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What’s in a Tweet?

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Pentametron collects tweets that happen to be written in iambic pentameter, then pairs them up in rhyming couplets. Some are absurd –

Perceiving beauty is a moral test

Velveeta macaroni is the best

some, gently melancholy –

White people don’t belong in basketball

Lost sirens waiting for the siren’s call

while some wax philosophical –

The darkest nights provide the brightest stars

The weirdest people have the nicest cars.

I love the idea of the “found” poem – the idea that there’s poetry in newspaper headlines, cereal boxes, the graffiti on bathroom walls. And writing them is a good way to surprise yourself, to stop thinking linearly and literally.

Tear up your rough draft, and rearrange the pieces.

Rearrange the lines of the next mass email you get at work.

Start a poem with the overheard words of a stranger.

Just finished reading Twilight. What.The.Fuck.

Amok amok amok amok amok

The deep work of translation

Text of Li Shang Yin's poem

The full text of Li Shang Yin’s poem

I came across a poem recently in a Walter Jon Williams book. It was lovely and wistful and I thought I’d post it here, but when I went looking for the name of the translator by way of Google, what I found was five different translations.

Here’s one version, author unknown.

Sent North on a Rainy Night
Li Shangyin

You ask me what time I’ll return, but I cannot give a time,
The rain in the hills of Ba at night overflows the autumn pools.
When can we trim the candle together by the western window,
And talk together of the rain in the hills of Ba at night?

It’s evocative, but the arrangement of words in English is a little clumsy, especially the last line with its four prepositional phrases.

Here’s version two, translated by Francis Chin:

You ask when I’m coming, I do not know

It’s autumn and the night rain

is flooding the mountain pool.

When can we trim the wicks again by the window

When can we talk all night while the

mountain rains?

This one was obviously translated by a poet; it’s got a repeated structure (“When can we / When can we”) and I especially like “while the/mountain rains.” Chin helpfully presents two more options, one by Lien Wen Sze and Foo Check Woo:

You ask the date of my return

I know not the date

On this mountain

the night rain

brims the autumn lake

When shall we

By the west window

Together trim the candle

And recollect this moment

A rainy night in the mountain.

This one takes advantage of English words with near rhymes: date/lake. But the word “date,” in English, is kind of – well – quotidian, unpoetic. It pulls you out of the lyricism of the poem. On the other hand, “When shall we/By the west window/Together trim the candle” has a nice staccato punch.

And this one, by Witter Bynner: 

You ask me when I am coming, I do not know
I dream of your mountains and autumn pools brimming all night with the rain
Oh when shall we be trimming wicks again, together in your western window
When shall I be hearing your voice again, all night in the rain?

Where before, the narrator and the listener “spoke,” now the narrator misses something specific: “your voice.”

And finally, translator Catherine Platt wrote in detail about her process of translation here.

Sent North on a Night of Rain
By Li Shangyin

You ask when I’ll return

I don’t yet know

In the Sichuan hills it rains tonight,

Autumn pools overflow.

When will we trim the candle

By the west window again,

Recollecting this time,

The Sichuan hills, this night of rain?

Platt notes, ” ‘Ba Mountain’ refers to the ancient kingdoms of Ba and Shu, which were situated in Sichuan. Since ‘Ba’ doesn’t carry any resonance in English, I translated it as ‘Sichuan.’ ” What does she mean by ” ‘Ba’ doesn’t carry any resonance in English”? I think she made the decision based on its syllabic count. “In the Sichuan hills it rains tonight” does have a lovely rhythm in English, but the name “Ba” also has a sonorous authority quite different from “Sichuan.” What I love about this translation is those last two lines; now the two people are not speaking at all, but recollecting. Their silence is deep with longing.

Are you still with me after falling down that rabbit hole? And which one did you prefer? Did the one you liked best seem like the most honest translation?

Each of these translators has had to make numerous compromises and artistic decisions about these four lines of poetry. If nothing else, my little Google experiment highlights how complicatedthe work of literary translation really is. Once a piece of writing goes through this process, it’s really not a singular entity anymore; it’s two things, or more – it’s manifold, multiplicitous. It has acquired facets or pocket universes like the eleven dimensions in string theory. It can’t be reduced back to one thing. And for those of us who will never read Chinese characters, there’s a powerful element of ambiguity in our appreciation of the work.

This reminds me of a debate I had with my mother about one of my favorite books, Peter Høeg’s Smilla’s Sense of Snow (Frøken Smillas fornemmelse for sne). I first read, and love, the Tiina Nunnally translation, but my mother could never get into it.

Høeg’s prose, via Nunnally’s translation, is both crystalline and elliptical, and that’s of a piece with the subject matter: the structure of ice, human venality, and biracial identity (along with a lovely idea called “absolute space” – seriously, I adore this book). After not much caring for the book and giving up on it, my mother stumbled across an earlier translation titled, more literally, “Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow.” In this translation, the language is dry and straightforward, and the magic, for me anyway, is completely gone. When I started comparing the two, I felt queasy and betrayed; my attachment to the Nunnally translation was that strong. My mother, on the other hand, found this version much more readable: it was the difference, perhaps, between a murder mystery and a mystery/meditation on liminal spaces.

So here’s my dilemma: which version is more truly Peter Høeg’s book? Is my impression of Høeg’s themes really just an artifact of the translator’s work? Going by Høeg’s other books, I feel pretty comfortable asserting that he really was writing about liminal spaces using liminal techniques. But can I be sure? No. Not unless I learn to speak, and think in, Danish. And is the version my mother likes any less valuable? I’d argue that if it allowed her into the book, then that version was more valuable to her.

Translation is complicated. It is an act, simultaneously, of intent and of self-effacement on the part of the translator. It is an act which adds layers to a work of literature, which complicates it irrevocably. Ultimately, the very fact that translation leaves so much uncertainty is part of its pleasure. A difficult pleasure.

I never did locate the exact translation of Li Shang Yin’s poem that Williams quoted. Was does it do to my perception of the poem that I read that version first? Can I come to the poem anew? There’s something impossible about the whole experience. The more I explored, the more confused I became, the more nuanced an idea I had of the original. And yet, I can never really get right next to the original text. This experience of translation, I think, is part of the experience of poetry. Perhaps it’s the other side of how, in the writing of poetry, it’s impossible to ever say exactly what you mean. We embrace both as part of poetry’s difficult soul.

You ask when I will return

The time is not yet known.

Night rain overspills the autumn pools

on Ba Shan Mountain.

When shall we trim a candle at the western window

And speak of this night’s mountain rain?

 

Postscript.If you love speculative fiction / poetry crossovers, you must read Guy Gavriel Kay’s Under Heaven.

Post-postscript. The Walter Jon Williams book is, appropriately enough, Implied Spaces.

The practice of imperfect

So I re-started a practice I used to do: write a poem every night, before sleep. It’s the time when I’m most relaxed, and least coherent. I have no to-do list. I have no expectations. Most nights it’s hard going. I have a habit of trying to explain everything, describe it to death. I’m pedantic, dry, scholarly. I keep banging away at an idea, but there’s no magic. The results are deadly.

But some nights, I’m lucky. Some nights a good line will just arrive. As Mark Doty puts it in The Art of Description:

It’s a familiar experience to poets, that arrival of a phrase laden with more sense than we can immediately discern, a cluster of words that seems to know, as it were, more than we do.

More and more, I’m looking forward to this exercise, maybe forty minutes in all, when I write down, “Write a poem. What poem?” and then just begin. What am I going to write about? I might come with an idea – write about camellias, how they bloom in December; or write about the ragged ear of a friend’s tomcat – but I almost never get anything out of these mental notes. No. It’s the thing I don’t want to write about that owns all the energy in the room. While discoursing on the cool and scentless camellia blossoms, some complaint will come up, a statement of longing or loathing. If I’m smart, I’ll willingly go off on that tangent.

I suffer occasionally from a whole night’s worth of insomnia – it was on one of those nights, in a state of exhaustion and gloom, that I wrote – “the blue soak of dawnlight” – and in that phrase was a strangeness and an energy. Something melancholy and synesthetic. The draft took on momentum from there.

Homo aestheticus

Shell beads from Blombos Cave, South Africa

Shell beads made 75,000 years ago

In Blombos Cave on the rocky coast of South Africa, archaeologists have been carefully excavating the earliest known examples of human art and jewelry – carved pieces of ochre and shells with holes drilled in them. It’s humbling to realize that we are heirs to an art-making legacy 75,000 years old.

For me, what is really important is here, for the first time really ever, we have evidence that people can store information outside of the human brain.

– Archaeologist Christopher Henshilwood, NOVA: Becoming Human

I love the way Henshilwood articulates it, that art is most essentially this: information stored outside the human brain. Art makes the inner life tangible in the outer world.

James Franco, for better or worse

James Franco, multi hyphenate

Today’s poetry-in-pop-culture moment is brought to you by actor/filmmaker/writer/serial-degree-acquirer James Franco. Going by Franco’s occasional poem for the inauguration (you can read it here), he’s got some maturing to do as a poet, despite attending the best low-res MFA program in the country and having a book forthcoming from Graywolf Press. As the recent Details interview notes of Franco’s writing, “It’s a huge body of work, running the gamut from brilliant to unbearable, at times in the same piece.” Sample lines of a poem composed specifically for the interview:

Mostly at Columbia where the students are brats
And they pay so much money they want results

Instantly, so how can you blame them for hating
A Hollywood boy who gets his book published
Right out the gate, and gets to do movies, and date
Whomever he damn well pleases, like a one ton Pink
Elephant in the room, whom everyone wants to shoot
But no one does, because they’re all begging for peanuts.

On the one hand, I love that an artist can get a magazine like Details to write, even tangentially, about poetry. And Franco seems enthusiastic about art, and thinking about art, and I hate to bash those qualities. There’s nothing to be gained by overly harsh criticism of new writers.

On the other hand, the Franco poems I’ve read so far are wearyingly self-obsessed and gratingly unmusical. Franco reports of his time at Warren Wilson, “there is still a heavy emphasis on craft…” Too bad he doesn’t seem to have taken that emphasis to heart. In a culture that’s at best indifferent and at worst hostile to my favorite art-form, Franco’s position in pop culture gives his poetry incredible visibility. James, please: put better poems out in the world.

Because whether you like it or not, you’re representing.

Little cat feet

A fifteenth century manuscript in Dubrovnik, Croatia – with cat footprints. Antique “aaawww!”

Kitty feet. It's like iambic pentameter, only shorter.

And an appropriate poem I just became acquainted with. I love the internet.

Pangur, white Pangur, How happy we are
Alone together, scholar and cat
Each has his own work to do daily;
For you it is hunting, for me study.
Your shining eye watches the wall;
My feeble eye is fixed on a book.
You rejoice, when your claws entrap a mouse;
I rejoice when my mind fathoms a problem.
Pleased with his own art, neither hinders the other;
Thus we live ever without tedium and envy.

– W. H. Auden

Emily Dickinson, solitude, gender – you know, the usual psychological thriller topics.

In which Emily Dickinson gets a shout-out on the radio, and I do a little fangirly squee-ing.

NPR's All Things Considered had an interview today with novelist Gerbrand Bakker about his novel Ten White Geese. 

Bakker quotes this Emily Dickinson poem:

Ample make this bed.
Make this bed with awe;
In it wait till judgment break
Excellent and fair.

Be its mattress straight,
Be its pillow round;
Let no sunrise' yellow noise
Interrupt this ground.

…and says of the poem, "It's a very short, but mysterious, poem. I think maybe it is really one of the reasons for me to write this book, to try to really understand, to really feel this poem."

The narrator of the book is a middle-aged woman, and Bakker goes on to say, "I am a strange man, maybe, but I think that there is no fundamental difference between men and women. A lot of people would say otherwise, perhaps."

That pretty much filled of my quota of awesome for the day.