On Yi Lei’s poetry
One way of organizing YI Lei’s work would begin with “Talking to Myself.” The poem---built upon repetition, using dashes to expound upon and to reframe a previous assertion, arriving at a conclusion implicit in but never contained by the first line—exemplifies the techniques discernible throughout YL’s corpus. And in addition to what we might call the tools of her poetics, the poem overtly states a misgiving latent in the volume: am I—making and remaking the image of black hair, disinterring the multiple contradictions of desire, remembering the person and the influences of my mother—merely dialoging with myself?
Lei opens a space easily populated with the specters of existential terror, but is masterfully able to preserve, structurally speaking, this uncertainty without incurring in flat despondence or the monotony of anxiety. Stoic at times, her poetic voice is incisive and observant, condensed in lapidary phrases, most immediate when she develops an archetypal image or traces the vicissitudes of her own heart, those two extremes which in her writing not only touch but begin to coalesce. After “Summer” conflates the expanse of the natural world with the enormity of human consciousness, intimating that the zenith of life necessarily forebodes its decay, the repeated word past—a geographic suggestion that becomes also a chronological marker—of “In the Distance” re-contextualizes the allegedly exhaustive space of “Summer” and pursues a horizon that’s also the borne of Lei’s poetic inquiry. Is there any material, objective existence on the other side of its optical or lingual representation or does the poetic image, like the string of adjectives in “Red Wall,” redound upon the consciousness that engendered it?
In my view, these are the imponderables which YL’s unassuming, always searching poetry explores.
About Jeremy Tiang
If two speakers say the same thing twice in as many weeks—and presumably sans collusion between themselves—I gather it may be important. Tiang, as did Allen, argues for the instability of a text. Where EA pointed out the impossibility of reading Di Benedetto apart from Argentina’s political upheaval and the author’s subsequent incarceration, JT spoke of the differences between American/British Englishes and the unique challenge of moving humor from Chinese into both. Although without dispelling the commonplace notion of things being lost in translation, Tiang also extends the possibility that things can be gained, as when he stumbled upon a pun that hadn’t occurred in the original.
Always interested in new analogies for the translator’s work, I felt an especial accord with JT’s comparing a translation to an audiobook, a format in which I indulge almost daily. Of course a translation presents a text to its readers. But it is also a performance of that text and calls for evaluation as such. Furthermore, in JT’s willingness to make textual changes in order to harmonize his sensibility with that of the original and to “get the spirit of the lines across,” while always honoring the source and staying true to its essence, I found an explanation which encapsulates my current way of working. I too feel like a kind of Meryl Streep, modulating my written voice in accordance with the literary demands of the moment yet unable to be other than the translator that I am.
One addendum. His ironic observation that a work, after accruing a certain critical mass of prestige, stops being viewed as translation—although it continues to be so—seemed spot on. Recalling my first meanderings through Hugo, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky, I can report that I approached their novels as if they’d been written in English and didn’t considering them via the twofold paradigm of text/performance which JT espouses and I, since coming aboard here at BU, am learning to apply.
-Josh
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