Stephen Boyanton PhD

Writer, Translator, Historian

Welcome to my Site!

Taiwan Headshot croppedWelcome to my website. I am a writer, translator, and scholar. Browse around to find out more about the different types of work I do–writing, translation, and historical and literary research. You can download my CV here, check out some samples of my work below and on the blog posts page, and visit my other blog, tenthousandli.me, to read more of my writing on travel, art, and life. If you have any questions, please contact me at s.boyanton@yahoo.com.

January 6th: Business as Usual in the U.S. Capitol

January 28, 2021

I wrote this essay in the immediate aftermath of the January 6th assault on the U.S. Capitol but was uncertain whether I should share it. Today, however, three weeks since that assault, it is all too clear that the public’s attention is already moving on. We are drifting into national forgetfulness, as we have done … More January 6th: Business as Usual in the U.S. Capitol

“America Used to be America (for Me)”: A Poem

November 5, 2018

I suppose this is my personal homage to Langston Hughes’s great poem, “Let America be America Again,” about which I’ve written on my other blog. Perhaps it’s also my personal update to that poem, my own “creative misprision”–to borrow Harold Bloom’s term–through which I’m trying to say where I think we are and where I … More “America Used to be America (for Me)”: A Poem

Breaking the “Great Taboo”: A Translation of Li Bai’s 李白 “Drinking Alone Beneath the Moon 月下獨酌”

October 19, 2018

There is a tradition among English-language translators of Chinese poetry to translate all Chinese poems as unrhymed free-verse. This tradition goes back at least as far as Ezra Pound, whose “translations” bear little resemblance to their originals, and is very much alive and kicking–so much so that I am borrowing Nathan Sivin’s term, “The Great … More Breaking the “Great Taboo”: A Translation of Li Bai’s 李白 “Drinking Alone Beneath the Moon 月下獨酌”

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