Dylan Suher for Asymptote writes on Austin Woerner’s translation of Phoenix 凤凰, by Ouyang Jianghe 欧阳江河 (after a sculpture by Xu Bing 徐冰) (Zephyr, 2014):
This excellent Zephyr Books edition packages the poem together with pictures of the sculpture, and, in what happily seems to be becoming the norm, places Woerner’s translation alongside the original. The bilingual reader can thus fully appreciate that the translation, rather than aiming to fix the quicksilver of the original, is a piano four-hands between two talented writers. From verse 14:
Ransacks the void till no emptiness remains,
while prestidigitating truths from thin air;空,本就是空的,被他掏空了,
反而凭空掏出些真东西。Woerner translates “掏” (tao), “to pull out” or “to fish out,” as “ransack” in the first line and “prestidigitate” in the second. These words do not quite come out of thin air, but—to borrow from the language of finance—it is a leveraged interpretation, and its yield is spectacular. The Zephyr books edition of “Phoenix” is therefore poetry truly suited to this age of globalization: two poets from opposite sides of the world collaborating to illuminate the way of life that unites them both.
Click on the image for the full write-up.