Tag Archives: Arthur Rimbaud

Baty’s Review Frodsham’s Li He

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https://i0.wp.com/cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0726/9203/products/Li_He_cover_2048x2048.jpg?resize=338%2C522&ssl=1Tank Magazine has published Jamie Baty’s review of The Collected Poems of Li He 李 賀 (c. 790–c. 817), translated by J. D. Frodsham, under the title of “The Sound of Glass.” Baty writes:

Frodsham presents Li as a poète maudit in the mould of Baudelaire, or Rimbaud. From the first pages of the introduction, Li’s “modernity” is illustrated with a quote from the 20th-century writer Hugo Friedrich; Baudelaire’s poem “L’Invitation au voyage” is quoted to illustrate Li’s (categorically non-Western) conception of heaven; his approach to composition is likened to the poetic philosophy of Gautier and the Parnassiens. Such examples masquerade as glimpses of an interconnected network of culture entirely free from geography or history, but in reality they assert a profoundly European sense of linear “progression”, with the ultimate effect of claiming Li as some form of non-Western, proto-modern Western modernist.

But on many occasions, when he is trying most concertedly to claim Li for the “modern” West, Frodsham is defending himself from those who claim the translation of Chinese poetry to be altogether impossible.”

Despite this interesting frame, I should point out some slight errors in the review: the book is credited as being published by “University of Hong Kong Press,” but in fact it’s Chinese University Press, in coordination with New York Review Books; also, the review states that the book is “the second English translation of Li’s work published in the 50 years,” but since it’s a reprint, the referenced earlier translation may be Frodsham’s, as well (I find a 1970 version as well as a 1983 version)–and of course this does not include the various piecemeal translations that have appeared in anthologies, journals, and scholarly writing.

Click the image for the full review.

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

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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.

Ashbery and / or Xi Chuan

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I’ve been reading, and reading about, John Ashbery recently, in part because translating Xi Chuan has put me in mind to look at the development of the prose poem in English–and Ashbery’s Three Poems (Viking Compass, 1972), of course, were fundamental in the expansion & popularization of that form–but also because Ashbery’s recently published translation of Arthur Rimbaud‘s Illuminations (Norton, 2011) have just come out, as Steve Bradbury mentioned on this blog in his write-up of the ALTA conference, and I’ve been curious about the relationship between original writing & translation in this writer (also, the model of Ashbery as a writer loved both on the margins and at the peripheries of the literary world seemed appropriate for Xi Chuan, a poet who is at once accessible and experimental, challenging and rewarding).

So I consider it a fine coincidence that I came across the following quote, which struck me as the positive version of Christopher Honey’s question of “who I am reading when I read Rexroth’s beautiful collections of Asian poetry in translation,” in Micah Towery‘s essay at The The on how “Google Translates Poetry“:

why do we want to read Ashbery’s translations of Rimbaud? I see two motivations: the first is to read Rimbaud without learning French; the second is to read Ashbery reading Rimbaud.

The second motivation, accurate as it is, only emerges when we’re dealing with the confluence of two established figures–Rexroth and Du Fu, say, or Ashbery and Rimbaud, or Kenneth Branagh and Hamlet. This does not mean that Google translate is any better for readers who want to read Rimbaud without learning French, but it does mean that, if I think few readers will be interested in reading me reading Xi Chuan, my choices may be different if I’m translating primarily so readers can read Xi Chuan without having to know Chinese.

As Xi Chuan said in an interview with the NEA, “Before I had an ‘I’ in my heart; later I found [that it was multiple] ‘I’s’ and not ‘we.’ I found that all these deceased people live in my heart.” As his translator, my goal has been to express these “I’s” of his–and perhaps find my own amongst them–rather than to subsume any of them into an “I” of my own.