Chris Song and Simona Gallo
Dwelling in Tongues
◉ Part I—”Hong Kong & Poetry”
◉ Part II—”A Translingual Self: The Art of Self-Translation”
Editor’s note: This is the first in a two-part series of interview entitled “Dwelling in Tongues: A Conversation on Language, Identity, and Self-Translation” between Simona Gallo and Chris Song. In this conversation, “Hong Kong & Poetry”, Simona Gallo and Chris Song talked about Hong Kong’s marginalised yet resilient Sinophone poetry scene, Song’s role in promoting it through translation and cultural initiatives, and the nuanced, decentralised ethos of Voice & Verse Poetry Magazine. Translation is framed as bridge-building—textual and cultural—while poetry reflects lived experience rather than overt political commentary.
Simona Gallo
In her book Verse Going Viral: China’s New Media Scenes, Heather Inwood asserts that modern poetry “is alive and well in twenty-first-century China”, as evidenced by the “wealth of poetry writing and related activities taking place daily on the Internet, in print publications, and at face-to-face events” (2014, 3). This observation holds true across the broader Sinosphere, even though contemporary Sinophone poetry continues to occupy a marginal position within the epistemic framework of Sinophone literary studies. At least until the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, a remarkable poetic phenomenon was unfolding in Hong Kong, where a kaleidoscope of poetry scenes emerged from a hybrid, polyphonic, and polymorphic Sinosphere.
What, then, is Hong Kong’s place within the Sinosphere, and what role does it play in the context of a global poetic network? What kind of relationship might one envision between Hong Kong and poetry?
Chris Song
Hong Kong’s Sinophone poetry scene has been remarkably robust for over a century. Its development was significantly shaped by Mainland Chinese poets who relocated to the city between the 1920s and the 1960s, often in response to a turbulent political climate. In Hong Kong—particularly during the Cold War—these poets were also exposed to the influence of Western modernist and postmodernist poetry, much of which had been condemned in the newly established People’s Republic of China for its perceived glorification of bourgeois culture.
Historically, the evolution of Hong Kong poetry began to diverge from its Mainland counterpart during the Cold War. A notable segment of the baby boomer generation in Hong Kong championed the local Shenghuohua (生活化) style, which emphasised quotidian life and resisted stylistic influences from Mainland China and Taiwan. These external influences were often criticised by Hong Kong poets as either overly political or too abstruse to capture the lived experience of the city. This strong attachment to everyday life in Hong Kong helped shape a literary voice that has remained closely attuned to the city’s political sensibilities across a range of historical events: from the Sino-British Joint Declaration and the June Fourth Incident to the 1997 Handover, the anti-establishment demonstrations, the 2014 Umbrella Movement, and the 2019–2022 Anti-ELAB Movement.
However, the poetry that emerges from these moments tends more often to reflect the emotional and political atmospheres they engender, rather than to describe the events themselves directly. In parallel, various poetic experimentations—most notably heteroglossic forms that blend classical Chinese, modern Chinese, Cantonese, and English—have rendered Hong Kong poetry a distinctive presence within the Sinosphere.
Yet, Hong Kong poetry has long been marginalised for both cultural and political reasons within the broader Sinophone world. The city has often been dismissed by Chinese literati steeped in a Central Plain mentality as a place devoid of culture—or, if it possesses any culture at all, it is viewed merely as a grain of sand absorbed into the grand river of Chinese civilisation. Outside the Sinosphere, Hong Kong poetry is doubly marginalised. Like other contemporary Chinese or Sinophone poetries, it is overshadowed by the dominance of English in global poetic discourse, and further hindered by the inherent challenges of poetic translation.
I believe Hong Kong poetry will continue to occupy this doubly marginalised position—as it always has—while nevertheless maintaining its unique identities and sensibilities.
Simona Gallo
In Translation, Power, Subversion, editors Román Alvarez and M. Carmen-África Vidal introduced translation as a political act—“an excellent vehicle for conveying the typically Foucaultian binary essence of the opposition power/knowledge” (1996, 5). Indeed, your work has made a significant contribution to reorienting and disseminating Sinophone poetry through translation.
What does translation mean to you? Do you regard it as a driving force? A vehicle of power? A form of subversion? Or a necessity?
Chris Song
I believe translation can embody all of these roles. I can only speak from my own experience, but to me, translation is an act of bridge-building. There are two forms of bridge-building that I engage in. One is textual translation—translating literary works between English and Chinese. The other is cultural translation, which, without necessarily invoking theoretical frameworks, involves facilitating cross-cultural communication in various ways: editing a bilingual poetry journal with a strong emphasis on translation; organising an international poetry festival in Hong Kong; curating the English-language section in Voice & Verse; coordinating translation projects for authors and translators; advising international literary programmes; and developing graduate-level courses on Hong Kong literature at the University of Toronto.
Together, these activities form a network of writers, translators, editors, and scholars through which I can connect people’s strengths and help draw greater attention to Hong Kong as an international literary space. I find this work meaningful because Hong Kong literature remains under-translated, and translators are few. Every translator and every translation matters. I’m not sure how much impact this work will ultimately have, but it brings me joy when I hear someone acknowledge that there is poetry in Hong Kong. More often, however, I encounter a lack of awareness—often accompanied by indifference or scepticism.
I don’t respond with anger or disappointment. Instead, it simply reinforces how meaningful this work is—and how much more there is to be done.
Simona Gallo
As a reader and scholar of Sinophone poetry, I believe that Voice & Verse—by giving voice to a wide array of sites of production, ideological perspectives, and linguistic identities—has become a prominent gravitational force, and thus, a new centre of cultural power. What is your view on this?
Chris Song
Voice & Verse is the only dedicated poetry magazine in Hong Kong. Naturally, it has become the primary platform for the publication of new poetry from the city. It is also the sole print periodical that regularly features English-language poetry by Hong Kong poets. In this sense alone might Voice & Verse be considered a “centre”—but whether it is a centre of power is less certain.
The magazine is not-for-profit and operates on arts funding that is just sufficient to ensure its survival. It is not faction-based and publishes work by poets from a range of aesthetic and ideological backgrounds. Voice & Verse rarely solicits contributions; instead, each issue features around thirty-five local poets, as stipulated by the publisher. The poems published often reflect the everyday life, realities, and shifting moods of the city. Yet the magazine has never sought to impose any particular poetic style or political agenda upon its contributors or readers.
Within any larger literary system—or polysystem—such as the modern Chinese or the broader Sinophone, Voice & Verse remains peripheral. Even within Hong Kong’s own literary landscape, there exist other non-genre-specific literary venues, and many poets remain idiosyncratically reticent about publication.
How to cite: Gallo, Simona and Chris Song. “Hong Kong & Poetry.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 19 May 2025, chajournal.blog/2025/05/19/few-questions.
Simona Gallo is Associate Professor of Chinese Studies at the University of Milan. She specialises in contemporary Chinese and Sinophone literatures, with her literary research closely intertwined with translation and cultural studies. Her publications focus primarily on cultural translation, self-translation, and contemporary Sinophone poetry—areas that now constitute the core of her scholarly interests. She is the co-editor of Mother Tongues and Other Tongues: Creating and Translating Sinophone Poetry (Brill, 2024), and currently leads the EU- and MUR-funded project Re-visualising the ‘West’: Geo-literary Images of Europe in Contemporary Sinophone Writings. [All contributions by Simona Gallo.]
Chris Song is a poet, editor, and translator from Hong Kong, and is an assistant professor teaching Hong Kong literature and culture as well as English and Chinese translation at the University of Toronto. He won the “Extraordinary Mention” of the 2013 Nosside International Poetry Prize in Italy and the Award for Young Artist (Literary Arts) of the 2017 Hong Kong Arts Development Awards. In 2019, he won the 5th Haizi Poetry Award. He is a founding councilor of the Hong Kong Poetry Festival Foundation, executive director of the International Poetry Nights in Hong Kong, and editor-in-chief of Voice & Verse Poetry Magazine. He also serves as an advisor to various literary organisations. [Hong Kong Fiction in Translation.] [Chris Song & ChaJournal.]
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