Ah, Catullus. Of course the woman who doesn't love you back must be unworthy, and the man she prefers to you must use his own biowaste as mouthwash. WAh, Catullus. Of course the woman who doesn't love you back must be unworthy, and the man she prefers to you must use his own biowaste as mouthwash. What other explanation could there possibly be?...more
Poems featured in this picture book include "Con Vỏi, Con Voi" (Elephant, Elephant), "K� Nhông" (Iguana), "Bống Bang" (The Girl Named Bong), "Thằng B�Poems featured in this picture book include "Con Vỏi, Con Voi" (Elephant, Elephant), "K� Nhông" (Iguana), "Bống Bang" (The Girl Named Bong), "Thằng Bờm" (The Boy Named Bom), "Bà Còng Đi Ch�" (The Hunchbacked Woman Goes to Market), and others. Quite a few of these nursery rhymes are of that common sort that seem more nonsensical than not but are fun to say, while a handful are little narratives modeling wise or good behavior for young people ("Bống Bang," "Bà Còng Đi Ch�"). The poems are splashed upon vibrantly colorful illustrations that were produced by a variety of Vietnamese artists but are nonetheless fairly uniform/unified in style. The English translations communicate the sense of the originals but, instead of being word-for-word cribs, deviate enough from their sources so that they, too, rhyme (although no regular meter is attempted). Interestingly, the book's bilingual format (the English translations and Vietnamese originals are presented on facing pages) serves to drive home how infinitely more condensed and compact the Vietnamese-language versions are, often using just a couple words to say what the English translations take several lines to convey.
ETA: Only recently did I stumble on the paradigm-shifting revelation that some of these rhymes have tunes associated with them: for example, sung versions of "Kéo Cưa Lừa X�" and "Chi Chi Chành Chành" can be heard at ...more
I hadn't read any Neruda for years until a poet friend recommended me this book, saying it put her in a generative frame of mind, much like a collectiI hadn't read any Neruda for years until a poet friend recommended me this book, saying it put her in a generative frame of mind, much like a collection of writing prompts. It took me a few tries to get into it: I guess I typically like for a poetic work to have more structure, maybe more of a well-defined arc, maybe just more formal variety, whereas this book consists of hundreds of mostly stand-alone-ish two-line stanzas loosely grouped into numbered/untitled clusters of three to six. What this compendium lacks in narrative cohesiveness or formal diversity/experimentation, it makes up for with sheer force of imagination, though. And it's edifying to study the varied conceptual and rhetorical strategies Neruda employs to make all his questions different from one another and keep them all relatively interesting. Personification of machines and elements of nature is one strategy he uses repeatedly: with the exception of a few questions wondering how Nixon and Hitler are being treated in the afterlife, I could see almost any of his questions fitting nicely into the context of, say, a picture book designed to nurture a young child's tendencies toward playful, outside-the-box thinking.
My favorite stanzas (all, incidentally, found near the end of the book) were:
Did autumn's hairdressers uncomb these chrysanthemums?
...
And why did the tricolored whale cut me off on the road?
...
Wouldn't it be best to outlaw interplanetary kisses?
Why not analyze these things before outfitting other planets?
...
Which is the true picture of how the future will turn out?
Is it the grain seed among its yellow masses?
Or is it the bony heart, that delegate of the peach?
I love the deliberate strangeness, paradoxical yet still clearly visualizable, of the phrase "bony heart" (el corazón huesudo) and the surprising-yet-fitting diction of the word choice "delegate" (el delegado del durazno) -- how it complicates the texture of the language so deliciously. Perhaps the latter was Neruda letting his political background seep into his poetry, to stunning effect. I relish seeing hybrid vocabularies bring renewed vigor to poetry like this....more
"Weapons are not auspicious tools some things are simply bad thus the Taoist shuns them.... he wields them when he has no choice dispassion is the best thu"Weapons are not auspicious tools some things are simply bad thus the Taoist shuns them.... he wields them when he has no choice dispassion is the best thus he doesn't praise them those who praise their use enjoy killing others.... which means... when the battle is won treat it as a wake" (from Taoteching: 31)
Bill Porter (A.K.A. "Red Pine")'s is a translation at once scrupulously scholarly, assiduously researched, and highly readable, clarified and enhanced by the inclusion of commentaries from multiple historical Chinese sources on each of the verses (including, interestingly, a solitary woman commentator, the Sung-Dynasty-era Taoist nun Ts'ao Tao-Ch'ung).
I came to this book relatively late in life -- all those years, I had somehow not been aware that the proverb "A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step" derives from this text! Personally, however, the metaphor in these pages that I found to be most revelatory was the rivers-and-sea metaphor in section 66: "The reason the sea can govern a hundred rivers / is because it has mastered being lower." That is, the sea receives the bounty of all the rivers in the world not by taking any willful action but simply by sitting at a lower altitude and then waiting for gravity to do its thing. Talk about an epiphany!
I was also struck by the crisp logic and lucidity of this metaphor in section 11:
"pots are fashioned from clay but it's the hollow that makes a pot work... existence makes a thing useful but nonexistence makes it work"
ETA: Here is a poem I ended up writing that was jump-started by this passage: ...more
This is a bilingual book, with the original Spanish poems and Randall Couch's English translations presented on facing pages. The poems are mostly sorThis is a bilingual book, with the original Spanish poems and Randall Couch's English translations presented on facing pages. The poems are mostly sort of persona poems, written in the voices of women in various kinds of extreme circumstances. Some of these women have names and identities drawn from Greek mythology (e.g., Antigone, Electra, Clytemnestra, and Cassandra), but most of the women are nameless inventions of Mistral, each defined solely by her most extreme attribute, with titles like "La abandonada" (The Abandoned Woman), "La ansiosa" (The Anxious Woman), "La desvelada" (The Sleepless Woman), "La dichosa" (The Happy Woman), etc. Each poem is 1-4 pages long, written in image-dense short lines, rich with shapes and substances and colors: red is, by far, the most prevalent color, and fire imagery abounds everywhere.
My two favorite poems were "La fervorosa" (The Fervent Woman) and "La que camina" (She Who Walks), which seemed to me to be allegories describing what it means to be a woman artist, to devote one's life to the artistic calling:
"In every place, with my arm and my breath, I have kindled the old fire....
"and when it was dying into cinders I learned to stoke it with my own body....
"I brought the flame from the other shore where I came from and where I return. There no one stirs it, yet it grows and soars like a scarlet albatross. I must return to my foundry and there in its lap lay down the sacred loan."
(from "The Fervent Woman")
"She always walks that same sand until the others have gone to sleep; and even though she drops in her tracks she dreams and walks that same sand....
"she lives on it and dies of the same...."
(from "She who Walks")
The poem "La bailarina" (The Ballerina) reminded me of one of my favorite Yeats poems, "Sweet Dancer," also about a doomed "madwoman" who threw herself into "the dance of losing everything." And "La cabelluda" (The Shaggy Woman) hauntingly reminded me of Plath, even presaging the image of the "red comet" that appears in Plath's "Stings":
"In a casket of glass we put her red comet [su rojo cometa]....
"When we at last lie down on her left side or her right, it may be to burn always, to glow like an open grate, and be kept by her from cold even though our planet dies."
I thought it was interesting to see Couch expound on what he views as resonances between Mistral and Yeats in his introduction: "Mistral's search for elemental diction did not lead her...to depart from traditional meter and rhyme. In this too her practice paralleled that of Yeats[, who wrote,] 'All that is personal soon rots; it must be packed in ice or salt.... Ancient salt is the best packing.'"...more
I read this in anticipation of possibly seeing the well-reviewed new Dev Patel movie at some point. I seem to be having good luck with translations ofI read this in anticipation of possibly seeing the well-reviewed new Dev Patel movie at some point. I seem to be having good luck with translations of verse narratives recently, as I enjoyed this book quite as much as I enjoyed the Headley Beowulf translation I read last fall. The fast pacing and vigorous language never left me bored, and translator Simon Armitage's obvious enthusiastic interest in some of the original Gawain poet's preoccupations (e.g., armor, hunting, the steps involved in preparing game meat) is infectious, making me devour those passages with avidity despite never having had any curiosity about those topics before. I relished the use of spiky, gristly concrete words like gralloching, numbles, and chine, which increased my awe for the virtually unplumbable richness of the English language. Regionalisms like nithering and chunters also added texture and interest. Finally, I appreciated how the physical adventure is balanced by timeless moral concerns ("friendship and fraternity with fellow men, purity and politeness...and pity"). "If fate is kind or cruel, man must still try."...more
I picked up this book of verse by a contemporary Portuguese poet because I'm always looking to include more poetry from the non-Anglophone world in myI picked up this book of verse by a contemporary Portuguese poet because I'm always looking to include more poetry from the non-Anglophone world in my diet, and because I feel an urge toward affinity with anyone who thinks deeply about the names of bones -- as, for example, Natalie Diaz does in the last poetry book I read, Postcolonial Love Poem ("I can't stop seeing / her bones. I'm counting the carpals, / metacarpals of her hand inside me. // One bone, the lunate bone, is named / for its crescent outline...."), and as Ana Luisa Amaral does in "The Astragalus: Traces":
The fingerprint of a star... speaks of the same calcium as the one that lingers in the memory of the astragalus, that small bone with an almost galactic name
(The bone called ٰá in Portuguese -- astragale in French, ٰá in Spanish -- is most commonly referred to as the talus in American-English-speaking medical circles, although the alternative term astragalus still appears in English dictionaries.)
While my bent is generally toward poetry with a somewhat different approach to language, images brought into greater focus, arguments more honed to a point, etc., I admire Amaral's willingness to engage in sustained grappling with the great cloudy mysteries of the metaphysical, of death and immortality, of annihilation and continuity, of sacrifice and salvation, in poems like "The Astragalus: Traces" and "Hecatombs." But my favorite quote overall was probably this one, from "Letter to Lidia About the Poetry That Was Lost and Found":
You said "listen," but "feel" was what you meant
This is one of the wisest things I've heard lately, and I'll be reminding myself of it next time someone says, "Listen." It reminds me a bit of the distinction drawn between purely intellectual knowing and empathizing in that late scene in Middlemarch:
Dorothea smiled, and Celia looked rather meditative. Presently she said, "I cannot think how it all came about." Celia thought it would be pleasant to hear the story.
"I dare say not," said-Dorothea, pinching her sister's chin. "If you knew how it came about, it would not seem wonderful to you."
"Can't you tell me?" said Celia, settling her arms cozily.
"No, dear, you would have to feel with me, else you would never know."
A vital record of an important place and time in American history, this book presents English translations of over a hundred poems inked and engraved A vital record of an important place and time in American history, this book presents English translations of over a hundred poems inked and engraved by Chinese immigrants on the walls of the detention center where they were confined -- often for months, sometimes even years -- when trying to immigrate to the U.S. in the early 20th century, shortly after a slight relaxation in the terms of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. The poems are cries from the heart, by turns expressing disillusionment, regret, grief, humiliation, anger, political consciousness, desperation, resignation, worry, and filial love and yearning for relatives whom the poets had left behind in their homeland and with whom they had no means of communicating. Quite a few of the poems make note of data like dates, years, the names of hometowns, as if answering the universal human thirst to document and preserve. Many of the poems read like little pep talks, rattling off litanies of names of historical figures who had suffered -- and survived -- setbacks similar to the ones the detainees were experiencing in the present: "When Ziqing was in distant lands, who pitied and inquired after him? / When Ruan Ji reached the end of the road, he shed futile tears...." Reflecting on how so many of these detainees turned to anecdotes of real-life heroes from their national history to uplift their spirits in a trying time, I gained a deeper appreciation for why we teach and study history, the value of it.
Though written by a variety of authors, the pieces are tonally similar, seeming to blend at times into a single heartfelt collective utterance. Now and then, though, there are glimpses of personality: "Night and day, I sit passively and listlessly. / Fortunately, I have a novel as my companion." The final poem is a stark couplet, "said to be a commentary written the day after a detainee had hung himself": "I pray that the day you again enter the cycle of life / You'll not be a chap with a worthless life from a poor family."...more
This anthology caught my eye as I was looking over my grandfather's bookcases. The English translations are admittedly wobbly (in the sense that the tThis anthology caught my eye as I was looking over my grandfather's bookcases. The English translations are admittedly wobbly (in the sense that the translator-commentator's English language fluency isn't perfect), but the poems (which appear in bilingual format, the Vietnamese and English versions on opposite pages) are still worth reading: it's really a unique book, with the noble ambition of making a little-known body of important spiritual literature more accessible, a book that should equally appeal to those interested in Buddhism, those interested in Vietnamese language learning and/or culture, and those simply interested in metaphor.
Some lines I want to remember:
"Don't say that, with the spring gone, all flowers fall. Last night, in the front yard, a branch of mai flower." -Man Giac
"In the sky, the swallow flies; underwater, its image shines. The swallow has no intention to leave any trace, the water no purpose to keep any image." -Huong Hai
"It...makes the iron girl dance and leads the wooden human to play a drum." -Truong Nguyen
"Without a calendar, I saw daisies blooming and knew the autumn was coming." -Huyen Quang
"There is fire in the wood. The fire is there, then the fire is born. If you say the wood has no fire, how could you make fire by friction?" -Khuong Viet
"The stone horse shows crazy teeth, eats young rice leaves, neighs through days and months, and lopes along with people on the road. Riding on the stone horse, the man does not walk." -Dai Xa
"As the flower blossoms, the whole universe glows in red." -Chan Nguyen...more
This book is a sublime immersive experience, a sort of mini-course in poetic Chinese, geared toward teaching an absolute beginner just enough about thThis book is a sublime immersive experience, a sort of mini-course in poetic Chinese, geared toward teaching an absolute beginner just enough about the script, vocabulary, grammar, poetic conventions (parallelism, tone patterns, rhymes, etc.), and cultural background of classical Chinese poetry that you will eventually be able to fumble your way through surprisingly many of this tradition's greatest poems in their original language. It might have been nice to have had an index with just a bit of biographical information about each of the poets, but I understand that that's sort of far afield of the intent of this perfectly constructed little book.
Here are the English cribs I made of a few of the shorter poems:
White sun docks on mountaintops; Yellow River joins the sea. To feed far-searching eyes, I continue to ascend the tower. -Wang Zhihuan
Above all these mountains, no more birds fly. On all these paths, no footprints show. In a boat, one old man in a straw hat and cape is fishing in the river snow. -Liu Zongyuan
Under pines I ask the servant boy; he says his master's gone herb-gathering amid these mountains, the clouds so deep, he knows not where. -Jia Dao
At the foot of the bed, a patch of moonlight. I mistook it at first for frost. I raise my head and gaze at the moon, then look down again, homesickness-stricken. -Li Bai
Shoo the orioles, shush their treetop noise, lest it eject me from dreams of trekking to Liaoxi. -Jin Changxu
In the east, the grass is silky green; in the west, the mulberry tree is foliage-heavy. You dream of visiting home; my heart twinges. Spring breeze, no friend of mine, what are you lifting my curtain for? -Li Bai [particularly pertinent as we enter another spring of social distancing!]
I rent rooms on a crowded street but never startle at a car. What's my secret? Cloistered minds feel peace no matter where they are.
I pick mums by the eastern fence. Remotely, southern hilltops swell. In wholesome upland air by night the birds fly home in parallel.
I sense a deep truth taking shape. I'd tell you what, but words escape. -Tao Yuanming [this poem really speaks to me in these times of increased societal anxiety]
In spring, moss lines the rocks with green. Tree shade sinks in the frigid well. When the hermit fills his pail, he quaffs the mirrored evening sun. -Sikong Shu...more
I'm glad I read this -- it was refreshing to learn about a pioneering modernist beyond the ones we're taught about in school, and an Asian woman to boI'm glad I read this -- it was refreshing to learn about a pioneering modernist beyond the ones we're taught about in school, and an Asian woman to boot. And Sagawa's loosely bound images can be stirring, even exhilarating, like taking a wander through a gallery of cubist art. Like feeling the dust being beaten out of the rug of your mind. There is a kind of chilling fierceness in her programmatic enthusiasm for modernism, embodied by lines like "The sound of things breaking, and the allure of a continuously dynamic space, are wonderful" and "wash away the artificial rouge of technique from the lips...." Ultimately, however, I think I may personally prefer a bit more narrative or formal structure, a bit more tethering and cohesion than what was here.
Some lines I liked:
"Trying to reach the outside world that is like the back of an embroidery, I become a moth that slams into the window."
"The sun is more warm bread than can be carried...."
On snow: "The road was white like the hallway in my dream."
"Turning into a battle cry for those who awaken repeatedly while tumbling around the eternal abyss, that sound gives birth to me, and the light shoots me through."
I love the idea that the outside world is the back of an embroidery (rough, lots of loose ends, not designed to please), while the inner world of the mind or the spirit is the embroidery's fantastically multicolored front, designed to tell a coherent story or at least please the beholder's eyes: two realms tantalizingly close to each other yet eternally distinct and in some ways impossible to bridge. Yet the poet is willing to be hurt or even destroyed trying to cross from one to the other. A bit like a modern retelling of Plato's cave.
I like the third quote for how matter-of-factly she refers to her dream, as though we are all already supposed to know about it, as though it is as real as anything else.
The last quote I gave above is one I find elementally stirring, yet almost impossible to parse. But maybe its knotty grammar is part of the source of its atomic power. I like how, partly through its strange word order, it scrambles time and also scrambles cause and effect: the sound (that sound) is a battle cry, yet instead of being produced by the speaker and the other repeatedly awakening poets of the world, it produces her. I'm reminded of the contemporary Korean poet Kim Kyung Ju's poem "Synopsis for the Theremin," in which one of the speakers is the reincarnation of a piece of a music -- a person (re)birthed by a sound. And here, the birth is happening in the present tense, not the past tense, leaving us to wonder who it was that spoke the first half of the sentence, since that was before the speaker was born. Did the first half of the sentence speak itself?
And then we come to the penetrating light that irradiates, but maybe also annihilates. The light, rather than being shot forth by a source, is perhaps its own source. It is not shot; it shoots. The sentence becomes a self-reproducing thing, an organism. And what is perhaps the most shocking part of the sentence (the idea that we are tumbling around an eternal abyss, some asleep and some awake) is syntactically buried in recursively nested clauses in the middle of the sentence as if it is obvious, axiomatic, and maybe also beside the point. The idea could be a Buddhist one (as could the idea of reaching for the back-of-the-embroidery that is Ultimate Reality), but she lifts it out of any specific dogma and makes it her own....more
One of my poems appears in this anthology of ekphrastic work centered around the pioneering anatomic woodcuts of Andreas Vesalius, alongside writing bOne of my poems appears in this anthology of ekphrastic work centered around the pioneering anatomic woodcuts of Andreas Vesalius, alongside writing by prominent figures in poetry and the medical humanities including Rafael Campo, Fady Joudah, Amit Majmudar, Heather McHugh, Stacy Nigliazzo, Danielle Ofri, Kelley Jean White, and more. Also included are translations of a handful of 16th- and 17th-century European poets who mostly wrote in Latin (Melanchthon, Varchi, Eber, Brusch, Montano, Sambucus, Balde). The book contains numerous plates of color art, including not only reproductions of Vesalius's work but also images of contemporary watercolors and sculpture inspired by it.
Some of the ekphrastic poems drew my attention to aspects of Vesalius's artworks I had never thought about before: e.g., the provenance of the cadavers Vesalius used as models (they were oftentimes the corpses of hanged convicts), the fact that the cadaver being dissected in the frontispiece woodcut is a female (ironic, given that living women were never permitted access to theaters of dissection during this time period!), etc. This seems to me to be exactly what ekphrastic poetry is supposed to do: deepen the reader's attention to, and engagement with, the inspiring work(s) of art. McHugh's prologue essay likewise illuminates Vesalius's woodcuts with its apt wordplay, its many felicitous turns of phrase (e.g., "the long now of a book," or "When you look at circulatory man, you see why humans had to hug. But when you look at neural man, you see why humans had to fly").
Some of the poems have a light touch, while others are suffused with horror, like Leslie Adrienne Miller's "Marked," about the use of flaying as a historical punishment for women who violated sexual laws (on a woodcut depicting "The vulva, vagina, and sliced uterus of a monk's lover," Miller writes: "Flaying, I learn, / sometimes had a simpler aim, / to make the dead woman nebulous, / wipe the life of markings from her skin, / and disconnect her from her kin, / so even a lover couldn't brush / her brow again and find the nick / only he could know...."). Other poems I found especially emotionally and spiritually rich included Margaret Lloyd's poems about saints martyred through flaying, as well as Christine Montross's poem "Bone House," about human vulnerability and the need for hope:
"They reach -- my patient and my boy -- for the same elusive hope that I do --
"that despite these mortal frames we exist somehow, in some form, permanent, impervious to clot or wound."
(As a side-note, I had no idea before reading this book that the oft-Instagrammed quotation "There are two ways of spreading light: to be / The candle or the mirror that reflects it" originates from "Vesalius in Zante," a blank-verse dramatic monologue by Edith Wharton that imagines Vesalius's final days, in which the anatomist regrets his moments of weakness but is nonetheless hopeful that his successors will continue building on his legacy and expanding human knowledge in their own ways.)...more
Though purists disapprove, I relish this approach to translating a classic: sharply intelligent; witty; sparkling with sound-play and gasp-provokinglyThough purists disapprove, I relish this approach to translating a classic: sharply intelligent; witty; sparkling with sound-play and gasp-provokingly bold choices of proposed equivalencies, evidence of a poet's ear; enriched by a coherent translatorial point-of-view, an unmistakable translatorial voice; and, on top of it all, fast-paced and wildly entertaining. Translator Headley sticks a dagger in the side of this old tale with a perfect blend of respect and effrontery, much like, say, a warrior confronting a dragon whom bystanders might suspect of outclassing him: though she begins her translation with a slangy "Bro!" and ends it with a likewise anachronistic-sounding "He was the man," making it her good-humor-laced quest to illuminate the work's modernity-relevant subtexts on gender performance and masculinity, yet she never seems to underrate or disrespect her source material or the poetry-loving soul of its characters' social system, and she somehow manages to endow that final "He was the man" with equal parts wit and sincere emotion. It's an impressive feat. Headley shows us Beowulf in multiple lights simultaneously: as an almost-caricature of machismo, yes, but also as a man of some depth -- a good fighter but rather reluctant ruler, capable of human empathy toward worthy adversaries ("For a moment, / he felt for his old foes, fen-bound, embarking alone"), his brain (or "word-vault") brimming with not only bloodlust but also eloquent language. If you like, say, Christopher Logue's takes on Homer, you may want to give this one a try....more
I bought this bilingual Vietnamese-English anthology of poetry in large part because I was looking for ways to improve my Vietnamese proficiency. As fI bought this bilingual Vietnamese-English anthology of poetry in large part because I was looking for ways to improve my Vietnamese proficiency. As far as that goes, this book gave me what I wanted, including teaching me multiple Vietnamese synonyms for the words soldier (b� đội, chiến sĩ), enemy (giặc, địch, quân thù), and widow (góa bụa, qu� ph�). Other vocabulary words I jotted down included: ranger (biệt động quân), sniper (bắn tỉa), cannon (đại bác), convoy (đoàn xe), unit (đơn v�), division (sư đoàn), military career (binh nghiệp), march (hành quân), firing line (tuyến lửa), battlefield (chiến trường), front (mặt trận), campaign (chiến dịch), malaria (sốt rét), grave (nấm m�), comrade (đồng chí), martyr (liệt s�), liberation (giải phóng), Resistance (kháng chiến), aggression (xâm lược), and empire (đ� quốc).
Like not a few poetry anthologies arising from periods of wartime, this selection has an ideological slant. One of the more glaring examples is a rather strange poem by T� Hanh that, as translated by Nguyễn Quang Thiều and Bruce Weigl, begins, "Moonlight floods through the window. / The baby sees the moonlight and sings to herself. // Her song's first words: Uncle Ho Chi Minh...." Still, there can be said to be a few interesting outliers, and overall the book remains a valuable document of its times when ranged alongside others.
Another ŷ reviewer commented that this book makes Vietnamese poetry seem like "prose chopped into lines." That is entirely the fault of the translation process, though. Reading the Vietnamese originals on the verso pages, holding them a moment in one's mouth, makes it clear how musical the Vietnamese verse tradition actually is, with its received forms like "lục bát" and "song thất lục bát," dense with gorgeously disciplined rhythms, rhymes, and tone patterns. The Vietnamese language's supple grammar also enables an almost supernaturally lively degree of compression and condensation not captured in the English translations, with multiple twists and turns of thought often magically boiled down to one sinewy five- or six-syllable line. Here, for example, is Văn Lê's poem "Quảng Tr�," whose taut six-syllable lines in ABCB-rhymed quatrains inevitably lose something in translation:
Đâu đâu cũng thấy xương trắng Chẳng l� đắp lên nền nhà V� mặt bạn tôi bối rối Không biết xương địch hay ta?
Làm gì còn xương M� nữa Nó rút đem hết v� rồi Còn lại đất này � xương trắng Toàn là dân Việt ta thôi.
Here is Nguyen Ba Chung's and Bruce Weigl's rendering:
Everywhere we dug there were white bones. What could we do? Could we just leave them? What kind of foundation would they make for our house? My friends were perplexed. Were they our bones or their bones?
No, I told them, there are no American bones here. The Americans left years ago and took their bones with them. These skeletons, scattered all over our land, Belong only to Vietnamese.
One could imagine a version maintaining the syllable count and rhyme scheme, say:
Here, there, all-wheres: white bones, Poor ground for raising towers. My friends� brows looked confused. Enemy bones or ours?
Why’d U.S. bones hang ’round? Those guys picked up, went home. What’s left’s this earth � white bones that are us Viets� alone.
But then you might argue something else had been lost.
Here's my effort at an English version of Xuân Quỳnh’s “Hoa c� may� that, unlike this book's, preserves its slant-rhymed seven-syllable lines:
Blank sand, stream filled with daft trees: rough air sees the season out. Who calls me, hidden by leaves? Fall chills my worn homeward route.
White clouds fly off with the wind. I'm blue as Eden’s weather. Rancor brings back no lost springs. Wind blew away our letters.
Foxtail spikes in every nook stab at my dress, unnoticed. Love’s vows are see-through as smoke� perhaps, Dear, you forgot us?...more
One of the best books I've read in a long time, Lean Against This Late Hour reminded me at times of some of my old favorite poets like Yehuda Amichai One of the best books I've read in a long time, Lean Against This Late Hour reminded me at times of some of my old favorite poets like Yehuda Amichai and Vasko Popa, in its accessibility, its burning lucidity, its skeletal concision, its youthful passion, its overflowing emotion, its intelligence, its originality, its necessariness and its timeless relevance in how it confronts the fallout of war. The metaphors are at once down-to-earth and exhilaratingly otherworldly, metaphors like:
the oranges of life are blood oranges
and
perhaps a day in my seventies I'll be born and feel that death is a shirt we all come to put on, whose buttons we can either fasten or leave undone...
I like how Abdolmalekian goes that extra step to make his metaphors feel not like fleeting verbal constructions, but something really concrete and tangible, something that can be later stepped on and built on:
the curved posture of my father who after years has yet to take my brother's corpse off his shoulders and place him in the ground
You can sense the poet's deep intelligence in the nuanced way he writes about the subtly varied interactions that can occur between light and dark, for example:
We stepped into a room, lit the candles but nothing in the room was lit. The glow conceals the unlit...
and, in a later poem,
The sun won't conform to the dark
His intelligence also shines through in the simultaneous complexity and clarity of some of his truly unique metaphors:
In me there are characters who melt in the snow who drift with the rivers and years later rain into me
In one poem he names Lorca as an inspiration, a predecessor, and you're like of course:
I think the bullet shot toward you was a glass of water poured on a forest in flames
My favorite poems were "Pattern," "Long Poem of Loneliness" (one of the best poems I've ever read about a father), "Doubts and a Hesitation," "Poem for Stillness" (about a soldier's PTSD), "Necklace," "Long Exposure," "Paper Boat" (a contender for the best poem ever to use Noah's Ark as a metaphor), "On Power Lines," "Forest," "Long Exposure VI," and "Bricks."...more
"It cannot end like this, I thought-- a mass extermination of inner life."
"I don't sing with people who know more than 100 religious hymns."
I'm
"It cannot end like this, I thought-- a mass extermination of inner life."
"I don't sing with people who know more than 100 religious hymns."
I'm not entirely sure what to make of this book. Certainly, I am astonished by its originality, the enormous imaginative force of its achievement, perhaps best exemplified by the two long poems "Synopsis for the Theremin" and "A City of Sadness," which imagine a lovelorn composer who wrote a piece of music so soulful that, in its next life, that piece of music was reincarnated as a man. What a beautiful idea! And the book contains many beautiful lines, though one sometimes suspects that this beauty is beside the point, that in Kim's worldview such beauty is just one part of a larger whole in which ugliness, disgust, and other such things are equally worthy of attention. Kim obviously loves music, Beethoven, etc. -- and music is a recurring theme throughout this book -- but, amid the perverse brutality of some of the images in these poems, this theme of music appreciation sometimes seems almost to play the role of the theme of Alex's music appreciation in A Clockwork Orange.
"Proof of our lives was that we could feel pain; however, pain was not something that could exonerate us. After we admitted this fact, we felt wonderful."
"And because I am irrational I can't explain anything I believe in And because I can't explain I write"
The voice throughout feels masculine, cold, alienated, separate, a bit Rimbaud-esque, especially in some of the longer prose poems. Like Rimbaud, Kim is simultaneously sensitive-souled and anti-Romantic ("to form the pattern inside the water / how much does the wind need to blather?"). Like Rimbaud, Kim seems to enjoy interrogating his own disgust -- this book is rife with images of chopped-off fingers, plucked-out eyes, hair everywhere (including pubic hair), spiders and other creepy-crawlies, dwindled and distorted bodies, smells, hints of a kind of shivery "body horror." And Kim seems sometimes to share Rimbaud's wish to shock his audience, which can be a bit offputting, but then, he also sometimes has Rimbaud's tenderness: "There are times when, suddenly / I cannot be reminded of mother's handwriting," one poem begins, unexpectedly and anomalously. "From behind, for his entire life, my dad slept embracing my sick mom," one poem narrates rather sweetly, only to have this sweetness refuted by a later poem in the same series that tells how "Dad crawled inside my sick mom like an inchworm."
"Humanity's pattern is the moment you see the beautiful eyes of fish and they become difficult to eat...."
"The only ability I have is the ability to be different from you."
The feel of this book as a whole is the farthest thing from autobiographical -- instead of literal autobiographical detail, Kim strongly prefers the symbolic -- yet there are some passages that offer glimpses of a life, e.g., the recurring references to past military service in "A City of Sadness," other poems mentioning a childhood of ramen powder and home haircuts. And I found myself gravitating toward those poems that mention a mom or a dad, as these gave me tastes of the human tenderness I crave from poetry. The titles of two of these poems, "Father's Dickhead" and "Even Now Mom Wears Her Flower Pattern Underwear," capture the humor and perversity with which Kim approaches even this subject matter, embodying how a milieu of awkwardness and discomfort is where he likes to situate his insights: "As mom proved in her time, life is lived moment by moment / by putting on panties and beginning again" is an undeniably risible yet also tenderly true epiphany found in the latter poem. "Hear the Mackerel Cry" is a somewhat more serious and successful "mom poem," where the speaker's mom becomes conflated with the mackerel the speaker grilled for dinner: "While striking the floor with her fin, mom straightens her spine. Mom, please stop dribbling. I can't close my eyes when I think of your spit.... Sunk into the deep, Mom quietly spits purple air. The mackerel is weeping." I liked the unsentimental conflict in this poem, that authentic-feeling mix of impatience and love.
"You can't see the poet's star from earth. However, you can watch the earth from the poet's star."
The second book containing translated Russian poems that I've tackled so far this year (see my write-up of Olga Livshin's A Life Replacedhere), The LThe second book containing translated Russian poems that I've tackled so far this year (see my write-up of Olga Livshin's A Life Replacedhere), The Last Poet of the Village includes 68 short lyric poems, almost all under one page in length, written by a young Russian man who died at the age of 30 in 1925 -- perhaps a victim of suicide, perhaps asssassinated by political enemies who contrived his death to look like a suicide. The back-of-the-book summary blurb, together with the brief but informative preface by translator Anton Yakovlev, asserts that this poet, Sergei Yesenin, is an essential part of Russian culture: among his fellow Russians, they say, Yesenin is the all-time best-known and best-loved Russian poet after Pushkin, a literary rockstar in his own time whose public readings once attracted hundreds and whose poems are still widely known by heart. Given his stature in his own country, Yesenin should be better-known in the wider world than he is, and these nimble, easy-to-read translations by Russian American poet Yakovlev -- whose original works Neptune Court and The Ghost of Grant Wood I've written about elsewhere on ŷ -- ought to go a long ways toward rectifying Yesenin's relative obscurity among Anglophone readers.
Although Yesenin's output -- remarkably prolific despite his truncated lifespan -- also included longer poems and plays, Yakovlev chose to build this volume of translations around Yesenin's shorter poems, seeing that these comprise so much of the basis of his populist fame in his native land. All the poems contained in these pages bear dates between 1910 and 1925, and although Yesenin was relatively cosmopolitan in his connections and influences (the third of his four wives was American dancer Isadora Duncan), these poems are largely rural in flavor, foregrounding the pastoral, quintessentially Russian sights and sounds Yesenin most adored. Yesenin loudly proclaims his empathy and affinity for beggars, poor people, cows, dogs, even the stalks of wheat whose "throats" are "slit" to make bread. He has a uniquely ingenious way of making dog poems interesting by hiding love poems inside them, as in "To Kachalov's Dog":
....My dear Jim, there have been so many Folks of all kinds among your guests. But did the saddest and the quietest one Stop here, by any chance?
She'll come, I give you my word. And in my absence, staring into her eyes, Please gently lick her hand on my behalf For everything I was and wasn't guilty of.
To me, the most captivating of Yesenin's poems are those confronting questions of identity: Who am I? What sets me apart from others? In answering these questions, Yesenin repeatedly leans into a self-mythologizing vision of himself as a rowdy, drunken, brawling, adulterous, scandal-prone "hooligan," an anachronistically idealistic dreamer with a doomed reckless aspiration to "marry a white rose / To a black toad on this earth." His hyperawareness of his own poete maudit nature prompts Luciferian utterances like "But if demons nested in my soul, / That means angels lived there too." His "I'm a lout and bandit myself / With the blood of a steppe horse thief" echoes his contemporary and countrywoman Marina Tsvetaeva's "Some ancestor of mine was a violinist / and a thief into the bargain.... I wonder suddenly: did / he even play the violin?"
In his poems on erotic love, Yesenin's sensibilities might strike some readers as a tad unsettling, especially in the poems where he tries to reconcile himself to being in a partnership with an older, more experienced woman (Isadora Duncan?): "So what if someone else has drunk you.... Other lips have dispersed / Your warmth and your body's tremor... your slightly gangrenous soul...." But it's impossible not to be exhilarated by Yesenin's images, which, as rendered into English by Yakovlev, are fresh and muscular, lit by pure fiery colors, voiced with authority and clarity:
"Rustle up, midnight, the jug of the moon To scoop up the milk of the birches! It's as if the churchyard would like to strangle Someone with its hands made of crosses!"
"So lift up, o paws of the moon, My sadness into heaven in a bucket."
"Like a colt, the red-haired new moon Harnessed to our sleigh."
"The sunset quietly swims In the pond like a red swan."
"The shivering streetlight reflects its lipless head in a black puddle."
Reminding me somewhat of Hai-Dang Phan's recent debut poetry collection Reenactments, Olga Livshin's A Life Replaced is another 2019 debut collection Reminding me somewhat of Hai-Dang Phan's recent debut poetry collection Reenactments, Olga Livshin's A Life Replaced is another 2019 debut collection by a poet born outside the U.S. (Livshin immigrated from Russia as a teenager, whereas Phan immigrated from Vietnam as a child). The most striking similarity between the two collections is the way they showcase their authors' talents not only as poets but also as translators of poetry. A Life Replaced contains 21 original poems by Livshin, interspersed with a total of 13 poems by Anna Akhmatova and Vladimir Gandelsman that have been translated by Livshin from Russian into English. While I've read other translations of Akhmatova before, Gandelsman was new to me until now: unlike Akhmatova, he is a living poet, born in the 1940s, who began publishing his Russian-language poems after immigrating to the United States in the 1990s and has since won prestigious national literary prizes in his native land.
Livshin's own original poems are presented as being "in conversation with" the poems by Akhmatova and Gandelsman that she has translated, reflecting on the elder poets' lives and legacies ("Your rhetorical questions are needed, for they demand a specific integrity from each of us") as well as musing on her own bilingualism, on the challenges of verse translation, and on the immigrant experience. "[S]ee: flight -- shelter -- nostalgia, in that order," one of Livshin's poems begins, before complicating the equation by questioning whether the primary emotion the speaker feels is indeed nostalgia. In another Livshin poem, an old immigrant mother frets over her linguistic alienation: "even my name's spelled / wrong in this alphabet." The mother-voice is put to strikingly effective use in this collection, one of whose most arresting poems is Livshin's "Mom, a Liturgy" (interestingly juxtaposed with a similarly structured Gandelsman poem titled "Mom, Resurrected"), telling the layered story of a woman's simultaneous romantic involvements with a woman and with a man through the voice of her somewhat bewildered and worry-oppressed Russian immigrant mother. And this narrative takes on additional resonances by sharing space with translations of eros-tinted poems Akhmatova addressed to the actress Olga Glebova-Sudeikina.
The fruits of the earth are recurring motifs in Livshin's work, especially mushrooms and persimmons (on a side-note, I found this interesting on a personal level, since both these foods have figured into my own writing about the Vietnamese diaspora, and I would love to converse with the poet sometime about why these particular varieties of plant life might resonate with immigrant families from such disparate backgrounds). In Livshin's verse, the act of collecting mushrooms becomes a metaphor for how the immigrant relates to the world around her, acclimating to relative safety and abundance after a history of danger and scarcity: "The years came, / went, and I yearned to stop / hunting. To collect, instead." But mushroom-picking also becomes a metaphor for how the world relates in its turn to the immigrant, who expresses a mixture of gratitude, guilt, and unease toward a country that has offered admittance to her but not to others: "Thank you for picking me" (italics added), the poem ends, the word "picking" equating the immigrant with the gingerly harvested fungus. This unease burgeons dramatically as the speaker must grapple with the terrors of rampant mass gun violence and rising anti-immigrant resentment in her adopted country. I'd say this is a particularly timely read today if it weren't, depressingly, a particularly timely read every day....more
I first encountered Basho in Sam Hamill's translation in a university course taught by poet David McCann; later, I devoured Robert Hass's translation,I first encountered Basho in Sam Hamill's translation in a university course taught by poet David McCann; later, I devoured Robert Hass's translation, on the poet Peter Richards's recommendation. I loved his sensibility and deep spirituality immediately, and he remains my favorite haiku poet (although, to this day, I am still occasionally troubled by his self-avowed refusal to help the small child and the two prostitutes he met on his deep north journey...). This edition, translated by Jane Reichhold, distinguishes itself by being the first edition to include every single haiku Basho ever wrote, grouped into sections based on the poet's life chronology and development. If your lack of familiarity with the translator's other work makes you wary to sample it (as I was wary to open this book until recently, despite having received it as a Christmas gift eight years ago!), you'll be reassured to learn there is a comprehensive appendix in the back that includes, for each poem, the original Japanese characters, a romanization, and a literal word-for-word gloss, in addition to explanatory notes that elucidate the allusions, cultural and historical context, ribald puns, double entendres, etc. This was a great book to begin the year with (and not only because it mentions the New Year holiday more times than probably any other book in existence). A few poems that stood out to me this time around:
clams survived and became valuable year's end
the moon disappears afterward the desk has four corners
(written on the occasion of a friend's father's death)
vast grassy plain may nothing touch you but your hat
(a valedictory poem for a friend departing on a journey)
wrapping dumplings with one hand brushing back her bangs...more
My heart almost stopped when I stumbled on this by pure chance at my lovely local used/rare bookstore yesterday: an out-of-print book from 1974, with My heart almost stopped when I stumbled on this by pure chance at my lovely local used/rare bookstore yesterday: an out-of-print book from 1974, with 11 illustrations by my late great-uncle, the Hue artist Buu Chi. For just $12. (The bookstore proprietor also served me Hu-Kwa tea and carrot cake "because it's Thursday.")
This book has many ways of reminding us how long ago 1974 was. For one thing, in 1974, the now-ubiquitous monk and bestselling spiritual writer Thich Nhat Hanh was apparently still a relatively obscure figure, published in the U.S. by a small outfit called “Unicorn Press.� (His poem “Recommendations� is included.) Also, one might infer that the Chinese zodiac was not as universally known in the U.S. then as it is now, blazoned as it is on red placemats in millions of restaurants, as there is a footnote explaining, “Vietnamese count the years in a cycle of 12, each year corresponding to an animal.�
From the book’s introduction:
Nowhere are poetry and life more closely intertwined than in Viet Nam. Pham Van Dong, a leader in the north, explained the phenomenon this way: “Our Vietnamese language is very rich. It is rich because of our splendid existence, our intellectual strength, the fertile feelings in our nation, and because of the historic and plentiful experiences of our struggles�. It is rich also because of the living experiences of 4,000 years of building and preserving the nation and the country.�
In September 1968, Tran Van Dinh wrote an editorial in The Washingtonian titled “Why Every American Should Read Kim Van Kieu [Vietnam’s great epic poem, authored by Nguyen Du, excerpts of which are included in this compilation].� In the editorial he asserted, “Had President Johnson�.read Kim Van Kieu, they would have avoided many serious and fatal mistakes.�
Besides Nguyen Du, other classic poets found in this anthology include Ho Xuan Huong, Dang Tran Con, and also the “warrior-king� Tran Quoc Tang:
What’s time? A gallop past the window.
Keep your shirt dry in water, deep or shallow.
When needed, do your bit; when useless, hide.
The pre-war period is represented by three autumn lyrics by Luu Trong Lu. Many poems by teens, who dutifully soaked up the propaganda of their day, are also included (e.g., 14-year-old Hoang Son’s “Americans Are Not Beautiful�: “They are tall like trees without branches. / Their eyes are green like eyes of boiled pigs�). The line between poems and songs is blurred, with ca dao folksongs and also the lyrics of songwriters like Trinh Cong Son included: the tune of played in my head as I read the lyrics translated as “I Shall Go Visiting�.
The footnotes contain stories, too: of an idealist killed hijacking a U.S. plane “armed only with a lemon wrapped in tinfoil,� of a newspaper closed for publishing an antiwar poem, of self-immolations on both sides of the ocean, of a 1908-11 political prisoner who “ruffled French authorities by refusing to talk to the French prison director unless he was invited to sit down.�
Quote: As Trieu Au, a woman warrior of the third century, said: “My wish is to ride the tempest, tame the waves, kill the sharks� I will not resign myself to the usual lot of women who bow their heads and become concubines.�
The eleven plates of artwork by Buu Chi manifest his expansive range, including his highly romanticized, sensual, dreamy, long-limbed images of beautiful women and birds (“Woman and Dove,� “Orpheus and Eurydice�) but also his grimly realistic, shadow-heavy depictions of women and men shackled and tortured in prison (“A Thieu Political Prisoner,� “The Plane Trip Torture�). The difference is stark as ever—I wrote about it once in the literary journal Cha:
The next most highly represented artist here is Vo Dinh, with five haunting woodcut prints. There are also editor Don Luce’s numerous black-and-white photograph portraits of anonymous Vietnamese, which with their white smiles and direct gazes stop you in your tracks....more
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