• About
  • WDSRB #1
  • WDSRB #2
  • WDSRB #3
  • WDSRB #4
  • WDSRB #5
  • WDSRB #6
  • WDSRB #7

Web Del Sol Review of Books

~ since 2004

Web Del Sol Review of Books

Category Archives: In Translation

because God had translated them: A Review of Dimitris Lyacos’ With the people from the bridge

13 Friday May 2016

Posted by wdsrb in In Translation, International Literature, Modern Classics

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

dimitris lyacos, greek poetry, poena damni, poetry in translations, shoestring press, shorsh sullivan, translated poetry

_T121190.jpg

Translated by Shorsha Sullivan

Both postmodern and high modernist poetry have a context of traumatized grand narratives, reflections of human consciousness (both writer and reader) damaged by and aware of their own damages, whatever the source. In the highest sense, both approaches to writing use language to pull everyone involved up short to a face-to-face blinking contest with reality. For the real owns rider and horse, and language obscures this fact by its severing nature—and this explains why postmodern literature is such a difficult medium in most hands. Only a writer who has studied and read the deepest narratives will succeed, reaching for and pulling up out of the muck brief remnants that add much-needed weight to the radical fragmentation that is contemporary life’s relationship to personal and cultural histories, not to mention death and reality. This is the gift of high modern and postmodern art. In his trilogy Poena Damni Dimitris Lyacos proves it’s a gift we’re still (for now) willing to accept:

As long as a match stays alight. As much as you have time
to see in the room that flares and fizzles out. The images holding, briefly, then
fall. Some lines you manage, they are
gone, another match, again. Pieces missing, empty pages, match, again. Comes
across an unknown work and sticks
in your mind. And where are the dwelling places of
the wicked. Ask those who pass beside you. Match, some smudges parts again
like those of the Testament,
then some of his pieces, then mine. The light so brief
that you don’t have time to write, in the dark you can’t
see if the page is blank. You write, a match, words fall-
ing on top of each other, another page, write, again a
match…. (Z213:EXIT)

Delicious, isn’t it?

Lyacos’ Poena Damni is powerful because the work is stitched in all its seams with a very deeply grounded lyrical and inward-looking precision. Most attempts at post (and post-post) modernism end up weak, scattered and afraid of scaffolding for fear of ridicule. In other words, something you only want to read once, with, at the end, a sense of relief that you are still someone special. Relief is overrated.

Begin getting to know Poena Damni as you read by searching references and collective human history and memory. You’ll get triggered for touchstones and allusions and be on your way to complete presence with the text. Soon, instead of knowing until you’re nauseous exactly where you stand (and do not stand) in today’s global economy, for example, you’re good and lost (in the best literary way) on the confusing road to a questionable salvation with each refugee, seeker and lost soul among the torturers, prisoners, survivors, lovers, friends and worshipers who haunt the trains, bridges, villages and churches that inhabit Lyacos’ (and our) world. It’s a real masterwork in that it accomplishes the avant-garde task of throwing the reader in all directions simultaneously. It’s a hearty meal, a marvelous, lively response to madness, to death and to reality, all of which we contain and run from constantly. In a sense, that would be the trilogy in a nutshell if the nut itself were not so remarkably complex.

With the people from the bridge is the second book in the Poena Damni trilogy, and in many ways the most initially difficult of the three books. It’s staged as a drama. NCTV is play’s title. There are four characters: the Narrator (who turns a cassette-player on and off and holds a Bible); a Chorus of women; LG, a man, and a woman named NCTV, presumably the subject of the drama’s title, who sits in the burnt-out shell of a car and also appears on television. The stage is set under the arch of a bridge. The floor is dirt, there are people and dogs sitting around, and the lighting consists of five or six lights, white, blue and green. There’s a fire in an oil drum. One of the men, half-naked to the waist, makes a cross out of two pieces of wood and sticks it into the mud. Thus, Lyacos builds a makeshift setting of a church for the reader.

The Narrator begins the scene by tearing out pages from the Bible and papering a nearby wall. Then he begins reading from Mark 5 (New International Version), a passage of the Bible in which Jesus restores a demon-possessed man. The man, too strong to be kept in chains, is free, possessed and wildly alone:

And always, night
and day in the tombs
and in the mountains he was crying
and cutting himself with stones.
But when he saw Jesus afar
off he ran
and worshipped him,
and cried with a loud voice,
and said ”what have I to do with you, Jesus,
son of the most high God?
I adjure thee by God,
that thou torment me not.
For he said unto him; come out thou
unclean spirit from the
man, and he asked him;
what is thy name? and he answered
saying; my name is legion
for we are many.

And so Lyacos begins the dramatic monologue of LG, a man possessed by demons, and not yet healed, waiting. And what does he hear? Her. And as the books nears its conclusion and LG draws near to being healed:

Narrator with the Bible.

for he saith; in a time accepted
I have heard thee and in the day
of salvation have I succored thee;
behold now is the accepted time
behold now is the day of salvation

Chorus. Burning newspapers. Narrator goes and turns on
the TV.

The TV. And NCTV is on the TV. It’s devastating, really, how accurately Lyacos explains our self-distances. And how beautifully, when it happens, we might be healed:

They were not to be found
because God had translated them

Has anyone else written a long dramatic poem about what goes on between the time a man and his insane legion encounter Jesus and the time they reach Him? Here we appreciate Lyacos’ gifted imagination.

Dimitris Lyacos’ Poena Damni (the loss of the damned) is perplexing, confusing, disturbing and gorgeous. It’s timeless work. There isn’t a screwdriver or latte or economic travesty in sight. It’s so refreshing to read work that dives down into the deep inner life of human consciousness, and at the same time in allegorical slant, maps the outward, subjective mess of ordinary life.

As for the last sentence in With the people from the bridge, we are brought into our current condition in which a man, for reasons we can only guess at, has tried his best to become a God. Which of course, makes him possessed by a demon. ~

Dimitris Lyacos | Translated by Shorsha Sullivan | Available from Shoestring Press

Reviewed by Elizabeth Myhr

Advertisement

Piotr Florczyk’s East & West

06 Friday May 2016

Posted by wdsrb in In Translation, International Literature

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

calypso editions, east & west, lost horse press, monika zoebal, piotr florcyzk, Poetry

EW_Cover72
Piotr Florczyk
Piotr Florczyk

As a widely published translator and writer of essays and poems, Piotr Florczyk, a native of Kraków, Poland, persistently mediates between languages and countries. At the heart of his first full-length collection of poems East & West lies the disparity between a home country that is at once elegized, revisited, and left behind and the new country, in which “questions get answered with questions” and guest bedrooms represent “the emptiness of people / departing each year.” The space that opens up in the midst of these seemingly dissimilar worlds is to our surprise filled with much more than nostalgia for a lost home but inhabited by a forceful and precise lyrical voice of conscience. By not romanticizing the notion of leaving and instead suggesting a view of the Western landscape through the lens of a newcomer, Florczyk only reminds us that when “hoping / to open that door and enter the world,” we might just “find it the same / as the last time we left it once and for all.”

Florczyk aptly introduces readers to the East with the poem “Nineteen Eighty-Nine,” in which a mother welcomes back her dissident and escaped daughter. The poem sets the mood for the rest of the collection by meditating on changes—
in the person who has left as well as in the home that was left behind.
Florczyk writes, “We couldn’t wait to finally sieve, sort, and disembody the impurities in our garb” and cleverly evokes change in the shape of a Maytag washing machine, a symbol of the wealthy West and perhaps of a squeaky-clean new life.

And yet, change is more complex and more profound in the individuals who adjust to new lives. The line “Still, you stayed up late, calculating how far a heart travels from home with each beat” speaks to the idea that homes are perhaps never entirely left behind and that parts are always taken along on the journey.

In the same vein, water—the ocean and rivers—becomes a fierce accomplice, a reminder and a metaphor for leaving and wandering in Florczyk’s collection. In
“Downriver,” the ones that stayed behind become “the rust / racing down the tongue of the slide, / the seesaw weighing the air,” “making baby sounds / with [their] lips / pressed against the fishbowl”; while in the poem “Pastoral,” the speaker, who in a past life “rubbed shoulders with buildings, blue / trams and pigeons,” reminisces on the idea of leaving as an act that resembles “catch-and-releasing” by a brook or a miniscule “breadcrumb,” only to be faced with “silence, something / like a furrow or a dagger” in this version of a pastoral.

In contrast to this, Florczyk invites us to share experiences of returning home that are resonant with feelings of nostalgia, uncertainty, and speechlessness. In the poem “Tetris,” the speaker climbs a staircase in a building he once used to inhabit, which skillfully becomes a metaphor for delving further into one’s memories.

“The air was thick with flies,
the smell of fresh tar sizzling on the roof, where,

years ago, we’d go to spit on people’s heads and tweak
the antennas to catch somebody else’s dreams.

Life was beautiful, I thought, leaving the first floor.
I found my misspelled nickname carved into the wall.”

In the long poem “Kinderszenen,”—the title calls to mind Robert Schumann’s piano piece of the same title—this memory is intimately revisited through a series of places, ranging from Southern California and Cape Cod to Europe, the Tropics, and the speaker’s new and old home. Here too, water plays a significant role, namely that of a border to cross:

“My ship, the one I’ll take home,
is a walnut shell—its figurehead
a boy gasping for breath.”

The metaphor of the boy struggling to stay afloat is continued in the last scene, fittingly titled “Homecoming”:

“someone you love throws their arms
around your sweaty neck,
so that you can let go of the splintering oars
and wear your body like air.”

To “wear your body like air” gracefully recounts the otherwise difficult to describe sensation of returning to a childhood home after many years. The walnut shell boat and the splintering oars suggest the fragility of such a journey, the complications that might arise when we return to our homes.

The desire to look out over the water, to gaze beyond physical borders, and to have the world at our fingertips is not only addressed through the personal narrative of a speaker who has left home to find a different life, but also by means of a perceptive criticism of a society that is constantly on the lookout for new discoveries and ways to conquer the world.

In the longer poem “From the Life of Postage Stamps,” Florczyk employs witty metaphors to hold up a mirror to our antics of taking on the world by planes, by climbing towers, or by using computers, just to name a few. A weightlifter suddenly “has a future in Sudan, / carrying pails of water, / should anything here go awry” and “ghosts hook up inside / the royal chamber” while “the guests are reminded / America wasn’t built in an hour.” Florczyk’s facetious and assertive tone when writing “The planets are next” and “If you agree the future looks bleak, / don’t click here” remind us that our actions have consequences.

Reading Florczyk’s riveting collection, we find ourselves on a journey from the East to the West and vice versa, all the while being accompanied by Florczyk’s hauntingly beautiful lines that speak of the psychology of borders and exploration, as well as the reconciliation of old homes and new homes. In addition to sharing intimate narratives of moving and settling down, East & West presents us with the dilemma of the 21st century, where the “story of the sun / climbing a fire escape in the rain” is no longer worth telling, but instead quick discoveries are to be made since “Hitting the road—the desert / or the sea—has never / been easier, and that’s a fact.” As a translator of several books of Polish poetry, Florczyk pays attention to the smallest details and has perfected bringing down linguistic borders while also preserving cultural peculiarities. In East & West he allows his readers to step over the crumbling remnants of these borders, to gaze out over the landscape to both sides, and to our astonishment realize that there are no places left to hide.

Reviewed by Monika Zobel
980992_10151710454851428_1292328037_o-2

 

 

 

Available from Lost Horse Press

A Review of Ece Temelkuran’s Book of the Edge

22 Monday Jul 2013

Posted by wdsrb in In Translation

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

book of edge, Deniz Perin, Ece Temelkuran, poetry translation, Turkish poetry

eceby Andrew Scoggins

Ece Temelkuran is described first and foremost as a journalist and political commentator on her website. Embroiled at an early age in the midst of a multitude of violent coups and uprisings, Temelkuran has spent most of her life trying to fight corruption and shedding light upon the daily struggles of the common people. She has travelled all over the world. It is within this wide scope of experience that she crafts her poetry collection, Book of the Edge.

The book plays out like a long interconnected narrative that utilizes poetic conventions to tell its tale. Temelkuran’s journalistic training is strongly evident as her images are very concise. There are even instances in which she forgoes verse entirely in favor of prose paragraphs, but that may be the strongest asset to the work as a whole. The story is incredibly compelling.

Because the allegories and metaphors are well-grounded, readers can focus less on exploring esoteric themes and instead lose themselves in this journey of self-discovery. The book contains six sections (divided by the motivations for embarkation, the journey itself, and the return home). The first section, titled “Necessary Things for Any Journey,” acts as the speaker’s introduction: a hand outstretched to the reader. The speaker describes feelings of entrapment: “the crowd suppressed the warm, familiar voices inside of me” and “you would be satisfied / with a tiny empire of playpens and narrow rooms. / You would be at ease. / But you are not at ease”. The reader is drawn into a universal feeling of restlessness. It only subsides when the speaker experiences the unvarnished life of the natural world in the next two sections.

Here, different species of animals are used as conceits which bring to mind the world the speaker has left behind. A butterfly points out the temporality of wealth, a bull is a meditation on responsibility of power, and albatrosses are incredibly touching examples of love and commitment in an era of absolute freedom. Each of the creatures that the speaker finds reflects some quintessential aspect of the the human condition and serves as a liberating counterpoint to the section that follows.

This section, involving the city, is profoundly disturbing as it critiques the vampirism of modern society in a series of four parts called “Plays.” City-dwellers are described as jaguars in “Second Play”, as they lurk through the city streets and hunt outsiders who have not fully conformed to their hollow lifestyle. “First Play” depicts people in the process of conforming, explaining how city-goers keep their eyes lowered to the ground so as to not display their uniqueness. Finally, the speaker leaves the corrupt city and metamorphizes into a sow bug to ruminate on her entire journey, curling herself into a ball. The outside world admires her journey but cannot understand it until the narrator passes along the information in “House of the Edge” on the “…snow white paper”.

Temelkuran seems to describe the experience of crafting one’s own story in the final few poems. This creates a sense of empathy with the reader and so it is fitting that the story begins and ends with two versions of the poem “Offering”. The first builds a sense of connection between the reader and narrator: “O reader! You? You are like this, too. / You may not know it yet: You are just like me.” At the end of the journey the narrator reverses that sentiment: “O reader! Me? I am like this, too. / I may not know it yet: / I am just like you.” Temelkuran’s first “Offering” has the narrator describe herself by saying “I am water. I am afraid of the stones I will strike as I flow.” In the second “Offering” the narrator states: “You are water. You are afraid of — and for — the stones you will strike as you flow.” The narrator acknowledges that the fear she once felt can be overcome. It is a rousing and inspiring send-off because the reader now knows that such a feat is possible. This sense of empowerment is what makes Book of the Edge such a captivating read.

Translator Deniz Perin perfectly captures the essence of Temelkuran’s journalistic training. The images are concise and the language straightforward. Perin states in the introduction that she had problems translating the Turkish concept of the universal pronoun for men, women, and objects, and Temelkuran wanted the narrator to be as genderless as possible. Luckily, the narrator is only referred to in the third person once, and Perin gives her a feminine pronoun as a “universal she,” which works quite well for the book as a whole.

Japanese Poetry Today: Masashi Musha Interviews Judy Halebsky

21 Sunday Jul 2013

Posted by wdsrb in In Translation

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

japanese poetry, judy halebsky, translation

judy-halebskyJudy Halebsky’s book of poems Sky=Empty (New Issues, 2010) was chosen by Marvin Bell as the winner of the New Issues Prize, a first book award, and was also a finalist for the California Book Award. With a collective of Tokyo poets, Halebsky edits and translates the bilingual poetry journal Eki Mae. She lives in Ocean Beach, at San Francisco’s outer edges, and teaches at Dominican University of California.

Masashi Musha: Who do you consider to be some of the best contemporary Japanese poets currently living today?

Judy Halebsky: The biggest struggle for an English-speaking readership is the tiny portion of new writing that makes it into translation. Yuka Tsukagoshi, whose work I greatly admire and translate, is doing exciting work influenced by multiple strands of modern and contemporary poetry, including surrealism. Jeffery Angles has done excellent translations of poetry by Takako Arai and Hiromi Ito. Sawako Nakayasu and Eric Selland are compiling an anthology of modern Japanese poetry in translation. Poet Alan Botsford does a wonderful job as the editor of the bilingual poetry journal, Poetry Kanto. These are just a few places to get started with contemporary Japanese poetry.

MM: You’re originally from Canada and lived in Japan for five years. What brought you to Japan? Can you give us an overview of the poetry that you studied in Tokyo?

JH: I moved to California for graduate school and was reading Jane Hirshfield and Robert Hass. I wanted to learn more of the poetry forms and aesthetics that shape their work. Jane Hirshfield’s Ink Dark Moon offers translations of court poetry or “waka.” These are short poems with syllable count phrases of 5-7-5-7-7 and are generally about refined subject matter. Many of the poems are about the longing of waiting for a lover to visit.

Renga or linked verse extended the waka form into a collaborative poetry activity. Poets would take turns writing the 5-7-5 or 7-7 links. The poem could go on for hundreds of verses. The first verse is called the “hokku” and is composed in 5-7-5 meter. This hokku developed into a poetry form on its own, and is now called haiku. Early haiku poked fun at the court class and court poetry by using vernacular language and common images. Basho elevated haiku and brought a poetic sophistication to the form while maintaining the colloquial language and everyday images. Hass’s translated volume, The Essential Haiku, contains haiku by Basho, Buson, and Issa. These translations inspired me to study Japanese literature.

Of course, once I was living in Tokyo, I became involved in contemporary poetry as well. I attended a reading series where poets would read their entire poetry book in one night. I also went to haiku events and participated in a group gallery show where we composed a ren-shi (free verse version of renga) together. I met Tokyo poets and we started a bilingual journal called Eki Mae (e.g. In Front of the Station).

MM: You also translate Japanese poetry. How do you choose which poets or poems to translate?

JH: I’m drawn to translation because I want to access the poems. I translate the work of two contemporary poets, Yuka and Akutsu Ayumi. I also translate some haiku within my own writing. Mostly, I have come to translation through some connection to the poems in Japanese that I can’t find in English either because the poems are not translated or because my experience of the poem in Japanese is different from existing translations.

MM: Is there a certain challenge to translating Japanese poetry that may not exist in translating texts in other languages?

JH: Translation is always hard. There’s the written language and the cultural knowledge that shapes how we assign meaning to words. What is assumed knowledge for some audiences is different for other audiences. In terms of the challenges of translating from Japanese as compared to other languages, I do think there are different distances among languages. The distance between two languages lessens if they share some linguistic commonality (such as Latin or Germanic roots) or aspects of a shared cultural knowledge (such as a Judeo-Christian heritage). I struggle not only with understanding the poem in Japanese but in re-creating it in English within its own frame. For example, a repeated image in Yuka’s work is a rice field and, in particular, reflections on the water in a rice field. When I write ‘rice field’ does the reader in North America get an image of a field with standing water that on a bright day can reflect the sky? I don’t know. It wasn’t an immediate image for me.

MM: Do you ever collaborate with others?

JH: Yuka and I work together in a collaborative process. We bring different points of view and have spent hours at a diner called “Jonathan’s” (with a free drink bar), going over a thousand possibilities in a translation. It’s also a process of trust, almost like spinning while holding hands. We both need to lean out and give weight to create the new poem without falling.

MM: What’s your process of translation like?

JH: For translating Yuka’s poems, I start with reading the poems and seeing what poems might work well in translation. While I work closely with Yuka, I start by reading the poem on my own and developing my own relationship with it. I’ll then make a gloss of the poem by translating phrases and parts of lines literally. I use various dictionaries to come up with the gloss. Then, I’ll start to write lines of the translation from a sensory understanding of the poem.

One of the struggles in translating from Japanese is trying to preserve the order of the lines and phrases. To re-create the order of the source poem risks the English translation having a disrupted grammatical flow. I weight this with the importance of sequence and the location of images within the poem.

After I have a working draft of the translation, I’ll share it with Yuka and we’ll begin a long collaborative process of going back and forth about lines break, word choice, and punctuation. She usually favors a more literal translation than I do. I often stress creating the effect of the original poem in English over preserving specific literal meaning.

MM: Has translating the works of other poets affected how you write your own poetry?

JH: Poetry writing and learning a language are entwined in my work. There’s the continual making of meaning, the disruption of meaning, and the searching for failed equivalencies. For my translation of haiku, my process is generative and often results in multiple possible translations of a particular haiku embedded in a larger poem. There’s a point in translation where I’ve internalized the poem that I am trying to translate. From there, I can write a translation into the form of the source poem. Sometimes, I want to write that poem into a new shape and that’s what I can do in my own work. Most often, I do this with Basho’s haiku. My poem, “A Breaking Word,” translates Basho’s frog pond haiku. I quote from three different translations of the haiku (by Robert Hass, Alan Watts, and Allen Ginsberg). Lines in the poem describe some of the ways that it is difficult to translate the haiku. So, in a way, my newly generated poem opens up Basho’s haiku and reveals some of the intricacies of translation for an English-speaking readership.

Contemporary Poetry in Spanish: Jennifer Minniti-Shippey Interviews G.A. Chaves and translates his poems

21 Sunday Jul 2013

Posted by wdsrb in In Translation

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

G.A. Chaves, poetry translation, spanish poetry

chavesG.A. Chaves, born in Costa Rica in 1979, is the author of short stories Cuentos etcétera (2004) and poetry collection Vida ajena (2010). Chaves has translated an anthology of poems by Robinson Jeffers and edited the selected poetry of Costa Rica’s Carlos de la Ossa. Jennifer Minniti-Shippey was excited to interview him about contemporary Spanish-language poetry, his work as a translator, and everything in between.

 

Jennifer Minniti-Shippey: In your opinion, who are the most interesting poets writing in Spanish today? What sets them apart and makes them must-read poets?

G.A. Chaves: Among the ones I know best, I think that Fabio Morábito (Mexico) and Rafael Courtoisie (Uruguay) are both major poets with very distinctive voices. Morábito has a reportage kind of immediacy to his language, whereas Courtoisie is a ceaselessly experimental virtuoso.

I recently discovered the poetry of another Mexican, Luis Felipe Fabre. His poems seem to be capable of making old tricks (like rhyme) useful and fun again.

In Spain, I like the variety of Juan Carlos Mestre’s work. He’s densely personal, yet not confessional, and strongly social, though not quite political. He seems to me a modern-day John Donne: everything he sees becomes poetry.

Javier Payeras (Guatemala) is an incredibly inventive poet with an amazing eye for dramatic details.

There are two Costa Rican poets who I think we will keep reading for many years: Silvia Piranesi (a tropical Samuel Beckett, with a vengeance) and Klaus Steinmetz (a poet who understands that intelligence is not the negation of intense feeling). When I read Steinmetz and Piranesi I have to conclude that, yes, there are still things that can only be said through poetry, and that the medium of verse is not only valid but also very necessary. There are two other Costa Rican poets that make me feel that the place I inhabit is worth writing about: Luis Chaves (no relation) and Alfredo Trejos. Their poems are as familiar to me as the city I live in.

JMS: What European poets are best known or loved by their Spanish language counterparts? And what American poets?

GC: I feel like all I can do here is name-dropping. While all the major names (Ginsberg, Ashbery, Celan, Szymborska, Enzensberger, Pavese, Bonnefoy, Transtromer) are well-known, I think people look for stuff everywhere and their writing is proof of that. I think that not many people know Don Paterson and Jürgen Becker, which is a shame. But maybe I’m just hanging out in the wrong neighborhood.

JMS: Translators who work with Romance languages often wrestle with capturing the musicality of those languages in English, with its more limited range of rhyme.  When you translate poems from English to Spanish, what is your process?  Which poets have been “easiest” to translate into Spanish?  And which have been difficult?

GC: I think this is a mistake. We all despair too quickly when our target languages can’t quite reproduce the fixtures of the original and end up thinking that our native languages are somewhat inept. The reason why Spanish, for example, gives the impression of being rhyme-rich is because it is completely regular in its five vowel sounds. An “o” will always rhyme with an “o.” That’s why “rezo” and “mozo” can pass as rhymes. But I think every writer with a good sense of prosody will tell you that this is a limitation. English is so maddeningly irregular that it could rhyme the Spanish “rezo” with the English “wrestle.” More than a limitation, I think that’s a blessing.

So far, Stanley Crawford’s novel Log of the SS. The Mrs. Unguentine is the hardest translation I’ve done. It’s only a hundred pages long, but it took two translators to do it. I was functioning mostly as a consultant to Andrea Mickus, the other translator on the project, but it was a very demanding and exhausting job all the same.

JMS: How does working as a translator influence your own poetry? What can young poets learn by translating the work of other writers?

GC: I started translating out of sheer necessity to learn how to write. You often hear from writers this old piece of advice about re-typing the great works of the masters to let that energy enter your system. Well, I don’t much care for energy, but I have learned technique from doing this. You have this powerful Robinson Jeffers lyric in front of you, and then you have this flabby little joke of a story in Spanish, and you wonder, how are the two related? Little by little, you learn to pay closer attention to the original’s technique and you get to use that in your own writing. Ultimately, translation teaches one how to read and that’s essential to good writing as well.

***

Five Poems by G.A. Chaves

Desayuno, by Juan Gris (MoMA, 2008) for Julio Acuña, in memoriam

Terracotta is the color of origin;
 and grey, the color of Juan. 
We are what we eat: 
earth, letters, wings, and ash.

(Winter’s colors 
should be primaries:
 in the beginning were water and ashes.)

We are always a beginning, Julio:
 we’re a table set with the tools,
 smoking, peaceful,
 that give way to another dawn.

*

Chaves, Portugal

Life that breaks me against its hard angles, 
(life, eroded, without the faith of my dead), 
life, intermittent, with uncertain steps,

the life of my poems, the life of silence…
the evident life—as Melcion Mateu said—
seems a little strange and distant in this fire

that sometimes I call sky and others cielo and now céu.

*

Foncebadón, Camino de Santiago

When we’ve lost the fear
 of not hearing more than our own pulse,

and only the dust of our steps 
remains between the stumps of dry grass,

the stone fences grow weak, unreal,
 and the hermitage fills with overwhelmed flies.

(This silence seems poor 
but took centuries ripening).

*

Idaho, 1997
for Olga Ruiz

Olguita sent me a petal in her letter and asked me to check if there are flowers where I live or if the sky is like the one over her house but here I only see snow and the night sky is the same with its stars and its blackness is broader than ever sometimes I lose sight of the moon but I don’t get sad because her petal doesn’t fade and I reread the letter where Olguita wrote life looks so beautiful at our age while I wait to leave this house and return to my own and see the whole flower planted below the narrow sky and the lovely Olguita imagining everything and writing me letters.

*

Catullus XCVI for Carlos de la Ossa

Because some joy must come with this 
interior, artificial winter,
 where we keep lovers and friends
 who with time we’ve lost, 
let’s not mourn the time spent
 while in our skin their memory remains.

Let’s leave with our souls,
 if it’s the soul that survives, 
if so much strength and cold 
hasn’t changed it into an animal. 
Be happy in your bones, Carlos;
 use them up until the world cannot weigh them down.

Translated from the Spanish by Jennifer Minniti-Shippey

Chinese Poetry Today: Masashi Musha Interviews Ming Di

18 Thursday Jul 2013

Posted by wdsrb in In Translation

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Boston University, Chinese poetry, Poetry, poetry east west, poetry translation, Tupelo Press

Ming-DiMing Di (pen name for Mindy Zhang) is a Chinese poet and translator. Born and raised in China, she moved to the US to pursue a graduate degree at Boston University before moving to California. She writes in Chinese and publishes in China and Taiwan. She is the author of six collections in Chinese: D Minor Etudes (poetry), Berlin Story (photo-poems), Days Floating on Footage (poems and essays on movies), Chords Breaking (poetry), Art of Splitting (poetry), and Selected Poems of Ming Di.  She has completed four volumes of translation from English to Chinese, including: The Writer as Migrant (2010), Missed Time (2011), and The Book of Things (to be published), and two more in progress. The Book of Cranes, which she co-translated from Chinese into English, will be published by Tupelo Press (USA). She is co-founder and editor of Poetry East West, a Chinese-English bilingual literary magazine published in Los Angeles and Beijing.

Masashi Musha:  What is the most challenging aspect of translating poetry?

Ming Di: The hardest part of translation is to go inside the mind of the poet and find out what he did NOT intend to say. I like to present ambiguities and multiple readings but I also try to avoid misrepresentation. For instance, if the poet hated rhythm and musicality in poetry, making the translation musical would be misleading. Usually one can get it right linguistically in the first few drafts but it takes more time to get the tone right. There are always several choices to translate a line, I would try to bring out the implied, the suggested, the hidden meaning and show the intention, the emotion, the mood. What drives the poem forward (the motif and echoes, the rhythm and variations, the passion or reasoning, the word play, the visual shifting, etc. . . ) should be reflected in the translation.

MM: Do you prefer translating poems from English to Chinese or vice versa?

MD: Definitely from English to Chinese. I write mostly in Chinese…  I didn’t translate poetry into English until I met some of the most interesting poets in China at poetry conferences eight years ago and got to know them better in recent years.  I find their work fascinating but they are hardly known outside China. In the past three decades, only the “Obscure” or “Misty” poets and a small number of Post-Misty poets from China have been translated into English, but the newer generation is very different. The new poetry in China speaks more to me. So I started translating Chinese poems and collaborated with American poet Afaa Weaver, but we progressed very slowly. I was highly motivated but there was no such need, until I met some poets from other countries at Struga Poetry Festival in Macedonia— their interest in contemporary Chinese poetry encouraged me greatly. At the present time I translate both ways.

MM: Can you describe to us your own process of translation?

MD: I try to find out what the poet intends to say at a deeper and more sophisticated level. I imagine where and when the poem was composed, what went through the poet’s mind, who he wanted to speak to, and how he or she was speaking. I put myself into that situation and start working… Revision is important. Reading beyond the poems is also important. I look for reference materials such as interviews and reviews (or biographies) to get to know more about the poets. With the Young Poets Series, I write from personal interaction and observation— each set of poems is accompanied by some write ups, so readers in China would understand them more.

MM: Do you like collaborating with others in the process?

MD: From Chinese to English, yes, absolutely. From English to Chinese, no.  When translating from Chinese into English, I enjoy working with English-speaking poets and explaining the aesthetics and driving force behind the Chinese poems, and they are able to help make my draft into more colloquial English. Communicating is important in the process. I’ve worked with Neil Aitken on more than 100 poems and this is how we revise a poem: I talk and talk and talk, meaning I speak out the line in different ways, until he says “That’s better.”  Then he reads and I listen.  He reads different versions until I say “That’s it.”  There are many ways to render a line, the subtleties of Chinese language and cultural reference embodied in poetry can be explored endlessly.

When translating into Chinese, I like to collaborate with the authors. For instance, I’ve asked Jan Wagner, Nikola Madzirov and Sonata Paliulyte to provide literal translation from their languages (German, Macedonian, Lithuanian, respectively) into English word by word, line by line, and explain to me the morphological and syntactical features.  I don’t just rely on the English translation, which can be paraphrase.  I try to see how they built their poems in their native tongues.

MM: And how do you choose which poets or poems to translate?

MD: The good ones. The unknown good ones. The not-yet-translated good ones.

I used to translate big names, but in recent years I enjoy being the first Chinese translator of young poets such as Marko Pogačar, Valzhyna Mort, Nikola Madzirov, Jan Wagner, Sonata Paliulyte, Ivan Herceg, Tomica Bajsic, Damir Šodan, Ramsey Nasr, etc… about 40 of them. Some I met, some were recommended to me by other poets, some I found in magazines. I don’t care about “fame”, I choose interesting poetry of diverse styles. When I first translated Jan Wagner and Aleš Šteger, I didn’t know they were well known in their countries and in Europe.

As to translating Chinese poets into English, I choose currently active poets who are producing real, interesting stuff, different from what’s been introduced elsewhere. Some of them have been translated before but I try to bring out their unusual quality, such as Jiang Hao, Jiang Tao, Hu Hudong, Lü Yue, Lü De’an, Li Li.… Some of them have not been translated ever, such as Lin Zi, Pan Xichen, Jiang Li, Qiu Qixian.… Of course there are other good poets, such as Xiao Kaiyu, Xi Chuan, Han Bo, Xi Yabing, Sun Lei, Lan Lan, Zheng Xiaoqiong, but other translators have been working on them.

Which poems to translate? The decision may take extensive reading. For instance, before I started compiling and translating the Book of Cranes, I read the author’s seven published books and two unpublished books.  I chose the ones from different time periods to show the evolving stages of the poetic development. With Missed Time that was published in Taiwan last year, I selected eighty poems from the author’s three poetry books. The selection was based on how well the poems represent the author’s overall aesthetics. I also worked with the authors during the selection and translation process.  If I translate an entire book, then there is no question of selection, just the entire book. But for the majority of poets that I only translated a few poems of, the criterion is which poems would sound interesting and fresh in the target language. I like unusual imagery and expressions.

MM: There have been many political movements in modern China, such as the Cultural Revolution and others. Have any of these events affected your writing in any way?

MD: The Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) affected my growing up and coming of age. The 1989 incident influenced my writing tremendously. Other movements affected me indirectly such as the “anti-rightist” movement (1957-1958) as my mother and my sister were deeply traumatized by it. The war and 1949 were brought up by my grandma constantly as she couldn’t get it over. I had a collection of my grandfather’s old photos that spoke to me like nightmare— I only met him by his grave. My sister didn’t speak Chinese when she was brought back to China at age five, but she joined the Red Guard against my father who she saw as an enemy… Political tragedies impacted me from very early on, but how to turn emotion into power in poetry is hard— I didn’t have the strength to do so until I reached middle age— I grew very slowly and matured very late in writing. I don’t like my early writing and I don’t like other Chinese poets’ early writing either— emotional outburst is good only when it’s combined with craftsmanship. In recent years I’ve tried to look beyond the political events and look more into myself and into ancient history and mythologies— modern history is too distant for me to grasp the true meaning and too close to get the true essence either.  China is only one spot on the world map. 1989 is only one year in the human calendar, even though it’s the most tragic year in our upbringing. There is so much more to write about, endless. But yes, deep inside me I have been drawn back to 1989 again and again. But I try to resist it. There is something larger than history.  I resist the term “1989 Generation” even though everyone writing today in China belongs to it: some were already mature poets in 1989 but still affected by it (such as the Misty poets in China), some were college or graduate students in 1989 (such as me), some were born in 1989 without knowing much of it (such as the youngest poets in China today).  I resist the convenient term because poetry is beyond any boundaries, names, schools, labels, especially politically related terms. The more political we are, the more complicated our poetry should be— political background brings another dimension to poetry, it gives an underlying power, an enigma, a bridge to something else, it is anything but limiting. If you ask, that’s how political movements in China “affected” my writing— it made me see the weakness in my writing and it made me want to write something more meaningful. In fact, I resent political poetry unless it’s transparent to other issues in human life.

MM: Has the translation process affected how you write your own poetry?

MD: Not really, but maybe subconsciously. When I first started, I translated Emily Dickinson, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Moore, Bishop, Ruth Stone, etc., etc. They influenced me as a poet in a way but not directly in my writing. I resist influence from women writers, no matter how great they are. There is a masculine force in my feminine blood that wants to give voice. I think I have been more influenced by Thomas Hardy and D. H. Lawrence, the sensitivity and vulnerability inside them influenced me as much as that in T.S. Eliot and W.H. Auden. It’s the subtle female power inside male writers that attracts me and influences me.  Chinese poet and critic Zang Di says: “It’s the woman inside a man who reads poetry, and it’s another woman inside a woman who reads poetry.”  I agree and disagree. I would say today that it’s the man inside me who writes poetry, it’s the other woman inside me who reads poetry (although I said something different in another interview).  When it comes to translation, it’s the woman inside me who reads the original poem and it’s the man inside me who translates it— both forces are at work in translation, they work together in harmony, but they resist each other underneath— the writing tries to resist the influence from the reading. That is to say, if I present my own voice in my translation, then the translation process doesn’t influence my writing. But I hide my personal voice in translation, I try to imitate the author’s voice— male or female.  So the translation process does influence my writing. However, poetry writing is not as simple as black or white, male or female. Voices of poetry are as rich and complicated as a full spectrum of colors, full wavelengths of lights, translators navigate in the sea, face the waves and cross them. Translation broadens the view, the vision, the horizon— that’s how it affects my own poetry writing.

MM: Can you tell us about your bilingual literary magazine, Poetry East West, and what kind of poems you publish?

MD: Poetry East West is a small independent magazine with a focus on cross-translation of poetry from other languages into Chinese and from Chinese into English (and into other languages whenever possible).  All editors are poets and translators fully engaged in poetry: Zang Di teaches poetry at Beijing University and has translated Rilke and several contemporary poets; Mai Mang (Huang Yibing) has translated Duo Duo’s poems into English and nominated him for the 2010 Neustadt International Prize for Literature; Yang Xiaobin has translated Tomaž Šalamun and John Ashbery; Neil Aitken has translated many Chinese poets into English; Wang Ao has translated Wallace Stevens and Hart Crane, etc.  There are also excellent Chinese poet-translators from different parts of the world contributing regularly, such as Fan Jinghua from Singapore who has translated about twenty poets including Derek Walcott, Adam Zagajewski W. S. Merwin and Paul Muldoon; Chen Li from Taiwan who has translated many poets including Wislawa Szymborska; Yang Lian from London who has translated contemporary British poets; Meng Ming from Paris who has translated French poets from French and Paul Celan from German; and Li Li who has translated Tomas Tranströmer from Swedish. Some wonderful poets from other countries are translating Chinese poetry into their languages such as Rupprecht Mayer (Germany), Rati Saxena and Sudeep Sen (India), Maryam Ala-Amjadi (Iran), Francois Roy (Mexico), Boel Schenlaer (Sweden), Tozan Alkan (Turkey), Anna Lombardo and Annelisa Addolorato (Italy), Damir Šodan and Miroslav Kirin (Croatia), etc.

What do we publish? Everything related to poetry: poems, critical reviews, interviews, essays, and poetry talk (a revived genre from classical Chinese literature) from well known and unknown poets around the world. What kind of poems? Anything interesting. The special feature of PEW is our “each-other-ness”: Poets translating each other, poets critiquing each other, etc.  This each-other-ness can be achieved in many different ways, the purpose is to promote cross-understanding and expand poetic dialogues.  “Each-other” in Chinese context is very broad, not excluding at all. We publish (or will publish) many other poets from all over China, from the most unknown (but good) ones to the most celebrated ones thanks to the wonderful translation by sinologists such as Jonathan Stalling, Christopher Lupke, Lucas Klein, Denis Mair, and Nick Admussen, to name just a few, and through the translation of PEW editors. Poetry East West is published in Los Angels and Beijing twice a year, a paper magazine with a simple webpage:  http://poetryeastwest.com/. We are growing slowly— join us, and grow with us. And be patient with us as we are seriously behind the schedule due to working on an anthology…

MM: Thank you Mindy!

MD: Thank you Masashi for your interest and for your efforts in bringing more voices out to the poetry community.

Social

  • View www.facebook.com/wdsrb/’s profile on Facebook

Authors & Contributors

980992_10151710454851428_1292328037_o-2
_T121190
portraits (2 of 3)
Piotr Florczyk
Piotr Florczyk
harold_jaffe-revolutionary_brain-21892
fischerova_sylva
halebsky
chaves
eli
mdi225
teutch

Social

  • View www.facebook.com/wdsrb/’s profile on Facebook

Blog at WordPress.com.

Privacy & Cookies: This site uses cookies. By continuing to use this website, you agree to their use.
To find out more, including how to control cookies, see here: Cookie Policy
  • Follow Following
    • Web Del Sol Review of Books
    • Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
    • Web Del Sol Review of Books
    • Customize
    • Follow Following
    • Sign up
    • Log in
    • Report this content
    • View site in Reader
    • Manage subscriptions
    • Collapse this bar
 

Loading Comments...