Morse on Bradbury’s Hsia Yü

At Paper Republic Canaan Morse reviews Salsa by Hsia Yü 夏宇 as translated by Steve Bradbury:

In order to recreate these transformative linguistic effects, Bradbury uses assonances, parallel structures, and rhymes with English words that may not appear in the original. While we obviously cannot claim (as much as critics demand it) that translations be both faithful and independent, Bradbury’s process – engaging a creative, artistic faculty that inhabits an English-language context to create a poem that represents the narrative and receptive structure of a Chinese poem – successfully makes poems that exist both within and outside of his control, which may be a more sound and equitable way to understand these words on these pages.

Click the here to read his review.