Across the pathways
of their bright
fledgling-mornings
faceless and bloodied
corpses are flung; […]
And our little ones
are children no longer.
Sivaramani, who was an outspoken critic of the Tamil Tigers, burned her poems before committing suicide in 1991. She was 24 years old and her death went largely unnoticed. She did not die a martyr’s death by biting a cyanide capsule or by blowing herself up for the cause. Kutti Revathi writes of such a death in her poem ‘Suicide Soldier’, sympathetically portraying the effects of patriarchy on female fighters:
The leader’s command
made your heart a bomb
caught, swinging, in the web
held between his two hands.
But as the Black Tiger explodes her body, the reader’s sympathy is directed away from her to the ‘thirty people… sacrificed’ that day as she stepped:
into the last quarter-minute in the map
of each person’s life there.
Mothers weep as they search for their missing daughters (Malathi Maithri ‘Lost Tiger’), wives contemplate lives put on hold (Urvasi ‘Do You Understand?’), women mourn the loss of love as the war takes it toll (Faheema Jahan ‘The Sea’s Waters’). These poems stand as evidence of the flourishing of writing by women during the civil war, a response to the brutalisation of the world around them.
Lost Evenings, Lost Lives not only brings to a wider audience excellent Tamil poetry, it also performs an important political service. During the long years of the civil war, the government of Sri Lanka maintained a news blackout on events occurring in the North and East. The world was kept in ignorance of the atrocities being committed there, by both sides of the conflict. But during these dark times, Tamil poets were witnessing and writing about events unfolding around them. Holmström and Ebeling by translating these poems written under duress, state clearly that Tamil lives do matter and Tamil words will speak. As P. Ahilan writes in his poem ‘2005’:
together with those destined to bear witness
there I sat.
Lakshmi Holmström and Sascha Ebeling have not merely sat and watched. They have brought to light writings that need to be read, disseminated, discussed and appreciated, so that the world can never again say, we did not know.
Shash Trevett
A Sensitive Earthquake Zone
Yu Xiang, I Can Almost See the Clouds of Dust, translated by Fiona Sze-Lorrain, Zephyr Press and The Chinese University Press, 2013
Lan Lan, Canyon in the Body, translated by Fiona Sze-Lorrain, Zephyr Press and The Chinese University Press, 2014
It’s a miraculous thing, the give-and-take of translations across time and space. Mallarmé’s fascination with Poe’s ‘The Raven’ comes to mind, but also how, having translated it, Mallarmé then borrowed the poem’s mournful rhyme sounds (‘lore… door… more’) for his ‘Sonnet in –yx’ (‘amphore…sonore…’); and how English poets go on struggling to carry Mallarmé’s highly wrought verse across linguistic borders. Translators will say they undertake translations, in part, to enrich the linguistic and formal possibilities of the target language – but almost always, especially when the translator is also a poet, the enrichment begins at home.
The single most memorable instance of this expansion of possibilities in the recent past must be the discovery of classical (principally T’ang) Chinese poetry early in the twentieth century. The poems in Ezra Pound’s 1915 collection, Cathay, captured the imagination of English-language readers and poets, and have influenced English poetic writing from the Imagists, including Pound himself (‘Faces in a Metro’) and William Carlos Williams, to the work of a contemporary Chinese-American poet like Arthur Sze, as a few lines from ‘Chrysalis,’ in Sze’s 2009 collection The Gingko Light will show:
The wisteria along the porch never blooms;
a praying mantis on the wood floor sips water
from a dog bowl. Laughter from upstairs echoes…
Syntactical parallelism and juxtaposition of images, whose links to one another must be teased out, shape the page: Sze has said his poems are influenced ‘by the motion of classical Chinese poetry (in the way that a five or seven character line unfolds)… translating classical Chinese poetry was an essential stage in the development of my own poetry.’
That China’s influence on English language poetry is a two-way street is one thing Fiona Sze-Lorrain’s sound-conscious (Sze-Lorrain, a Singaporian who lives in France, is a musician as well as a poet) translations of two contemporary Chinese poets, Yu Xiang and Lan Lan, born in 1970 and 1967 respectively, demonstrates. For anyone used to the shape of T’ang poetry, it is striking to see the Chinese characters here fall down the left page, not in blocks, but in varying-length lines like English free verse. Grammatical parallelism is used and images can be simply juxtaposed as in classical Chinese poetry, but logical connectives and markers of time and place may complicate the syntax. Nature is present as we might expect, but so are cities and contemporary life with its pleasures, its technology and sciences, and its violence: the ineffable – the ‘“beyond words” towards which Chinese poetry has always tended’ (François Cheng, Chinese Poetic Writing) is de-emphasized. And whereas the suppression of personal pronouns in classical Chinese poems gives them an air of impersonality, in these two books, both by women, whose voices were rarely heard, though often impersonated in the classical poem, human dramas occupy the foreground, and the women shed their traditionally submissive, muse-like role, and become subjects in their own right.
Yu Xiang’s I Can Almost See the Clouds of Dust contains ten groups of poems (regrettably it is not clear, in either book, whether there is a chronology in the poems’ ordering) opening with ‘My House’:
I have a door, a reminder:
Be careful!
You might lose your way.
This is my house, a long narrow
hallway, a table with a view.
[…]
I have a chair. Sometimes
it disappears.
The language is plain, the syntax simple as a primer, the tone conversational. Several poems have irony-tinged socio-political comment (‘classroom buildings under construction | as cost-effective as possible, gaudy and pompous | even in a sensitive earthquake zone’), but most evoke the quotidian: love affairs, self-doubt, dysfunctional families, domestic activities (‘I squat on the balcony picking Chinese leeks’). Objects can seem surrealistically mysterious or menacing (the disappearing chair, above). The poems are often held together with repetition, as in ‘To the One Who Writes Poetry Tonight,’ a 10-page poem of precise detail, bribes of narration and something like prayer, punctuated with thoughts and feelings.
In Lan Lan’s Canyon in the Body the five groups of poems depict a range of personal experience (‘I am the book I once read | the wall I leaned on…| am a mother’s breast and a baby’s mouth’). If some of the tonal and syntactical ruptures in the earlier sections of her book are jagged (‘What is more is silence. | A secret magnetic needle among wild geese. || Many smiles emerge from the crowd… .’), leaps in the volume’s later poems are easier to follow. Here, for instance, is ‘Parasitic Bacteria’:
Abandoned mines, pits accumulated with water.
Stove fire in your chest is long out.
Could it have lived in blazing times
when we still didn’t know the cold?
I unbutton my blouse, let the sun dry
the damp moldy heaps of firewood –
Meant for two hands’ fiery flames, it is now
growing fungi absurdly.
Note the sure-footedness in the choice of sensuous detail, in the modulation of sounds (‘cold… blouse… firewood… flames… fungi’) and in the poem’s suggestive, metonymic shifts from cold to heat to mould. Why these images and not others? Some of the meaning-making here is up to the reader. Still, the lines give the feeling of saying more than first meets the eye.
To the Western reader Lan Lan’s and Yu Xiang’s poems will not seem particularly foreign: absent some of the props (‘steamed buns…rice fields’) most could be mistaken for English-language poems. This is partly due to English-language poetry’s adoption of some Chinese poetic techniques. But, as Gao Xingjian, author of the Nobel Prize-winning novel, Soul Mountain, and others have written, European languages and culture have also influenced the Chinese vernacular over the past century, moving it towards a more colloquial and syntactically complex language. Xi Jiang and Lan Lan know their classics but also clearly their contemporaries and antecedents in other parts of the world. These two books will enrich the growing body of contemporary Chinese poetry in translation; they will also expand the ways in which English readers and writers understand the Chinese poem.
Beverley Bie Brahic
The Artist and the Poet
Isao Miura and Chris Beckett, Sketches from the Poem Road, after Matsuo Bashō’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North, Hagi Press, 2015
This is a book brimming with translation, including but not restricted to the linguistic, a work inspired by the notion of continuous change and transformation. The journey starts when Isao Miura, a Japanese artist, through his sketches follows in the footsteps of Matsuo Bashō.
Bashō, the great seventeenth-century Japanese poet and Zen Buddhist, wrote about his precarious physical and spiritual journey through the landscape of his country, which included visits in honour of places associated with other artists. He cast away his possessions and his account is of four journeys, the longest of which ‘the long road’ lasted two and a half years and took him up to the north of the country, an area familiar to Miura but at that time an unexplored and mysterious territory. The Narrow Road to the Deep North and other Travel Sketches, is written in haibun, a combination of prose and poetry. This form and in particular the haiku poems, so perfect for capturing the fleeting moment of beauty and meaning in a landscape, also sets the tone of the book Sketches from the Poem Road.
The sketches are unfinished, preparatory, open to the world, and the book becomes itself with the contribution of poet and translator, Chris Beckett, whose name will be familiar to MPT readers for his collaborations with Ethiopian poets and his translations from Amharic. He initially encouraged Miura in his creations and then started to write in delicate response to Bashō, Miura at work, and to the sketches, his words scattered like touches of a paintbrush across the page.
The book is slightly larger than A4 and is designed as a sketchbook, although with high quality paper and print. Each page contains a charcoal sketch, or a group of words in Western cursive script or occasionally in a brush-stroked Japanese calligraphic character. Translations of Bashō and original work are differentiated by colour, with the translation in blue. Like the original, the form of the writing is haibun and it contains poems, exposition, description, as well as translation of Bashō’s lines by Beckett and Miura together. The visual impact of the book is significant. The writing has minimum punctuation, words are broken up by spaces and blend seamlessly with the calligraphic images and sketches.
In the Poetry Society exhibition in London that accompanied the book launch, a page stretched horizontally along the left wall representing the road, like a river, painted in a black wash over torn strips of paper. The road also fills the first facing pages of the book and is followed by sketches in pencil and charcoal of a little man walking, dwarfed by the landscape, figures communing in a group, one meditating, a man breaking out of a rock shaped like a teardrop, head high, determined, and myths of monsters and goddesses introduced in Bashō’s haibun re-surface on these pages.
The sketches were eventually to become the basis for two sculptures, plaster and bronze pieces, displayed at the end of the exhibition, the end of the road. Miura’s illustrations look back to his past and Bashō, but they also represent his artistic journey into the future. During the making of this book, he took up a fellowship in the Chelsea College of Art Foundry and for the first time worked in the three-dimensional forms of plaster and bronze, using the lost wax method of bronze casting. And the sculptures have also continued to change in the Foundry, moving through six transitions before the final cleaning, polishing and patination, to emerge in several versions, in green or silver or gold, each surface giving the work a different character.
Meanwhile Beckett watches Miura rest his pencil, like Bashō his pen, and rests his own pen in order to watch, just as Bashō halted on his journey to observe and write about life around him. Then Beckett, in light, sensual poems, picks up his pen again to describe Bashō’s journey, while watching Miura at work. A student/master relationship is suggested, mirroring Bashō and his disciple:
The teardrop of a fish
bursts out of its sketched eye
pear bottomed, weighty with plaster
fish-festooned on the road to bronze
I photograph you
turning it slowly on the stand
studying the little man
who steps so gently, resolutely out of it
just as this poem studies you
not photo-flat but in the amazing
all-around of your body
which bursts out of nowhere
every time I look at you
In this lovely poem a number of transitions take place and dimensions are explored. The teardrop of the fish is an image taken from Bashō:
Spring is leaving too!
Birds cry even the wet eyes
Of fish fill with tears
This becomes a sketch by Miura of the little man walking out of a tear-drop shape. The poet observes the artist, considers and photographs him, writes a poem, seeing his ‘all-around’ body like a moving sculpture, and through the intensity of his watching expresses his own feeling about him.
‘Lonely, sad – the landscape of a troubled mind’ was how Bashō described the volcano, Mount Chokai in Kisigata Bay in the north of the country towards the end of his journey. A hundred years after Bashō’s visit the volcano erupted. When he was in his teens Miura had a job as a guide leading tourists up that mountain and shortly afterwards it erupted for a second time. On each occasion the landscape was transformed. The ‘troubled mind’ and spiritual darkness are represented towards the end of the book by Miura in black monstruous images of the mountain, but it is followed by the one of the the man stepping out of the teardrop, a hard, rock-like teardrop, a strong final image.
MPT’s editorials and content have always suggested that the complex meanings inherent in ‘translation’ include the idea of making new, a work for now, at the same time as enriching our connection with the past. The sense I was left by this artistic collaboration was of a love poem in which two artists observe, work with one another, hesitate and progress together, their work transforming on its way, together with the great Japanese poet, Matsuo Bashō, their guide from four centuries earlier.
Caroline Maldonado
An exhibition of Sketches from the Poem Road is being held at the Glass Tank Gallery, Oxford Brookes University from Monday 20 June until Friday 15 July, 2016. The gallery will be open daily from 9am to 5pm, Monday to Friday, and weekends by appointment.
Further details on the project and Glass Tank Gallery websites:
•afterBasho.weebly.com
•www.brookes.ac.uk/about-brookes/events/glass-tank/current-and-forthcoming-events
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
ANAS AOLO, an Assyrian poet and dramatist from Baghdede, has published extensively in Iraq’s most respected literary journals, such as the literary organ of the Syriac Writers’ Union, Safrutha. He has received a number of awards for his poetry and plays. He is now living in a makeshift refugee camp in Ankawa, Iraq.
RACHEL TZVIA BACK is a poet and translator. Her translations of poems by Tuvia Ruebner in the 2014 bilingual collection In the Illuminated Dark: Selected Poems of Tuvia Ruebner, was shortlisted for the National Translation Award in Poetry and was a National
Jewish Book Award Finalist.
CHRIS BECKETT grew up in Ethiopia in the 1960s. His translation of poems by Bewketu Seyoum, In Search of Fat, was published by Flipped Eye in 2012 and his second collection of poems, Ethiopia Boy, came out from Carcanet/Oxford Poets in 2013.
VIKTOR BERBERI is Assistant Professor of Italian at the University of Minnesota, Morris. He has published English versions of contemporary Italian and Albanian poets and is currently working on a translation of the Selected Poems of Gëzim Hajdari, along with a critical survey of Albanian self-representation in Italian literature.
MANASH ‘FIRAQ’ BHATTACHARJEE is a poet, writer, translator and political science scholar. His poems have appeared in The London Magazine, New Welsh Review, The Fortnightly Review, Elohi Gadugi Journal, Mudlark, Metamorphoses, The Postcolonialist, The Missing Slate. His first collection of poetry, Ghalib’s Tomb and Other Poems (2013), was published by The London Magazine.
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