Jonathan Stalling’s translingual synesthesia of Rimbaud’s Bateau Ivre

I raced, stained by the moon’s electric
爱  日北四大, 四大北那大 八爱  浊舌呀 么  马乌乌那’四   弟拉也吃丝卡 
fragments, timbers crazed, black sea-
发日言言哥马么那台四, 台丝丝马八么儿四   卡日北浊四  大, 八拉言卡   四弟
horses as my escort, July’s battering me—
哈够日四么浊四    言浊四   马爱   也四卡啊日台,扎乌乌拉爱’ 浊四    八言台么儿冰   马弟—

So begins Jonathan Stalling’s version of Arthur Rimbaud’s Le Bateau ivre for the twentieth anniversary of Drunken Boat, which he explains,

In this reworking of Rimbaud’s “The Drunken Boat,” I wanted to set the poem adrift through a disordering of the senses corresponding to systems of writing (alphabets, syllabaries, or logographies) which create the conceptual foundation for imagining languages as irrevocably separate from one another. I believe that we can access forms of linguistic synesthesia that will free us to see different writing systems not as walls between but bridges into other languages … Unlike the system I used in my book Yingelishi, the script below sequences English speech sounds at the level of phonemes (individual sounds) rather than morphemes (in the case of Chinese full syllables). In short, this poem is English, just not through the same Romanized senses.

And read Anna Rosenwong‘s excellent essay, which starts with Eliot Weinberger and Octavio Paz on Wang Wei 王維, and goes on to explain the feature:

The project’s irreverence—anthropophagism— is made possible by this journal’s sense of “Le bateau ivre,” of Rimbaud, of French symbolist poetry, even of the French language, as too well-respected, too established to tarnish or appropriate in a problematic way. Working with classic texts, one feels she is at liberty to be a punk. Framing is likewise an enabler: in an envelope-pushing journal and section such as this, introduced by this hedging editorial note, the boats are clearly marked as a kind of risky play, their transgression a testament to the aura of the original.

Follow the links for the sites in question.

Li Shangyin translations at Drunken Boat

Drunken Boat has published three poems by Li Shangyin 李商隱 in my translation.

I’ll come is   empty talk   I’ll go and then no trace
The moon slants   over the tower   the fifth clack of the bell

Li Shangyin 李商隱The page also includes a note where I explain how my translations “aim to link the opposition to the social order that motivated these poems in the ninth century with an opposition to the social orders relevant to dense and allusive poetry today.”

Thanks to Managing Editor Erica Mena, Translation Editor Anna Rosenwong, and founding editor Ravi Shankar for including my work!

Why This Book Should Win the BTBA: “His Days Go By the Way Her Years” by Ye Mimi

The Best Translated Book Award winners have been announced. But here’s Anna Rosenwong on why Steve Bradbury’s translation of His Days Go By the Way Her Years by Ye Mimi 葉覓覓 should win:

The ten exclamatory, cuttingly modern poems of His Days Go By the Way Her Years are shot through with sonic gamesmanship, punning, the unbridled verbing of nouns, and voraciously transcultural allusion. Many also perform an oscillation between coy formal disruption and seductive dream logic, as in the typographically resistant line: “\ every one of the ◻◻ / could find themselves sluiced by the ◻◻◻ into a water melon frappe of a summer season.” The poems are well aware of their own cleverness, but resist turning precious as they revel in grotesque particulars and subversions of the ordinary stuff of life and poetic diction.

Click the image above for the complete write-up.