What Sparks Poetry:
James Shea on Yam Gong's "Startling Hair"
"My co-translator Dorothy Tse and I, however, took a small gamble by shifting to present tense for the speaker’s memories. We felt there was an opportunity to signal the fluid sense of past and present in the Chinese, so we used an em dash to prepare the reader for a shift in temporal perspective. Tense cannot be avoided in English, so by mixing verb tenses in the translation, we tried to dislodge the reader from being fixed in a single tense." |
|
|
"Sandra Simonds on Piecing Together Poetic Puzzles"
"Early Surrealist exercises helped me to appreciate the element of surprise, luck and play that enters into language—'play a role'—seems like a perfect phrase: we play, we 'roll the dice' (as Mallarmé says), and we also role-play—our poems are little actors singing various woes and ecstasies of the self, and sometimes they are just Beckett-like voices grumbling in the dark."
via LIT HUB |
|
|
|
|
|
|
