Thoughts

More Vinod Kumar Shukla news: he's won the Jnanpith Award, one of India's most prestigious awards. The official site for the award doesn't seem to have been updated yet, though it's in a bunch of news stories out of India.

(Also! Literary Activism has put out an Indian edition of Treasurer of Piggy Banks. You can go there and read translator Arvind Krishna Mehrotra's introduction to Treasurer of Piggy Banks, as well as another piece he wrote about the poet.)

A launch for The Rust of History will be held in New York on March 3 at Bureau, 178 Norfolk Street. The event starts at 7 p.m., doors at 6:30.

Present will be:

Raquel Salas Rivera (Mayagüez, 1985) is a Puerto Rican poet, translator, and editor. He is the author of six full-length poetry books, which have been longlisted and shortlisted for the National Book Award, the Pen America Open Book Award, and the CLMP Firecracker Award. His honors include being named Poet Laureate of Philadelphia, the New Voices Award from the Festival de la Palabra, the Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Poetry, the inaugural Ambroggio Prize, the Laureate Fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship to translate the poetry of his grandfather, Sotero Rivera Avilés. He has co-edited the anthology, Puerto Rico en mi corazón (Anomalous Press, 2019), various folios, and the literary journal The Wanderer. This year he will participate in no existe mundo poshuracán: Puerto Rican Art in the Wake of Hurricane Maria at the Whitney Museum of American Art, whose title borrows a verse from his fourth poetry book while they sleep (under the bed is another country) (Birds, LLC, 2019). He holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory from the University of Pennsylvania and lives, teaches, and writes in Puerto Rico, where he also works as investigator and head of the translation team for El proyecto de la literatura puertorriqueña /The Puerto Rican Literature Project, a free, bilingual, user-friendly, and open access digital portal that anyone can use to learn about and teach Puerto Rican poetry.

Gabriel Carle (San Juan, 1993) completed a BA in Creative Writing from UPR-Río Piedras and an MFA in Creative Writing in Spanish from NYU. Their creative and academic research interests center on disaster poetics, queerness, race, gender, and migration in Caribbean literatures and cultures. In 2018, they published their first short story collection, Mala leche. They currently pursue doctoral studies at NYU Department of Spanish and Portuguese.

Willie Perdomo is the author of Smoking Lovely: The Remix, The Crazy Bunch, The Essential Hits of Shorty Bon Bon, and Where a Nickel Costs of Dime. Winner of the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Cy Twombly Award for Poetry, the New York City Book Award, and a PEN Open Book Award, Perdomo was also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Poetry Society of America Norma Farber First Book Award. He is co-editor of the anthology, Latínext, and his work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Washington Post, African Voices, and Best American Poetry 2019. He teaches at Phillips Exeter Academy and was appointed State Poet of New York, 2021–2023.

Ricardo Alberto Maldonado was born and raised in Puerto Rico. He is the co-editor of Puerto Rico en mi corazón and the translator of Dinapiera Di Donato’s Collateral/Colaterales (Akashic Press/National Poetry Series). His first collection of poems is The Life Assignment (Four Way Books). A recipient of fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, Queer|Arts|Mentorship and CantoMundo, he serves as the 92Y Unterberg Poetry Center’s Co-Director, and along with Raquel Salas Rivera, Enrique Olivares Pesante and Claire Jimenez, is part of El proyecto de la literatura puertorriqueña.

We've been a bit remiss on keeping this up. But a few things to note:

• Kulleh Grasi made an appearance at the Sami Pavilion of the 2022 Venice Biennale. His group of musicians, Kulleh Comrades, can be seen performing at the opening here (their performance starts at about 2:48). And his reading on the second day can be seen here (he starts at about 3:20).
• On May 9th at 7 p.m., there's a launch party for Pee Poems at the Powerhouse Arena in Brooklyn. Details here; it's in-person (!) and ticketed. Translator Lynn Xu will be reading; and it's also a launch for Line and Light by Jeffrey Yang, friend of Circumference and a member of our advisory board.

And Joshua Edwards keeps an updated list of events here – there might be more Pee Poems events if you're around New York!

1. Why did you decide to translate Pee Poems?

Lynn and I met Yang when we were all living at a residency in Germany, the Akademie Schloss Solitude. He quickly became a dear friend. Some years later, Yang visited the States and stayed at our home in Marfa for a couple of months, and while there he wrote part of Pee Poems. Until then we’d only known his sound and visual works, so when he shared some poems with us we were both blown away and not surprised by how amazing they are. We wanted to translate the collection partly as a way to stay connected with Yang, but mostly because the writing is fantastic and unique. Also, on a personal level, Lynn and I thought it would be nice to have a project that we could work on together when time allowed.

2. Can you talk about what it's like to translate a friend. I know that you couldn’t reach out to Lao Yang as you translated, but did knowing him guide your choices? Put a different kind of pressure on your approach?

We found the experience of translating a friend to be strange and often moving, and working on passages he’d written while living in our house at times felt uncanny. Yang is a very inspiring friend, so for me at least there was pressure to convey qualities of his person (equanimity, bravery, sincerity, modesty, brilliance) which show up in the writing but which are of course fuller than language, which have much deeper meaning in camaraderie.

3. What is one line or word or stanza that was particularly difficult to translate? How did you find the words we have here in the book?

There were a lot! Here’s an example, from the poem “Civil War of the Chinese Language,” in which Yang sometimes uses simplified and traditional characters to stage political conflicts in the written language: the first line is “优雅羞辱優雅”which sounds like “Yōuyǎ xiūrù yōuyǎ” and means something like “elegance humiliates elegance,” but the reader of Chinese will immediately see that the first appearance of yōuyǎ includes a simplified character for “yōu” (优), while the second uses the traditional character for “yōu” (優). There is of course no directly analogous drama in the English language, but there are certainly plenty of historical struggles which appear in English vocabulary, pronunciation, etc. Throughout the poem we used different methods to gesture at this. Our first line is “Elegance humiliates élégance.” This might transliterate some of the humor in some of Yang’s lines, and thinking on it now, it might also be traced back to a dinner I had with a bunch of friends at a restaurant in Paris, when a waiter scolded me for eating something the wrong way, and forced a fork into my hand. It was actually quite delightful and hilarious, but I guess I’ve been biding my time and this line is my revenge.

4. And what is one line where you feel like you found the perfect solution to a tricky moment?

I don’t know if there are any perfect solutions, but there were definitely moments where we felt like we’d stuck the landing. One example is the versified poem on page 108, which begins with a line in which the poet proclaims that the remaining lines should be “vigorously sung.” It’s got really nice prosody, which throws its subject into relief, so we did our best to reimagine the music in English. The last two lines in Mandarin are “Yīnwèi qiánbian yǒu pào shǐ / Qù wǎnle chī bùzháo,” which we translated as “Because a pile of shit’s up ahead / And if you get there late you get none.”

5. Every collaboration between translators looks different, and I wonder if you can talk about your process of collaboration and what that brought to the translations.

Lynn reads Chinese and speaks perfect Mandarin and Shanghainese. She also has an incredible ear for languages and poetry, so she did the heavy lifting when it comes to the first stage of translation. However, because of her closeness to Chinese and the fact that she only uses it with family, she sometimes had difficulty seeing the forest for the trees, so although I can’t read Chinese at all, I manage most of the second stage, once we have a literal translation—I work on crafting a consistent voice and try to ask the questions I feel exist between words. For Yang’s work, this was occasionally a matter of rooting out references to Buddhism, classical Chinese poetry, art, or ideas from radical politics, but more often it was a question of poetic resonance, like I’d know there was something going on, but I’d be unsure about what it might be, so we’d look into the subtle elements of the language: tuning our ears for homonyms, investigating references and sayings, looking closely at characters. The third stage of translation was the conversation we’d have about our questions and about Yang’s sensibility and thinking.

6. I know that you reached out to others in the process of translating this book. Can you talk about that, the different folks whose insights aided your work?

Lynn’s dad was the biggest help, because if we sensed a reference to a classical Chinese poem or some kind of colloquialism or aphorism, he’d usually know what was going on or be able to point us in the right direction for further research. The other folks who read the translation in manuscript were Yang’s friends we were in touch with regarding other matters, and although they didn’t offer notes on the translation (besides kind words, which were valuable), it was very helpful to discuss Yang, his work and life, and to think about his milieu.

7. Would you say you have a theory of translation, or a theory of translating Lao Yang?

Like Achilles in pursuit of the tortoise in one of Zeno’s paradoxes, the translator will never manage to arrive at the original text. I like to conceive of translation as an act which begins with curiosity and ends with conveyance, something akin to telling someone what someone else said, in a way that gets at how they said it—devoted to the author and to the art itself, but not so dutifully that the sparks of creativity and freedom disappear.

8. What is his other work like?

Yang makes things and does things that run the gamut from sound poetry to sculpture (for lack of a better word) to meditative erasure to performance. For example, he's got a project where he'll take a newspaper and meticulously cut out every appearance of the character for “person” (人). For another series I've seen, he photographs things, such as branches, which happen to look like “人”. He's done performances where he'll repeat a word loudly for very long period of time. He makes things out of clay. Yang has also been involved in the promotion of independent and experimental music, and for years he ran an artist space/store that was devoted to this. He's worked as an art teacher for kids and he's done some gardening. In all things, I think he's devoted to the flowering of life.

9. When readers open up Pee Poems, they’ll see the original Chinese poems facing the English, although many readers won’t know any of the characters. What can a non-Chinese reader get from paying attention to the Chinese pages? Or what do you hope their experience with the Chinese might be?

We’re so happy that Yang’s Chinese text is included in the book. The reader can decipher some formal qualities of the originals, which look really nice on the page, and even without knowing anything about characters, there are clues about word play in appearances and juxtapositions, such as in the aphoristic poem “人 从 众 / 众 从 人.” (This is one of the simplest poems to translate simply, but one of the most difficult in the context of the book. Literally it’s “Person from society / society from person.” In the end we went with “One of many / many of one,” partly because it weirdly echoes E pluribus unum—evoking some of the political and philosophical questions in the collection.) Maybe a reader has a friend who reads Chinese, and they can show them the facing texts and talk about languages and translation.

A quick note to point out an extraordinary review by Faisal Tehrani of Tell Me, Kenyalang in Malaysia Now. Tehrani is one of Malaysia’s most important contemporary writers. The review’s in Malay, but Pauline Fan has translated a few excerpts:

“There are some astonishing aspects to Kulleh’s work that I fell in love with immediately. I sense that Kulleh’s modern poems have deep roots in his world and identity.”

“Many poets from the Peninsula seem to me detached, distant, lethargic. They do not play with traditional poetry in their work. At times it feels like they are grasping. Kulleh is different. He creates from Leka Main, the root of Iban folk poetry.”

“Reading Tell Me, Kenyalang is like being welcomed as guests in a long house, eagerly waiting to see whether we will be invited to join a ‘miring’ or ‘biau’ ceremony (rituals performed with the accompaniment of incantations), until we are lulled into a trance between utterances of ‘sampi’.”

“Kulleh is the most noteworthy young poet of this decade. What’s even more remarkable is that Kulleh is a Malaysian poet, choosing to write in the national language with patches of dialect and local languages; this makes him a poet who is truly unique and exceptional.”