Hsia Yu lived in New York and France for some time, but 5-6 years ago she moved back to Taipei, where she co-edits Xianzai Shi, or “Poetry Now.” (http://poetrynow2002.blogspot.com/). She edited and co-designed issues #2 and #5.

When Pink Noise was released late last August it sold like hot cakes and climbed to #4 on the bestseller list at the Eslite Bookstore chain, Taiwan’s answer to Borders, before it sold out. It may be awhile though before it starts showing up at used bookstores or goes to a 2nd edition. Hsia Yu has a huge and devoted fan base who avidly collect her books, and she lost a fortune on the first edition. She spent about $18,000 U.S. to print the volume but she’s not much of a business woman, and the deal Eslite made with her to sell the book was so cut-throat she lost money on every copy they sold.

The machine translator Hsia Yu used to make the Chinese version of the 33 poems is actually a search and web program with a translation function that comes with the Apple Macintosh computer she uses.

It’s a pity you can’t read Chinese because, as Hsia Yu points out in an interview in the forthcoming Zoland Poetry, which includes some English back translations of the Chinese versions, half the poetry in Pink Noise are the discrepancies between the two versions–Sherlock didn’t just (mis)translate the English poems Hsia Yu cobbled from the net; he?/it? reinvented the Chinese language.