Wendy Pond has been translating Tongan poetry for twenty years, working with Tupou Posesi Fanua and other poets in Tonga and in New Zealand, where there is a large resident Tongan population. She has been a guest editor of Tonga’s literary magazine, Faikava. An independent scholar, she is currently attached to the Stout Research Centre at Victoria University of Wellington, discerning systematic principles of Maori and Austronesian classifi cation of the insect fauna.