“An exile writer who fled the massacre of Tiananmen Square to begin a new literary life in American universities, Huang has a unique perspective on what he calls the ‘transpacific crossover’ between China and Anglo-America, particularly between our poetries, poetics, and translations. The Chinese Whispers of Huang’s title are those ‘inscrutable moments’ when poetry determines—and is determined by—political, national, and linguistic difference, dispelling all notions of universal intelligibility and global translatability. Indeed, Huang’s study details the ways our two literary cultures have in fact understood (and misunderstood) one another, using as test cases the works of I. A. Richards, Ernest Fenollosa, Lin Yutang, and Ezra Pound. Huang has produced a superb study that is theoretically sophisticated and yet also highly personal, witty, and deeply moving.”

Marjorie Perloff, author of 'Infrathin'

“Huang’s poetics and scholarship, relentless and original at their entangled core, have helped over these past decades to provide an expanded comparative vision of the American transpacific in its transnational, transcultural, off-center, writerly, and transcendental elements. Chinese Whispers continues this uncanny world-making project. Once again, we encounter timely transnational concerns with displacement, textual migrancy, cross-cultural translation, and stylistic experimentation, but here deployed in a quasi-surrealistic pattern of juxtaposition that gives Chinese Whispers imaginative force, eloquent engagement, professional edge, and staying power.”

Rob Sean Wilson, University of California, Santa Cruz