship bridges Western sinology, translation studies, traditional Chinese classical learning, and contemporary critical theory. She has published numerous articles and is the author of The Age of Courtly Writing: Wen xuan Compiler Xiao Tong (501-531) and His Circle and The Poetic Way of Xie Lingyun, the latter of which examines the significance of landscape poetry (shanshui shi) in Chinese literary history.

Her honors include a research membership at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, a special Andrew W. Mellon Foundation grant for international collaborative research, and a research fellowship from the Simpson Center for the Humanities at the University of Washington. In 2017, she was invited to lecture at the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia, and she is currently a resident fellow of the Institute of Chinese Studies at The Chinese University of Hong Kong.

Date: 29 October 2026 (Thursday)

Time: 4:30pm – 6:00pm (4:00pm: Tea Reception)

Venue: Activities Room, 2/F, Art Museum East Wing, CUHK

Language: English

Registration: Click Here

Enquiry: 3943 5976/ This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.