POETIC REFRACTIONS
CURATED BY JENNIFER FOSSENBELL
In Issue 4 of Spittoon, two poets performed creative translations of an ancient verse by Liu Yuxi. Their resulting poems enfolded a few of the multiple possibilities of language and creative processes, and each reflected the poet’s own language and identity, passed through the filter of the original quatrain.
In this segment of Issue 5, we have extended this concept by borrowing André Lefevere’s term refractions. Here are acts and responses surrounding literary texts that reveal a spectrum of interpretations—with the conventional notion of translation serving as just one of these. We can think of these alternate texts and images as having a kind of dynamic equivalency to some element of the original.
The idea of faithfulness is based on a fixed notion of identity. What else is possible when we approach poems as objects, made up of language of course, but also occupying spaces, creating sounds, forming images? And when we approach a poem — a work of art — made from the medium of a language we understand imperfectly or not at all, then what? How to prod the poem with a foreign tool and discover its life?
We can let some essence or energy of that poem travel through the prism of our experiences, language, or medium to project a spectrum of possibilities. The artists and writers here, who themselves occupy myriad linguistic and artistic worlds, were asked to approach a given Chinese poem and create from it a new work through interplay with its context, appearance, language, images, sound, or form.
The work proceeds in the spirit of experimentation — trying, risking, seeing what might erupt or seep out when we prod it. We hope to spark unlikely interactions between and among artists and their works of art, in all the many tongues they speak.
REFRACTIONS OF 知不死记 by 陈先发 Chen Xianfa
Put up the face in the shadow of the tree
Starlight stitched up enough
I must be this at the same time
A hidden needle is enough
printed cotton, Chinese colour, sucrose, thread 30cm diam
Stranded Stardust
by Niamh Cunninham
There were different phases of interpreting Chen Xianfa’s poem. I first took the pinyin and translated one character per line, resulting in an overall ironic message, Why do we torment ourselves with intellectual challenges? Three days later, I took the full translated version and came again to the theme of struggle, as well as that of unreliable memory. The imagery in the poem of stitched starlight in the shadow of a tree was striking to me in terms of memory retention. So I chose a digital image that I had never worked with previously. Human intellectual struggles are reflected in the patchy light of tree shade imagined on a face uplifted to the heavens. Interventions of the image included sewing the cotton with thread, as well as using my sucrose technique, in which I pulled the ink from the digital image and mixed it with blue Chinese colour and sucrose, then waited to see how the crystallization developed. Crystallization obscures and shifts the ink with time, before eventually obliterating the surface view.
There Is One Window
by Jaime Santirso
吃 To eat dead birds served 中 in porcelain
resembles a 南 southern firmament turning 酿 claret
until finally having 的 of perennial memories 够 enough。但 Nothing but one
left foot moving a few inches 前 forward.
跨 To stride in small 步 steps or 懂 to understand
an open 嘴 mouth requires先 firstly to understand
whether air is entering or leaving 它 it.
站 To station bone and tissue at foreign 处 places
brings echoes听 heard in a子 child’s first joke
until finally having of 读 reading tea leaves够 enough。但 Nothing but one
right foot moving a few inches
前 forward. 跨 To stride in even smaller 步 steps
or让 to let that least breath
begin 又 again requires firstly阻 to block its way 出 out.
Of 飞 flying though time 够 enough. Nothing
but 一 one of the smallest steps is够 enough.
是 Yes – there is 人 someone.
把 Hold all which has been 与 offered.
Of 星 shining stars 够 enough.
我 I command 这 this.
Of 隐 hiding places 够 enough.
A 清 clear view is 够 enough.
To 不 not not be is 够 enough.
是 Yes – there is one 窗 window.
又 Again the sky is now 红 red.
Peruvian poet Lezama Lima used to say that an artist is like a spider—each has their own private space within reality, a spiderweb, entirely self-made. In this literary experiment I have aimed at respecting Chen Xianfa’s spiderweb while sewing new threads in between. This procedure relies on the difference between a concept-based writing system as in Chinese and a phonetic-based alphabet as in the Latin. I have kept the first and last character of each verse, taking them by one of their many meanings, and then spun a new web of words around each character to create an entirely different text.
Refractions of 红小鬼 by 星芽 Xing Ya
ANOTHER ONE
by Una Yan
As I know Chinese, I read this poem a couple of times—more like I ate the poem, or it ate me. I completely placed myself into it, and it in turn entered into me. Then I started drawing immediately. This poem reminds me of justice and injustice. I used the red and the flying creature to echo the title; the extreme black and white surrounding the figure whose brain is heavy—who has forgotten that there are still many adjectives in its vocabulary. Then a golden-colored wish that, like magic, can make a person real, help him/her to exist and grow in space.
AS IF TO GO
by Jack Calder
I have attempted to translate Xing Ya’s poem visually, character by character, without any knowledge of Chinese. This means to see the characters as images. To see “值,” for example, as a wide figure holding a walking stick. This I translated as “Old Woman.” But seeing is not always so simple. Images may be seen as symbols, gestures, jokes, idioms, surfaces, artworks. I have chosen to see each character in a way that seems appropriate to its atmosphere. Surrounding my poem is the lexicon I developed from this act. The poem was arranged from an attempt to read the secret thread of this lexicon, as one might try to make sense of the series of images of a movie. Even if I have achieved nothing else, I hope to have exposed some of the seams of the act by which image becomes word becomes poem.
Stolen Hope
by Iman Jabrah
علمنا العلماء
لكن لا نرى
تلك العنكبوت على الصنيم المهجور
غبار ترفد من على كتفها
نورها يضيء نافذتنا
لكن لن نكن
أن نرى ما بين الثانية والدقيقة
عالم يغوي
ننسى البصريات
صوت الصدى على صباح الربيع يتباعد
أغسل وجهي بماء الحياة
رنين الأمل يحرث ذبيبات أفكارنا
تتصاعد تراث أصولنا
تروينا بما كانت أحلامنا
أنظر على كف يدي
خطوط لا هي مظلمة منقوشة
على يد مغلفة بألوان مذنبة تتلاشى
من لائحات معلقة بمتاحف الكاتدرائية
أغوار رائحتها حكايات الزمن
والنور لا يضيع
scientists have taught us to see
but we choose not to see—
a spider falls on the stilled Buddha
dust comes off her shoulder
its light shines on the glass
in absence we were / in absence & in presence we were
to see between the second and the minute
the echoes of the spring morning diverge
I wash my face with the water of life
cultivate shattered thoughts
we reach out to our rooted heritage
I look at the palm of my hand
patterned with lines, which are not dark, I watch
hands covered with guilty colors dissolve from canvases
hanging on columns at the cathedral museums
the smells of time
sparkling angels come to guide us
to the hallway where the light is not lost
and the light is not lost
Working on a Chinese poem with little knowledge of Chinese language, I challenged myself to understand the poem as much as possible by consulting with multiple Chinese native speakers and synthesizing their interpretations. This Chinese poem holds a universal meaning corresponding to transformation and having a second chance at battling temptation and the drive through desire to commit contradictory moral acts. I decided to respond to the Chinese poem with an Arabic poem, which isn’t the Chinese poem word by word, but holds a familiarity from within. Then I continued on and followed the same process, responding to the Arabic poem with an English poem.