Poets on Translation: Swimming in Two Rivers

Poets on Translation is a series of short essays in which poets examine the intersections of poetry and translation in relation to questions of language, identity, authorship, and more.

In 1988, I walked into what I thought would be an 18th-century English novel class, a must for my graduation from Long Island University. Instead, I found myself in a creative writing workshop. As I turned to leave, the professor called out: “You’re in the right place!”

I stayed, sat down, and wrote my first story about a duck and hen on a farm.

“You have a story,” the professor commented, “and you told it like a poet. Start your book, now!”

I felt a sudden awakening, as if a Zen master had just whacked my head with a stick. I’d been dreaming of writing poetry since I’d learned to read and write, but had never dared to try. How did Professor Lewis Warsh know? What did he see in my little story?

I asked Danny, my then-fiancé in Montreal, if I should stay in NYC another year and try writing. “Ping, it’ll be easier to enter paradise than to get your work published with your second-grade English,” said Danny. “We have a wedding date. McGill offered you a full scholarship for an MBA degree. Your path is set: have kids and be rich!”

But it was too late. The seed of poetry had sprouted. I stayed with creative writing, which meant I wouldn’t be able to graduate on time to start my MBA at McGill. Danny was not happy, but he was willing to wait another year.

Lewis took me to my first poetry reading at the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church, where I met Allen Ginsberg, Anne Waldman, and other members of the New York School. The place filled my heart with wonder and excitement. It was a new world, but also felt familiar, something that had been part of my soul and flesh. I started going there twice a week, no matter how tired I was.

One day, Lewis called me: Ginsberg was seeking a translator to prepare for the first Chinese American poetry festival in America. Would I be interested? It’d be a one-year volunteer job—no pay.

I called Danny. I got a translation job. Would he wait a little longer?

He hung up on me, and I never saw him again.

That year, I worked as a waitress during lunch, took my afternoon English Literature classes at Long Island University, then went to Ginsberg’s apartment in the East Village to translate poems by Gu Cheng, Yang Lian, Bei Dao, Shu Ting, Jiang He, and other Misty School poets. I’d give my first drafts to Allen and his secretary Bob. They’d go over it with me line by line, then I’d work on the second, third, and sometimes fourth drafts, until they were finalized. I also translated Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, John Ashbery, and other American poets into Chinese. As I worked in Allen’s apartment, surrounded by his photos and listening to his wisdom, I realized how lucky I was to learn from the best poets in America and China.

It was then that I started writing and sharing my own poems with friends at the Poetry Project, where, in addition Ginsberg, Waldman, and Warsh, Ron Padgett, Kenneth Koch, Michael McClure, and Wanda Coleman, among other great poets, frequently read their work. With my “second-grade English,” I couldn’t understand everything they read; exhausted from a day’s work and studies, I’d often fall asleep during the readings. But their poems found their way into my sleep and I’d wake up with images for a new poem. The poets would tease me but also bring me food and clothes as they knew how hard I had to work as a student, immigrant, and aspiring poet. The Poetry Project became my new home.

At the same time, I was also writing Chinese poems and sharing them with poets and artists from China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong: Ai Weiwei, Yao Qingzhang, Qin Song, Tan Dun. We hung out weekly in our favorite restaurants in Chinatown. Ai Weiwei introduced me to artists such as Tehching Hsieh and Xu Bing. One day, I showed a poem to the Peng Bangzhen, an influential poet who helped establish modern Taiwanese poetry. When he published it in the magazine he cofounded, 意象 Imagery, another world opened for me.

This is how I began to swim in two rivers at once. In the beginning, they flowed in parallel: two languages, two tracks, two spirits, until the Poetry Project invited me to read at St. Mark’s Church. I was excited for my first poetry reading, but also nervous. I had only about 8 to ten decent poems in English, not enough to fill the half-hour slot. I tried to translate my Chinese poems, but soon realized that was impossible, because the poems seemed to come from a different author. In the Chinese poems, I was a good girl, following rules, striving to look pretty, stylish, pleasing. In the English poems, I was wild and daring, breaking rules, making trouble, playing, laughing, having fun.

I froze. All these years, my mother tongue had been guiding and governing me like a compass and whip, telling me where to look, what to see, how to feel and think, which way to go… till I walked into the wrong class and started writing in another language. A new star exploded. In English, I had limited toys to play with but was free to take things apart and make new things without a mother watching or pointing a finger. In this new world, I became keenly aware of every sound, syllable, and word, its history, its living surroundings. And how fascinating and refreshing it was! Even better, my heightened sensibility in English allowed me to give new eyes and ears to my mother tongue and discover its endless treasures, which I’d long ignored. I could no longer take Chinese for granted. Every character opened a new playground.

This is the gift translation has given me: an understanding of the poem as a kernel in which a civilization is embedded, and translation as the key to open that kernel.

To translate a poem, I must learn how to feel its emotions and the spirits embedded between words, lines, and stanzas. To feel a poem, I must feel the pulse of the culture the poet lives in, to absorb what it offers: pain, hardship, joy, language, and dreams. I must not take words for granted, words I use daily, rarely giving them a second thought. I must dig into the root of each word, follow its stem, branches, flowers, and fruit, and reach for the light, water, and soil that brought it to life. I must hear each word sing, watch it dance along with the words that come before, and after it; I must listen, also, to its silence. I must taste its chemical transformation as it moves across space and time on the page, beyond the page.

Is this what poetry is about, to see, hear, touch, and taste the world like a newborn? As Rilke advised the young poet: “Go within. Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depths of your heart […] Dig into yourself for a deep answer.” Translation can be a way to cultivate one's inner voice, and find that answer. That must be why so many master poets practiced translation: Snyder, Padgett, Friedrich Hölderlin, Ezra Pound, Sylvia Plath, Kenneth Rexroth, W.S. Merwin, Robert Bly, Paul Hoover… just to name a few.

When the Chinese American poetry festival ended, I decided to start a new project. I invited Padgett, Waldman, Ashbery, Ginsberg, Koch, Warsh, Simon Pettet, and many others to co-translate an anthology with me. To my delight, every poet agreed to collaborate on New Generation: Poems from China Today (Hanging Loose Press, 1999).

The process of creating this book involved me selecting a diverse group of China’s most interesting poets, translating the first draft, then matching each poem with an American poet, according to the poem’s style, rhythm, and inner voice. I started with Yu Jian. His work seemed straightforward but was deceptively layered, which made the translation really fun. I invited Padgett, known for his minimal flashes of humor and insight, as the co-translator. It was a perfect match as we both felt and understood Yu Jian’s intention, nuance, image, music, and dry humor.

After the anthology was published, Yu Jian turned the translation into a booklet to give away. A year later, at a book festival in Sweden, Yu Jian handed the booklet to Padgett, neither one knowing who the other was. As Padgett later told me, he started reading the booklet in his hotel and felt that he knew the poems. Then it hit him that he had translated them with me. Yu Jian and Padgett met the next day and have been best friends ever since. When Padgett got back to the US he asked if I’d be interested in translating a book of Yu Jian’s poems together. A few years later, Flash Cards came out from Zephyr Press.

Translating Yu Jian with Padgett was smooth sailing, as the poems synced with both our poetic sensibilities and styles. Though Padgett rarely made changes to my drafts, when he did, it often transformed the poem entirely. Here’s one sample from Yu Jian’s Flash Cards:

130

削苹果的女人
在黄昏中削下一片递给我
我接过来的时候 
碰到她有汁的手
 

Peeling an apple at dusk
she cuts a slice and hands it to me
I take it
from her hand wet with the juice
 

The draft I gave Ron didn’t have “an” before “apple” or “the” before “juice.” I still get confused by English prepositions as Chinese doesn’t have any. Ron explained that adding “an” to apple suggests mundanity—an ordinary day in the life of an ordinary couple doing ordinary things together. As Ron further explained, inserting “the” before juice transforms everything, imbuing this seemingly ordinary moment with love, and infusing the atmosphere with a sexual charge.

This is how I learned to find the gems of English, buried deep in the interplay between words, lines, and various contexts within a poem, with the guidance of American master poets.

In “A Glorious Day” Yu Jian reflects on time spent at Ron’s home in Vermont, soon after the three of us had completed the Vermont Studio Center’s writing residency together. In the elegant mountain cottage filled with paintings, collages and poems by the great American poets and artists, we brewed and sipped Yu Jian’s Pu’er tea, a special gift from his home in Kunming, Yunnan. Then Ron took us through the woods to visit Joe Brainard’s grave: a white giant rock brought there by Kenward Elmslie. The sun shone through the August woods, and the rock glittered as if on fire. We said nothing, but felt everything.

[…]—sunlight on everything
A white rock shines in the Vermont woods
That’s Joe Brainard’s grave an American poet
[…] […] bears and fallen leaves make way
White like a bone in his memory no words
[…] I touch the rock recoil as if scorched
So cold like the geniuses’ foreheads
Cool like a rock
In this world that burns like a furnace

That day, poetry entangled our spirits—not just me and Ron and Yu Jian, but also Elmslie and Brainard—together, transporting us from this world to that, like wind blowing through grasses, like the rock, scorching and cool at the same time, keeping us alive in this world. That was also the moment I felt the “pure language” in translation, where literalness and freedom come together as wind and rock, time and space, body and soul. 

In his essay “The Task of the Translator,” Walter Benjamin writes: “A real translation is transparent; it does not cover the original, does not block its light, but allows the pure language, as though reinforced by its own medium, to shine upon the original all the more fully.” A translator must be a superb critic, reader, writer, musician, artist; they must know more about a book than its first creator, in order to bring the content, form, time, place, and culture across and into another realm; they must know two worlds inside out, must swim back and forth with ease; they must have the knowledge and strength to move mountains together, not to merge them, but to bring them close to each other, to make a sacred place where the glacial ice from the peaks seeps into the soil and rocks, re-emerges, and runs down the valley with the most refreshing, nutrient-rich spring of poetry. Translators are magicians in the linguistic quantum world.

The moment I walked into the wrong classroom in NYC, in 1988, I stumbled into Ginsberg’s “rabbit hole” of poetry and translation, which led me on a journey of inner discovery: who I am, what I am, where I’m from, where I’m going. Translation reminds me that I’m never alone. I contain multitudes. I am connected to the stars and the planets, within and without.