Klein’s Ouyang Jianghe in Seedings

Issue three of the literary journal Seedings, edited by Jerrold Shiroma, is now out, featuring sections of my translation of “Taj Mahal Tears” 泰姬陵之泪 by Ouyang Jianghe 欧阳江河–alongside new work by Will Alexander, Marry Oppen, Matt Turner, Elizabeth Willis, Osip Mandelstam, Michael Palmer, and more!

Poetry does not have an identity of its own, its prajñā and insight
are polyphonic, beginning in two, exerted from other objects.
…………….The gods and the departed face off
like the narcissus, intoning the original poem’s splendor
and its fragrance. Tears extract themselves from polysemy,
elapsing and simultaneously creating their boundaries
……………. and plasticity,
because the tears of poetry’s minstrelsy flow from a statue,
within which flow the materials of consciousness,
e.g., the crystals in the nightingale’s throat,
…………….those tiny metals.
But in rural India, why is the peacock’s cry choked up,
why does the history of words again become a history of dust?

诗歌并无自己的身份,它的彻悟和洞见
是复调的,始于二的,是其他事物施加的。
             神与亡灵的对视
水仙般,支吾着一个元诗歌的婀娜
和芬芳。眼泪从词的多义抽身出来,
它一边流逝,一边创造自己的边界
              和可塑性,
因为诗歌的行吟的泪水是雕像流出的,
里面流动着一些知觉的材料,
比如,夜莺深喉里的那些水晶,
               那些小金属。
但在乡村印度,为什么孔雀的叫声如此哽咽,
为什么词的历史会再次成为尘埃的历史?

Click the image above to download the full .pdf of the issue.

Xi Chuan cameo in Michael Palmer Poem

Last October Brooklyn Rail published a new poem by Michael Palmer titled “His Artificial Lover Sings a Wordless Song,” which mentions Xi Chuan. Here’s an excerpt:

Will the despoilers have it all
to themselves? Even the textured sky?

Xi Chuan, we often ask the same
questions it seems, or is it simply

that together we studied the stars
in Mechanicsville? Orion’s Belt shown,

the Sisters and the Drinking Gourd.
Words formed

their own
seamless patterns

one moment,
sundered the next.

Read the whole poem here.

Yunte Huang’s SHI: A Radical Reading of Chinese Poetry

On his blog at Jacket2 Charles Bernstein has posted Yunte Huang’s 黃運特introduction to his 1997 book SHI: A Radical Reading of Chinese Poetry. Huang has since become one of the foremost figures in Chinese – American literary studies, translating Ezra Pound and Michael Palmer into Chinese, and writing the scholarly books Transpacific Imaginations and Transpacific Displacement, as well as the recent Charlie Chan: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and His Rendezvous with American History. Here’s how Huang’s intro to SHI begins:

This book is not an attempt to grasp the “essence” of Chinese poetry, nor is it an endeavor to produce an over-polished version of English that claims aesthetic superiority over other works in the same field. It grapples rather with the nature of translation and poetry, and explores poetic issues from the perspective of translation and translation issues from the perspective of poetry. Looking from such a vantage point, translation is no longer able to hide itself in our blind spot; instead, the often-invisible face of translation is being brought to the foreground of poetic texture and the traces of translation’s needle work are being exposed to the reader’s view. With its agenda hidden, translation is too often a handyman for the metaphysical, mystical, or universal notion of poetry. When emerging from obscurity, translation becomes an ally with poetic material and enacts the wordness of the words. And this book strives to strengthen the alliance between translation and poetry through various textual and conceptual means that I will discuss now.

Andrea Lingenfelter wins NCBA for Zhai Yongming translation

Congrats to Andrea Lingenfelter for winning the Northern California Book Awards for her translation of The Changing Room (Zephyr Press), a collection of poems by Zhai Yongming 翟永明. Click here for my my review of The Changing Room, and here for the full list of NCBA nominees and winners (Michael Palmer won in the category of poetry for his New Directions book Thread).