REVIEW: ‘River East, River West’ by Aube Rey Lescure – reviewed by Susie Gordon
DECEMBER 9th 2023
RIVER EAST, RIVER WEST
Aube Rey Lescure
Duckworth Books, publishing 25th January 2024
pp 339
The best books are the ones whose charactes you think about even when you’re not reading; the ones you miss when you reach the end. Aube Rey Lescure’s River East, River West is one such book. The novel takes its name from the two halves of the city of Shanghai – Pudong (east of the Huangpu River) and Puxi (west of the Huangpu) – where segments of the narrative takes place. Told in an exquisite literary yet strikingly accessible style, the novel interweaves the stories of the two main protagonists with aplomb.
Aube Rey Lescure is a French-Chinese-American writer who grew up between Shanghai, northern China, and the south of France. During her upbringing in Shanghai, she lived in both the colonial-era concessions of Puxi and the futuristic skyscrapers of Pudong, only coming to understand the dichotomies and divisions of the city until she was a teenager. It is partly her unique insight into a biracial, third-culture identity played out in a city like Shanghai that powers River East, River West.
The characters experience (and embody) many of the divisions of modern China itself. The novel opens in Shanghai in 2007, and focuses on fourteen-year-old Alva, who is perturbed by her American mother Sloan’s engagement to their wealthy landlord, Lu Fang. Then, the focus shifts to Qingdao, in 1985, where Lu Fang is a lowly shipping clerk who harbours hopes for a brighter future despite being haunted by memories of the Cultural Revolution. With China opening up to foreigners and capital, Lu Fang meets an American woman – Sloan – who shifts his perspective and makes him question his life trajectory. Decades later, Lu Fang marries Sloan, forcing him and Alva together as step-father and step-daughter.
Both threads of the narrative are supremely engaging, with settings and characters that never descend into Orientalising caricature or cliché the way many “China novels” do. This is testament to the authenticity of Rey Lescure’s voice. Her writing is sharp, dry, and often witty, with an unfussy empathy that makes the characters appealing even in their darker moments.
Of her novel, Rey Lescure writes “Nowadays, when China is always in the news in relation to the specter of global coflict, I wanted to immerse readers in the daily lives and private dreams of these characters – their commutes and supermarkets, their jealousies and dramas, their heartbreaks and desires.” In this, she has very much succeeded. Yet outside of the microcosm of quotidian dramas, Lescure paints with wider brushstrokes a portrait of a country that is as complex and multifaceted as the novel itself.
Aube Rey Lescure has a BA from Yale University. She has worked in foreign policy, and has coauthored and translated two books on Chinese politics and economics. She was an Ivan Gold Fellow, a Pauline Scheer Fellow, and an artist-in-residence at the Studios of Key West and Willapa Bay AiR. Her fiction and creative nonfiction have appeared in Guernica, The Best American Essays 2022, The Florida Review online, and more. She is the deputy editor at Off Assignment. www.aubereylescure.com
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REVIEW: ‘The Vanguards of Holography’ by Annie Christain (reviewed by Johnny Payne)
DECEMBER 4th 2023
THE VANGUARDS OF HOLOGRAPHY
Annie Christain
Headmistress Press, 2021
99 pp.
When speaking of “The Vanguards of Holography,” one is first tempted to speak of pop culture, as the volume’s tutelary spirits tend toward epigraph figures such as Kanye West, Billy Corgan, and Patton Oswalt. But a more proper place to begin is with the French avant-garde poet Francis Ponge, beloved interpretive object of Jacques Derrida. His poem “The Telephone,” published bilingually in Poetry Magazine in September 1952, provides a suitable point of reflection.
From a portable base with a felt sole, dependent on five yards of wire of three kinds which twist without impairing the sound, a crustacean is unhooked and gleefully buzzes…
While between the breasts of some siren under a rock a metal point vibrates.
Nothing comes out of nowhere. After all, this volume overtly touts its lineage in the title. Its poems take us afresh to the fascination of the surrealists and Dadaists, the “historical avant-garde,” with all things modern. They often brought a childlike wonder, combined with adult sass, to emerging forms of technology, seeing them less as instrumental life improvements and more as sites to marvel at, but also to prompt thoughts of decay, destruction, death, those alliterative counters to life, as in Guillaume Apollinaire’s “There Is”:
There is this ship which has taken my beloved back again
There are six Zeppelin sausages in the sky and with night
coming on it makes a man think of the maggots from which the
stars might someday be reborn
There is this enemy submarine slipping up beneath my love…
There is this infantryman walking by completely blinded by
poison gas.
With appreciable wit, Annie Christain catalogues relentlessly the techno-phenomena surrounding us, defamiliarizing them by staging the multiple anxieties about them of the speaker, persona, often undecidable as she/he/it/they. This being is mutable, alternately tormented by basic yet outrageously physical processes, yet strangely calm and even seemingly in control, even on the verge of being overwhelmed, as in “O.K., Miles Per Hour”:
No one cares about keeping the details right in period piece movies anymore—don’t you get it?
I only have until the next solar eclipse to figure out what a sun-body is and how I lit it.
<We’re kind of like attached to a moving dry cleaner conveyer roller where
duplicates of ourselves are assigned to other hangers.>
Whichever self we choose to embody is the front— I’m on the rooftop terrace because Einstein said that’s where my space-time won’t bend as much—keep up.
The world presented seems a flat simulacrum, even when it has four dimensions. There is no real history available. The closest one may come is “keeping the details right in period piece movies anymore.” And even that forlorn reality is at a remove from a remove, the best case being to “lose oneself” in a costume drama, rather than in history itself.
“We’ll Always Have Terracotta Warriors Dusted in Han Purple, Never Looking Behind” presents what Roland Barthes referred to as a “fictive nation.” In this faux place, real heartbreak isn’t strictly possible. Rather, we are given a simulation of what that heartbreak might look like, when viewed as a radiograph.
What remains of the warriors is what my outside body was from the start—very ill, but human-looking from ten feet away or more. The Han Purple stacks the air unevenly, and my core self walks away on that grand staircase. My favorite concubine may think she left me, but two thousand years on Earth is ten minutes to me in the upper dimension, so here it’s like it never happened.
One thinks of Duchamp’s “Nude Descending a Staircase,” a visual representation of the seemingly nonsensical phrase “outside body,” rather a body in motion promoting the idea that there could be a core self both psychologically and physical separate from all the other selves. This should be normal in our age, according to the poet, governed by a flux of time in which two thousand years is equivalent to ten minutes, when it’s in the “upper dimension.”
The poems in this collection are full of that kind of offhand fireworks. It would be a mistake to think that “Vanguard” doesn’t offer emotional depth of a kind, but it plays out and pays out slowly, the “I” too dispersed to isolate a single event, except as an ever-evolving displacement. One may have a favorite concubine, but that lover, like the self, is always already multiple. One cannot speak of things phantasmagorical because everything manifests as real. Everything is visible, in plain sight, but it simply shows as continuous flux. If one contemplates it long enough, Duchamps’ nude is moving because it is moving.
A tacit longing floats through these pages, as in “I’m From the Earth Where Only Three Astronauts Walked on the Moon.” There exists a wistfulness about the fact that in such a dynamic, hard-charging universe, everyone’s hyper-elevated consciousness makes it nearly impossible to connect in the quietly contemplative ways that were presumably easier before Einstein, Oppenheimer, and the space age.
Now I’ll never be able to touch a naked woman
whose skeleton has holes behind the eye sockets.
This submerged sorrow can only be expressed in isolated phrases, in a passing manner, as the poet-seeker-I-you-we-them-he-she-they labors without cease to amalgamate into a sentient self. And even the most degraded of human activities is more clinically, impartially watched than ultimately judged. From “Rolling on the Floor with Punches”:
Watching snuff films at computers, a man on clipboard taking notes. Blink twice.
In these poems, it is less relevant to speak of similes and symbols than it is to speak of phenomena. Yet in the ingenious and theatrical, yet resolutely prosaic presentation of them, one gets suddenly surprised by lyricism.
When you can still discern my burned initials through an adult film star’s tattoo concealment, her authentic crystallization still happened no matter what, bringing out her Diamond Man, and that’s important to reveal.
In a book unafraid of ostentation, I find myself over the life of its pages becoming increasingly aware of its moral center and ethical compassion. I couldn’t decide whether the author was modulating as she went, or whether I was, like Duchamp’s nude, gradually catching up with myself.
— Johnny Payne
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REVIEW: ‘Night Jasmine’ by Goran Gatalica (Miho Kinnas)
DECEMBER 19th 2022
Publisher: STAJER GRAF, Zagreb, Hrvatska (Croatia)
Editors: Emiko Miyashita, Geethanjali Rajan, Marina Bellini, Dejan Pavlinocić, Sanela Pliško, Tomislav Maretić.
Price: 18 € (135kn)
**
A new book of haiku, “Night Jasmine” by Goran Gatalica, is a book of concentration. Not only because haiku is the art of close attention, but clearly, tremendous efforts and coordination have gone into creating this beautiful book.
A dark-red, transparent semi-circle over the Jasmine blooms is striking on the cover. The bilingual title, printed vertically in a calligraphy font, is the swing of the double swords. The book consists of one hundred fourteen haiku written originally in Croatian are translated into six other languages; the informative prose sections are in Croatian and English.
The haiku appear in the four-season chapters with the symbolic section titles – Passing cloud, Searing Heat, Wind Chimes, and Scent of Snow – respectively. Artistic calligraphy accompanies each subtitle. Each haiku in seven languages occupies a page. (The introduction named Croatia, USA, France, Italy, Czech Republic, India, and Japan.)
Those who understand two or more languages appreciate the challenge of haiku translation: “A thorny path,” once a veteran translator characterized the process. Considering the lack of any commonality between English (or Croatian) and Japanese in vocabulary or grammatical elements, the translations in this paring require additional considerations; the satisfaction of successful outcomes, therefore, is sheer joy. In addition, disparate cultural assumptions, aesthetics, and literary traditions pose constant challenges in literary translations of any combination.
Encompassing seven languages, the voyages in seven seas are highly ambitious. However, the Japanese translations in the book are loyal to the English translation (assumed to be faithful to the original), carrying over the exact image for every haiku, and its execution is meticulous. Unfortunately, although the contributors’ biographic information is comprehensive, each translator’s individual contribution details are unavailable.
**
The book structure is necessarily complex. In a way, this complexity and multi-layer construction of the book resemble Goran Gatalica’s haiku. The most prominent characteristic of Gatalica’s haiku style is its preciseness and intensity created by complex layering. His juxtapositions of objects are often sharp and highly strategic, and the message of his verse transcends clearly and powerfully.
Let’s begin with the title poem:
night jasmine —
her bloomed soul brings water
to a refugee
This haiku is a superb example of layering. The juxtaposition of night jasmine, fragrant and mysterious, and a refugee, the hard reality, is striking; I see a woman (or flower – interchangeable in this magical atmosphere) admired by the narrator; she/it is beautiful in her existence, and appearance. The night jasmine offers fragrance, too. The verse represents the act of quiet yet deep empathy.
This technique stands out in many of Gatalica’s haiku. As a result, a reader may need not consult the author’s name before they can spot Gatalica’s haiku. A haiku published in the latest issue of Frogpond (Volume 45:3, Autumn 2022, Haiku Society of America) is a prime example: it contains solid images that manage to express a political comment contrasted by helpless ordinary citizens who nevertheless remain hopeful.
Gatalica’s skillful preciseness is also effective in suggesting something more subtle.
evening coldness. . .
mother puts one of the pills
between her teeth
The moment this verse captures is priceless. “One of the pills” slows one’s reading, and “between her teeth” makes a reader experience a tablet’s hardness and the capsule’s softness. “Evening coldness” and “teeth” send shivers down the spine.
autumn chill —
the barber lathers soap
into a silver dish
Again, “chill” and a “silver” dish are a perfect coupling. The barber’s hand movement is like a scene in a film. Gatalica is a winter’s poet – like Buson was. The objective way Gatalica’s lens comes close and focuses on a subject reminds the reader of Buson’s technique, like lighting /one candle with another/ spring evening or The camellia —/it falls into the darkness/of the old well. There is no ambiguity in the atmosphere of these poems. If Goran was a free verse poet, he might write like Robert Lowell. His accuracy is graceful.
City cannon —
mother’s hyacinths tremble
in the flowerpots
This haiku of sophistication creates a barrier in the air around the hyacinths: it is not the flowerpots that tremble but the plant itself. What an exciting distinction! The delimited space depicts the absence of the mother.
Alone at the beach
the pinot noir from Chile
full of starlight
Chilean wine began appearing worldwide as a substitute for French wine. The details evoke the beautiful coast of Croatia, a personal moment, and the expanse of the thought travels.
summer lightning
our cat jumps
from the bookshelf
The use of “our” makes the poem alive. The bookshelf defines the internal space, and “our” cat gives the multiple observers of the cat: A couple at the table; lightning lit their faces as they both watch the jump, then they look at each other—such a translucent moment.
There are many approaches to writing good haiku. In one collection of one poet, Goran Gatalica’s Night Jasmine, we note various ways the poet’s attention to detail captures the poet’s laser-sharp observation.
Lastly,
spring sunshine
my wife is singing
in a light blue bathrobe
This poem is delightful: Light blue is the perfect color to share a happy, ordinary moment. A passing moment in the privacy of one’s home skillfully organized transcends a ubiquitous image of happiness to many of us who live in distant places, in different languages. It proves how powerful and universal a small poem can be. We should celebrate a highly successful book of haiku by this talented poet.
~
REVIEW: “They Called You Dambudzo” – A Memoir by Flora Veit-Wild (reviewed by Miho Kinnas)
“They Called You Dambudzo” is a memoir by Flora Veit-Wild, Emerita Professor of African Literatures and Cultures at Humboldt University, Berlin. She was born in West Germany in 1947. “Dambudzo” was Dambudzo Marechera, a novelist and poet, an enfant terrible of modern literature, born in Southern Rhodesia in 1952.
With their two young boys, Flora and her husband Victor arrived in Harare, the capital of newly independent Zimbabwe, at the end of 1982. Dambudzo was homeless but a legendary writer in Harare, where he remained since his unintended return from Europe. He had been a writer tramp for a few years in Europe after being kicked out of New College in Oxford, where he attended on scholarship.
Flora and Dambudzo met in Harare and immediately fell in love, or entangled.
He died in 1987 of pneumonia caused by AIDS. Flora took care of him till the end.
She did not write a formal biography of Dambudzo Marechera for she felt she was too close to him. Her interpretations of his poems given in this book are often tied to the circumstances of his writing. She must have offered and encountered different readings of the same poem over her years of teaching since that’s the beauty of poetry: no amount of background information limits the effect and interpretation of good poems. Background information as such does not fully explain the motives of one’s life decisions, either. This book is a personal biography: a biography of love between the writer lovers, told often in an intimate second person voice.
What FloraVeit-Wild did to preserve Dambudzo Marechera’s work was tremendous. Marechera, now called the best writer in Africa of his generation, didn’t leave much behind besides a few brilliant publications before his death. His return from Europe coincided with the nation building following the hard fought independence. Publishers stayed away from Dambudzo’s radical and disturbing, yet highly artistic and un-nationalistic, writing; he was often drunk and seemingly paranoid.
Throughout the review, I will call Flora by her first name because that’s how we met. The two of us were in the Iowa International Writers’ Workshop for Creative Nonfiction with Cutter Wood in 2014. The roster showed the participants’ residencies spreading over thirteen countries from Bangladesh to Argentina and South Africa. Most of us lived in two or more languages and chose to write in English. Germany was Flora, and Japan was me.
In the Iowa writers’ workshop, Flora was on a mission to write this memoir. Infected by her enthusiasm, I bought two books: Cemetery of Mind (a collection of poems by Dambudzo Marechera, compiled and edited by Flora) and Moving Spirit (a book that emerged from the tribute symposium for Marechera at Trinity College, Oxford, 2009.) Then, in the spring of 2022, the topic of African poets came up while conversing with a poet friend. I opened the Marechera books, which I hadn’t touched for a while. I was excited when I found, on the internet, that she completed the book.
Let us consider the title, “They Called you Dambudzo.” Dambudzo is his name in the Shona language that was spoken in the region where he was born. Flora informs us:
They called you Dambudzo (‘the one who brings trouble’) because they were destitute.
Here, “They” refers to the family; however, Dambudzo’s This is “they” from An Interview With Himself describes “they” of his early life:
They ranged from the few owners of grocery stores right through primary school teachers, priests, deranged leaders of fringe/esoteric religions, housewives, nannies, road-diggers, factory workers, shop assistants, caddies, builders, pickpockets, psychos, pimps, demoralized widows, professional con-men, whores, hungry but earnest schoolboys, hungry but soon to be pregnant schoolgirls and, of course, informers, the BSAP (British South African Police), the police reservists, the TMB ghetto police, the District Commissioner and his asserted pompous assistants and clerks, the haughty and rather banal Asian shopkeepers, the white schoolgirls in their exclusive schools, the white schoolboys who’d beat us too when we foraged among the dustbins of the white suburbs, the drowned bodies that occasionally turned up at Lesapi Dam, the madman who was thought harmless until a mutilated body was discovered in the grass east of the ghetto, the mothers of nine or more children and the dignified despair of the few missionaries who once or twice turned up to see under what conditions I was actually living.
The list grows longer as he lives on. By the time Flora finalized the title, I could not help but wonder who else she might have added from the fact-finding journey she took as his biographer after his death. She visited his family (your mother was so proud of you,) tracked down the twins you played ‘office’ in a cardboard house and an old type writer you found at the dump, met with the people who knew Dambudzo in London and Oxford (he obviously had a chip on his shoulder about being black,) and many literary figures Dambudzo knew in Africa and elsewhere. Many felt guilty and received her as if she was a tax collector. Quite a few suddenly declared themselves as Marechera’s best friends and believers of his talent. She would meet his other white woman, too. People suspected her motive as his executor, suggesting her misappropriation of his material.
The book begins with Prelude. The Prelude rushes – it is slightly confusing or incoherent for the reader who is not yet familiar with the story. The sudden switch to direct speech such as “You had not written a will,” or “On the day you died, I collected your papers,” might throw you off. But if you return to Prelude after reading the book, you will appreciate it differently. She speaks directly to Dambudzo in the first chapter (many chapters are only 2-4 pages long) and another toward the end. The second-person style grew on me: I hear the tender voice of the woman who loved him despite all the hardships during and after the life with him: The price, high or not, she paid to follow her desire. The composites of short chapters make the book choppy despite her consistent language. Readers should be assured, however, that this book answers all of the questions:What does it mean to live with HIV? To be infected and infect others and meet another who’s on the chain of infection? What was her husband doing? How did she become the executer of his affairs without a will? What was happening in the newly independent Zimbabwe? Flora had anticipated all sorts of questions.
I believe that the choppiness and confusion I feel while reading are because certain things are not made for language. There are things we don’t talk about, or we only whisper a few words and nod as if we understand them. They are, for example, adultery, cancer, AIDS, abortion, depression, and racism. We are not good at articulating these topics in any language. In addition, racism overshadows everything; the racial society directed Dambudzo’s talent. And it was the 80s. We were just beginning to find out about AIDS. We did not have the knowledge or awareness to talk about it. Nevertheless, Flora kept the meticulous record of Dambudzo’s diagnosis of AIDS followed by her and her husband’s HIV positive test results and life thereafter with HIV.
Dambudzo believed in the power of language. Flora asked him as many others did: Why did he not write in his native language? He answered: Shona, the language he grew up in, was filled with violence. So he chose English, yet he didn’t take the colonial language as it is; You have to turn it upside down until it screams your screams. What he meant is described by Édouard Glissant, a French Caribbean writer and philosopher, thus: He (Glissant) intentionally destabilized and de-categorized the standard French to establish the new relationships between the words and the objects to make the others know that he was different. Flora also wrote: You would not allow any white liberal art lover to feel comfortable patting the back of a black writer from the ghetto, however gifted he might be. You would always bite the hand that tried to feed you. Relations, what Glissant called it, are also the technique of poetry or poetic language where most of work is done by associations. Post-colonial writings take the associations to where the colonialist imaginations haven’t been. Dambudzo’s poetry and novels represent that style.
His reputation was made by his novels, but it was his poetry where he communicated his feelings toward Flora and his other white women. The Amelia Sonnet is a series of thirteen poems; Amelia is Flora; Amelia was Heinrich Heine’s woman who didn’t share his feeling. Amelia is the archetype of the unrequited love and the unattainable ideal woman. Yet, in Dambudzo’s poetry, we cannot expect Heine’s lyricism sung in the melodies of Schumann or Schubert. Flora writes:
The Amelia Sonnets, which he wrote in anticipation of my departure, talk about his fear
of abandonment. The ordinary objects around him, the dust, the crockery, the
cockroaches, turn into symbols of absence.
The last four lines of the poem, The visitor, are haunting:
And she, my human hunger, grew pale, lost appetite, became haggard
Shunned by her own kind. Outraged storms, as if fired from some
Celestial cannon up there, day after day blew down upon us. Amelia
Drowned. I shunned man and his daylight ways. I make the terrible pact
And nightly may visit her in spite of her horns and forked tail.
They are the Black Sunlight love sonnets, borrowing the title of Dambudzo’s other prose work. They express perhaps more than his anxiety about Flora going away for a month. His comment:
Another part of the ambiguity of the Amelia poems is that I know that Amelia will never be mine, wholly mine, my own. To love somebody is to want them all the time, to want to drown their identity in one’s own identity, that everything they do or say or decide or think is centered on what I am.
Flora knew she couldn’t give what he wanted. Flora also knew and understood what her white body meant to him. Dambudzo’s words:
Amelia is white; I am black. . .Amelia does not have any sense of race . . . In a very personal sense, it does not matter at all what race Amelia is, but there are times, especially when I have gone through some shitty incidents or I remember some of the things which were happening here before 1980, that’s when I feel very violent towards Amelia.
Flora keeps asking herself: Why Dambudzo? Do we have a choice in who we love? Perhaps, love is something not made for language, either. In the beginning, it must have been a thrill. Being infatuated with him is easy to imagine. Marechera’s accent. The voice. His talent. His mannerism. In an interview with Fiona Lloyd, a journalist, she admitted that it might not have happened if she had met him a little later once her initial excitement of moving to a new place and meeting new people had time to wear off a little.
And there was his theatricality. Nadine Gordimer recalled him answering Flora’s question about what he was like:
‘Marechera was seated beside me at the writers’ workshop,’ Gordimer remembered. ‘Of course, he always made an entrance like an actress, very late, with that big red scarf flying. . . ‘
Flora also writes about herself:
I had always had a longing for the wondrous, the fantastic, the outlandish. . . Dambudzo appealed to the clownish, melancholic, poetic part of me, which was menacingly dark and colorfully bright at the same time. . . He led me through many closed doors.
He was the perfect storm.
She couldn’t extricate herself from him, from the troublesome relationship for a long time. She writes how he banged on her and her husband’s bedroom window in the middle of the night demanding that the taxi driver needed to be paid. Then, there were times like the scene shown in the memoir: Dambudzo performed his long poetic sequence, “My Arms Vanished Mountains” written during her absence, with the background music of Ravel’s Bolero.
The story’s left arm was missing
It needed thick-lensed spectacles
They watched him fall from the tenth floor
Chewing gum stuck to his dentures
Such a sun
Such a crying morning song
Falling directly on the spikes
This is my body
That is my pencil.
The poem is the wide winding river, filled with longing and yearning. The forty-minute performance given by not completely drunk Dambudzo would charm her all over again.
Yet, she was not blind:
It was an exciting and a daunting journey into the life and work of the ‘black heretic.’ At times I felt overwhelmed by the effort of it, at others thrilled by the miracles I unearned. I felt so many things, Dambudzo: grateful, gratified, inadequate and, indeed, full of love.
Yet, I had a price to pay.
Before arriving in Zimbabwe, while she and Victor lived in Nurnberg, she had taken a course in miming. Later, she ran workshops for children. I was wondering why mime, but when I came to the end of the book, she talked about her Gestalt therapy puppets – they made a perfect symmetrical bookends of who she is. Her playful creativity flourishes also in these forms.
She writes about her depression:
A year after I had started my position and work as a professor I cracked.
I had my first bout of clinical depression.
The Lady in Black made her appearance.
Years of psychotherapy and medication followed. I learned to do my job.
I also learned to live with the visits from the Lady in Black. . . At some point I gave her a body I could talk to or scold or throw against the wall: a gestalt, made of fabric, cardboard, wire ribbons, and beads.
Flora began making her puppets. Like her fascination with miming, the puppets became companions. It started with Lady in Black. She quotes CG Jung:
‘Depression is like a lady in black. If she turns up, don’t shoo her away. Invite her in, offer her a seat, treat her like a guest and listen to what she wants to say.’
Other puppets followed. She writes:
that many people who saw her puppets proclaimed that they must have been inspired by her connection with Africa but she refutes by saying that she does not feel they are, apart from the general penchant in cultures worldwide —including Africa —.
Isn’t this what Dambudzo was saying? He said in an interview:
‘I would question anyone calling me an African writer. . ‘He is not a writer for a specific nation or a specific race.
Their minds were merging, but Flora kept her private and professional life separate for decades. The memoir was a surprise or confirmation. Her last chapter ‘Out of Closet’ is touching.
In all those years, there was the public face of your biographer and editor, of the teacher the critic, the Dambudzo Marechera’ authority’ as people started to call me, the face of the committed scholar who would safeguard your legacy, commended by many, envied and reviled by others. Behind that public face, only known by some, imagined by others, was the private one, the face of the woman who had loved you and had lain in your arms, had seen you die and had her own physical grievances to bear.
And yet, it took more than thirty years until my two Marechera faces blended into one.
The trigger to write the memoir came in 2009 at the Celebration of Marechera at Oxford. Someone asked her: “What was your real relationship with him?” She answered: “I suppose it is time that I write my own story.” And she did. With or without the trigger, I believe that it would take time to be able to write about some things in life if it is at all possible. We also need to be at a certain age to be able to put a pen to paper.
The Prelude ends with the last fragment from the Amelia Sonnet sequence.
Time’s fingers on the piano
play emotion into motion
the dancers in the looking glass
never recognize us as their originals.
Her recollections might have appeared unrecognizable at times with the passage of time. However, by paralleling her memory with ongoing life and by carrying on speaking to Dambudzo, Flora made the memoir vivid in images and intimately tangible.
(“They Called You Dambudzo” A Memoir by Flora Veit-Wild, James Currey, An imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd.)
~
REVIEW: Reading Lenard Moore’s ‘Long Rain’: Tanka Has Always Been A Perfect Form For Love (Miho Kinnas)
FEBRUARY 14th 2022
Long Rain by Lenard Moore. Berkley, California. Wet Cement Press, 2021. 140 pp. $16.00.
Review by Miho Kinnas
霖The kanji character for the title Long Rain, is pronounced na・ga・a・mé in Japanese. The Japanese poetry has been associating the word with the sound of another verb, na・ga・mé・(ru) —眺める that means to glance, look, view, stare, watch, or focus for some time. Playing with similar-sounding words for cascading effects and their meanings for counterpoints have been traditional in Japanese poetry. The state of mind when we watch the rainfall day after day is universal and timeless; reading Long Rain is to observe the passage of time, the fleeting moments, and the love of past and present. We stand behind the poet’s shoulders in a room, a square, a doorway, or a moving vehicle.
The book is divided into four sections, not by seasons as traditional tanka books, but by the four universally recognized elements: Earth, Fire, Wind, and Water. Most of the poems contain a keyword that belongs to the element; more interesting, the poems in each section as a group merge into the energy of the title element.
EARTH ・地
The Earth poems firmly ground us. The pace of the poem is andante, and we take each step steadily in this section.
country night
how many bullfrogs telling
where they are
as I walk the soggy earth
that my grandfather once plowed
Although Lenard Moore’s poems are innovative, they are never outrageous or pretentious. They are filled with subtle surprises that are created by the juxtapositions of things, deft handling of nuances, and noun choices.
on the porch
watching you
pick yellow apples
I long to eat
when you return
The poem above needs no explanation: It’s such a delicious poem. A reminiscence of William Carlos Williams’ This Is Just To Say? Or the tanka, Loved as if sucking sweet peach juice and I know I was a woman in my previous life[1] by Tawara Machi?
Two extra lines of tanka (in addition to the three lines of haiku) are not used for explaining what had started as haiku: the scenes, the people, and the actions unfold as we read, but at the end of the reading, we have everything in front of us at the same time. These five lines (legs) have their way of working (walking.)
at the beach
the two of us alone
I felt her legs
open wider and wider
in the darkening air
Here is the introduction to Long Rain in a few words: Long Rain is a book of love poems of grounded, long-lasting, erotic, familiar love.
And for such a relationship, sometimes, a night can be generously long. Simple yet rich joy expands the night.
the night is long
a tavern just off the road
with one parked car
but the man and woman hug
to the song on the jukebox
WIND・風
The section shows more movements, and the reader anticipates the next unfolding. The poems are far more suggestive and moving faster.
man with a goatee
hunkers in the onion patch—
the wind lifts,
while I descend the steps
into early light
It is mysterious. Tanka is a form both the writer and the readers understand that no more explanations will be added. The poet builds tanka carefully, paying attention to each word.
And we gulp it down with a breath —and read it again. And again.
I sniff the wind
as the scent of honeysuckle
rises from the path
Her blouse blows wide open
the shape of her full breasts
A surprise is a necessary element in poetry.
The next poem depicts a scene as if it is the beginning of a film, yet enough is said. A detailed sight and sound and “shapes on the wind” — what’s that? The sixth sense? The interpretation is up to each reader.
stranger nearing—
in an angle of sun
the hound’s bark
grows deeper
and shapes on the wind
FIRE・火
Fire: hot, bright, burning, maturing, rupturing, ripeness, and agedness. The stories thicken in this section. The word “old” appears a lot here, such as “old homestead,” “old bulldog,” “old photographer. “ An old man must be an old man, not just a man. A black woman must be a black woman: It is an extended noun, not an adjective + noun.
The items of our daily life stream in: clothesline, the shack door, hospital, wheelchair, exhaust smoke, shacking sweet corn, the sloping fence, wire fence, post office, telephone booth. And a woman is, of course, pregnant.
rising sun
the pregnant woman walks
through falling mist
with the fragrance of pine
the ancient path narrows
The following tanka is precious. It is so simple and small, yet each word, each line, forces a reader to ponder.
anniversary
a point of light flickers
on the buffed floor—
our daughter notices it
while cooking breakfast
1) anniversary – what (which) anniversary?
2) a point of light flickers – what light? how does it move?
3) on the buffed floor — the clean floor – a loving family
4) our daughter notices it – what did she say? how old was/is she?
5) while cooking breakfast – was she cooking?what did they have?
A day we take for granted is eternalized.
The signature Lenard Moore poems: They are the oil paintings with deep southern colors.
a black man bending
over the low cotton bush—
gunfire on his back;
the flap of a burlap sack
while blues hide in my throat
Music is sensed. Music, especially jazz and blues flow out of his work; his poetry readings are often framed with music; the poet lives in music.
There is no doubt there’s music in the next poem, even though it is not spelled out.
Unbearable heaviness. A poem like this one is the direct link between the spirit of blues and the essence of sabi. The merged aesthetics characterize Moore’s work.
heading home —
dozens of planes roaring
in the night sky;
no wind pushing back
the suburban heat
When the poem oversees the broader landscape, this American tanka rooted in Japanese waka (more traditional tanka) reflects further back at the Chinese classics. This poem reads like a Tang dynasty poem in the North Carolina setting.
autumn moon rises;
rot of pumpkins rides the breeze
on remnants of fog;
old cabin on a hillside
where hungry wild deer roam
WATER・水
A Japanese composer, Takemitsu Toru, wrote a series of music on the theme of water. He went to see a dam emptied for a repair and saw a freshwater stream that kept flowing separately from the main river. Water often runs unexpectedly in independent forms; the section of Long Rain also includes many different bodies of water.
twelve noon
a green tin lunchbox gleaming
behind the courthouse
goldfish swimming under
water lilies in the pond
The poem above is densely packed. It takes courage and experience to write a poem like this one. A mere pond behind the courthouse, where we meet the misery of others and our own, holds the poem together.
sleepless
I listen to your breathing
this shortest night
the warmth of thighs
all over my body
And sometimes, the night is too short even for the man living the long-lasting love. The short night, incidentally, is a kigo (season word) of summer in haiku. The effect immediately intensifies the poem to the readers aware of a great number of haiku showcasing what short night could evoke. In this poem, the restlessness shortest night exudes sensuously.
One more tanka:
rain ends—
reflection of headlights creeping
down the two-lane road
and from out the hushed woods
a black cat crossing my path
Even a very long rain eventually ends. In this poem, the speaker is driving; the rain ended because he left the raining area or it stopped; the poem shows how time is exchangeable with space. A multidimensional parallel world appears in five lines.
*
Lenard D. Moore (born in Jacksonville, North Carolina, in 1958) is an internationally acclaimed poet, especially known for his work with Japanese forms, and is the author of The Geography Of Jazz, A Temple Looming, and The Open Eye, among other books. He is the founder and executive director of the Carolina African American Writers’ Collective, and co-founder of the Washington Street Writers Group. He was the First African American President of Haiku Society of America and is the Executive Chairman of the North Carolina Haiku Society. (from Long Rain)
Moore teaches African American Literature and Advanced Poetry Writing at the University of Mount Olive, where he directs the literary festival.
[1] Translated by the reviewer. From The Chocolate Revolution, Tawara Machi
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REVIEW: ‘A Gap In the Clouds: A New Translation of the Ogura Hyakunin-Isshu’
(Miho Kinnas)
The Ogura Hyakunin-Isshu is one of the most popular poetry collections in classical Japanese literature. Since its reputed compilation by Fujiwara no Teika around 1235, it has been widely read and parodied. Artists produced artworks inspired by the poems, and a card game made in modern times is still played in Japanese homes. The presence of classical poetry stars, including the authors of The Tale of Genji and The Pillow Book, and the protagonist’s model in the Tale of Ise must be one reason for its enormous popularity. The poems chosen are not necessarily the best works of the respective poets, and many have suspected political undercurrents in the selection. Such speculations add more mystery to the collection. The thirteenth century in Japan was a chaotic time in history: the grace and elegance of the aristocratic era, as depicted in these poems, was a thing of the past. Still, as the introduction to this book states, “Poetry was central to life and reputation among the ruling elite of medieval Japan, but these beautiful poems have endured because their themes are universal and readily understood by contemporary readers. They include love, loneliness and mortality, as well as the passage of the seasons and the beauty, of natural phenomena. Many are steeped in the rites and sensibilities of the Shinto religion, with gods to be found in every natural thing.” It is no wonder, therefore, that numerous translations into contemporary Japanese and many other languages along exist, along with annotations. A Gap in the Clouds by James Hadley and Nell Regan is one of the newest efforts.
First, I read A Gap in the Clouds from the beginning to end without any critical thought. I tried to imagine how an average reader new to Hyakunin-Isshu and expecting poetry would find this book. The page layout is artful, and all of the one-hundred poems are very accessible. The book introduces the reader to who a hundred poets were and what type of subjects they dealt with. The translations are consistent with the principles described in the introduction. I thought, maybe, they achieved the goal for the book.
Then, I read the original poems and the contemporary translation with annotations in Japanese to refresh my memory and compare the details. I read classical Japanese to a degree, but the annotation and an “old-word” dictionary are indispensable. I chose a particular book[1] for reference because it is one of the newest translations, and the translator Koike Masayo is a prominent poet and a favourite of mine. Her translations are in free verse. The length varies, and it is a creative translation without going overboard.
The authors of A Gap in the Clouds have worked very diligently to convey the gist of each poem with the constraints as explained clearly in the introduction. I had thought their process was reasonable and understandable at first. I will explain the objections that came to me after having read the books and thought things through.
Quite a few unfortunate grammatical misunderstandings have altered the context.[2] I noticed very puzzling phrases[3] and a ‘prosy’ style of writing in general. It’s possible that while polishing the final output, unintended changes crept in. Some are possibly considered as an alternative interpretation. Such instances are common in translations, and I have no intention of nitpicking. However, one question that kept coming back to this reviewer’s mind was whether this book challenged to claim that poetry was something translatable.
There are some delightful translations. For example, the words “tendril,” “vine,” and “entwined” of #25 (refer to the introduction, please) replicate the tangle of the original very well. #32 contains the phrase “one-by-one,” which doesn’t exist in the original; however, the insertion added animation that works beautifully. #72 also works quite well to replicate the waves, if not its flirtatiousness.
In No. 96, however, the translation conveys the poem’s surface meaning, but certain eroticism is completely lost. The first seventeen sounds of the original describe a garden in intricate language: The play on words on seduction and the snow-storm-blown flower petals constitute a charming adjective for a garden. The written-out translation somehow erases the imagery.
The circumstances under which these poems were written were far more social than a popular image of poets agonising over their lines and diction. These poems were written for greetings, occasions, and competitions. Many were written to show off knowledge of allusions, wonderful metaphors, and witty or irate responses. Some of them mock love affairs. True emotions do exist; some poems are more emotional than technical. Literally, one hundred different voices, attitudes, and backgrounds of the elite class spans about four hundred years are crammed in this anthology.
Overall, this reviewer’s biggest complaint is that the translated poems sound overly monotonous; they do not sound like a hundred poets’ voices. I may be asking for the different level of considerations which may be out of the scope of the authors’ intentions; however, some deconstructions might be interesting to some readers.
Knowledge of the background stories might transform the reading experience of some of the poems. The first example is #60. The last sentence, “So I say,” helps accentuate the author’s strong-headedness. At the end of the book, the note mentions the author is the daughter of Izumi Shikibu, the representative poetess of the classical poetry world. But if a reader knows that this poem was a spontaneous come-back to a man who teased her whether she received advice from her mother who was living in Ama no Hashidate at that time, it might have added more colour to the poem.
#7. It may be a matter of interpretation; however, the two moons the poem deals will heighten its poignancy once a reader knows those two moons belong to the parallel worlds: one being the moon the author sees at night in China; The other moon was the moon of long ago in his hometown where he’d probably never return. In fact, he didn’t return to Japan.
How do you incorporate such backgrounds? You might ask. It must be hard. However, I know an example by Kevin Young, who did this for Basho’s poem.
Look at its shape
the moon is just a young girl
sent to bed[4]
The original poem (miru Kage ya / Mada katanari mo/you zukiyo or 見る影やまだ片なりも宵月夜) doesn’t contain a word “girl” or “bed.”
The translation by Jane Reichhold is:
see its slim shape
it is still not developed
the new moon this night[5]
One more step removed, her literal translation is like this:
see shape <> / still immature /new moon evening [or good]
Basho used Katanari, knowing it was the word used for a girl-child as being “pure” in the Tale of Genji and emphasised the young moon’s elusiveness (You Zuki). You Zuki is a” young new moon that appears only early in the evening and then disappears,” according to Reichhold’s definition. I recognise that haiku and waka are different; David Young offered new translations for the selected haiku, yet his translation made me immediately go to the original poem in Japanese and other translations, and found it satisfying.
I want to discuss pronoun use in a couple of poems. #5 specifies that “I hear a deer cry out.” I noticed it on my first read, and the poet Koike Masayo also writes about the difference between having a person and a deer in the scene. She maintains that the presence of “I” dilutes the poetics of the piece, and “I” might be somewhere, but it functions just as an ear, let the deer cry out, and “I” should remain in hiding. The translation also works just fine without “I hear.”
Likewise, #6 begins with “I cross toward the sky.” By this, the man is placed in a fantasy world. However, the poem deepens when the reader knows the man is awake late into the night and is standing in the cold in the palace as he looked up at the sky, which plays out the legend of Magpie, a bird of black and white like the dark sky and the bright stars. Grammatically, that is how one should read it.
#9 is one of the best-known and most beautiful poems by Ono no Komachi. Regrettably, the use of the “you” personification destroyed the complexity and the atmosphere of this poem. The poem’s focus should be the quiet reflection about the passage of time: The peak-time flower petal is not the only beauty there is to be appreciated. The highly technical sound and the flow of the poem didn’t survive the translation.
As mentioned earlier, those who write and translate poetry constantly wonder whether poetry is a translatable thing – whether it functions when taken out of the world it was written in. Translating into contemporary Japanese is a challenge; translating into a foreign language adds another layer due to the total lack of common knowledge and expectations. Even with contemporary poems, solely translating the text without knowing how the poet’s writing style and viewing things is risky. Needless to say, knowledge of allusions and historical backgrounds are basic requirements. A poet/translator must pack it back into the destination language in a poetically appealing way. It is a humbling exercise. It is the duty of cross-cultural translation to encompass all of those aspects. If the end-product is a beautiful creation inspired by the original poems, but not a translation in the traditional sense, I would love to read it. I am inquisitive about what the step-by-step process of their translation was like.
Miho Kinnas is a Japanese writer and translator of poetry. Math Paper Press of Singapore published “Today, Fish Only” and “Move Over, Bird.” She grew up playing the Hyakunin-Isshu card game.
[1] Hyakunin-Isshu trans. Koike Masayo (Vol. 2 Japanese Literature Series) Kawaide-Shobo
[2] #11, 19, 20, 27, 47, 49, 52, 56, 57, 59, 63
[3] #3lily-of-the-valley I would like to be informed of the allusion. It seems unnecessary and spring flower seems an ill-fit. #88 shipwrecked!
[4] Moon Woke Me Up Nine Times – Selected Haiku of Basho Translated by David Young
[5] Basho The Complete Haiku Translated with an introduction, biography & notes by Jane Reichhold. This book is invaluable. David Young heavily depended on her extensive research and translations.
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REVIEW: “Professor Su Jing’an in His Later Years” by Dong Jun
(Patrick Schiefen)
OCTOBER 14th 2019
It is fundamentally human to disregard our own mortality, to believe – especially through our younger years – that we’re indestructible, even immortal. Yet Death is undeniable; it casts its shadow across every aspect of our daily lives whether or not we dare to look. After all, all things must come to an end.
So it is appropriate that death plays a large but quiet role in Dong Jun’s Professor Su Jing’an in His Later Years, revealing itself in its various forms throughout the short story in ways that are true to life. Its influence can be felt in every character’s actions, in their personal relationships, and, ultimately, in their association to identity. It serves both as an explicit motivation and as an unspoken one. It is even there in the book’s title, asking us to confront life’s finality before a single page has been turned.
With his ticking clocks and his conversations about legacy, Professor Su had already confronted the passing of time, to some degree, in the years before he is introduced to us.
As it goes, we, like the narrator, meet the retired Professor Su in the middle – or, more accurately, in the middle of the end – of his life, after the seventy-four year old academic requires a caretaker at his eclectic estate, the Bamboo and Plum Blossom Pavilion. There, with his wife and housekeeper, the professor oversees his now modest life like clockwork, though to which, if any, of his many international clocks that decorate his study he follows remains unknown.
Hoping to gather insight into the prestigious professor’s accomplishments, the narrator initially accompanies Professor Su as he moves through his daily routine with particular pride, crediting his not-yet-diminished sharpness on the habits he keeps. He wakes up to a pot of coffee and a glass of milk each day, he walks in reverse down his street after sunrise as exercise, and he eats salty sprouts and fermented bean curd with every meal, all the while making time to read, write, and construct those blue book sleeves for his library.
He criticizes his peer for being senile while comparing his own age to “a good tune played on an old fiddle.”
At first glance, it seems true; he is an aging man who both looks back on his life with fondness and looks forward to a rewarding and productive future – a future which, according to his planner, will see him to “at least a hundred.”
It is time’s indifference to people’s plans that sends Professor Su and the narrator on an unexpected trajectory, as death weighs more and more like gravity. His marriage evaporates suddenly, his rival is left hemiplegic after collapsing in front of a crowd, and his mentor loses his fight with lung cancer. In some ways we are more a companion of time than of Professor Su, as we observe his evolving relationship with his everchanging surroundings.
Sid Gulinck, a Belgian sinologist and certified interpreter, translates Dong Jun’s first-person narrative with a casual ease, weaving both observation and exposition with language that allows us to step into the intimate realities of the characters. It helps that the story is composed as a near timeline, one that starts by familiarizing the reader to a life already lived and then slowly departs – or, arguably, crash lands – as lives are propelled forward.
With each glimpse into this timeline, Dong Jun raises the stakes ever so slightly until we have no choice but to reckon with the effects that time has on who we are and who we will become. Plans and relationships are no match and reveal themselves to be fragile when up against such a relentless force.
As the story progresses and life’s tiny and mundane tragedies pile up, the characters must learn, like the rest of humanity, to examine even the most well-intentioned habits and to submit to what cannot be controlled. Professor Su, in particular, has staked so much of his identity on the illusion of control that when the rug is pulled out from under him he is faced with the existential threat of the death of self.
How he deals with this is at first is relatable, if a little predictable: he shuts his doors to all but the housekeeper, allows his routine to unravel, refuses to shave or shower or brush his teeth, and changes all of his clocks – the timekeepers – in an illogical manner. He caves to all the things he has been fighting against.
It is when he forgoes his established life completely that the Dong Jun’s narrative delivers on the unexpected.
Death may be the endpoint for us all but it always seems to come as a surprise. The real surprise, however, is the way we try, as humans, to negotiate with it. By the end of Professor Su Jing’an in His Later Years, Dong Jun reveals through his subject that by being overly concerned with doing so, you can lose perspective on what you have and who you are.
When Professor Su finally asks the narrator, and by extension us, “Who might you be?” he is offering an opportunity to decide if we are the sums of our pasts or, simply, whatever we may be in the flash of this moment.
Professor Su, at the end, has more or less already made up his mind.
Dong Jun (Author)
Sid Gulinck (Translator, Chinese to English)
Professor Su Jing’an in His Later Years
Penguin Random House/Penguin Books
2019, 55 pages
Patrick Schiefen is an expatriate writer from Upstate New York who currently writes and performs in Shanghai, China. His writing is greatly influenced by topics of identity, politics, and sexuality and aims to build community through his writing. His work has appeared in various publications both inside and outside of China, most recently in High Shelf Press and A Shanghai Poetry Zine.
“If You Know, You Know” is his first collection of poetry and was launched with the help of Literary Shanghai in September 2019.
Find more information about him on Twitter, @p_schiefen, or on his website, patrickschiefen.com.
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REVIEW: The Euphoria of Violence and The Absurdity of Heroism in Ai Wei’s ‘The Road Home’ (Aiden Heung)
OCTOBER 7th 2019
Ai Wei (Author), Alice Xin Liu (Translator, Chinese to English ) , The Road Home, Penguin Random House/Penguin Books, 2019, 81 pages
Violence, by definition, is the intentional use of force against oneself or others to inflict injury, death or trauma. Despite being widely reprimanded and censured, more often than not, the use of violence is justified, or even celebrated once it is labeled as nationalism. The mistaking of violence for glory is like a ghost that can never be exorcised, and is the basis of countless tragedies. It is therefore a writer’s responsibility to reflect on these tragedies, and ask why they occurred, even if he knows there won’t be any answers. As for readers, it is up to us not to forget.
That is exactly what Ai Wei does in his novel, The Road Home. One of the most lauded authors of the 1960s generation, he writes about the insignificance of a life entangled in a hostile social environment, eulogizing on the greatness and tenacity of human nature by trying to understand our raison d’être. He cares about those who find themselves “under the wheels of creakily-forward-moving history”.
The story takes place around the time of the China-Soviet border conflict, several years after the beginning of the Cultural Revolution. An obsession with violence already permeates the small village where the main protagonist Jiefang, a teenage boy, lives. In school, teachers show students the different modes of Soviet weapons and teach a military drill game to expose and catch “enemy commanders”. Jiefang often confronts his nemesis Strongbull, and their typical way of solving problems is a fist fight.
In the village, people spy and tell on each other, and torture the children of “four sinister elements, or people considered inimical to the new regime”. One day, when the children discover a trench full of bullets, joy “spreads like wildfire” in the village. Jiefang takes an active part in finding and hoarding them.
Trouble comes when Jiefang’s father is reported as a counter-revolutionary for painting a picture of the war hero Dong Cuirun bombing a bunker beneath a portrait of Chairman Mao. To atone for his father’s “crime” and redeem himself as a son of a counter-revolutionary, he has to become a true hero; a scarred soldier in the war. Jiefang makes use of the gun-powder inside a bomb he accidentally finds, and thus embarks on a “heroic” journey.
The story centers on conflict: between Jiefang and Strongbull, between Jiefang’s father and the Revolutionaries, and between “politically correct” people and counter-revolutionaries. In any conflict there must be a winner or a hero.
Violence permeates the air. “Jiefang thinks the smell of gunpowder is the best smell in the whole world, all of the pores of his body open up after he smells gun powder and his whole being is relaxed”. It is every boy’s dream to become a hero and be received with “ drums and gongs”. However, in the end, the euphoria of violence leads only to fear and insecurity; Jiefang constantly escapes into the shells of the bomb for solace.
The story is full of metaphors. The smell of gun powder and the squirrels are particularly interesting, reflecting the antithesis of themes, as if the author were offering his own idea of redemption.
The setting is simple, logical, and almost true to history, with a touch of dramatic exaggeration that lifts the story to a higher level of tragicomedy. It leads us to ponder the uselessness of human endeavor, and the futility of being better or different in an absurd society, especially when this endeavor is tarnished from the very beginning by illusions.
Praise must also be given to Ai Wei’s dispassionate approach to the story. He tells but does not judge or suggest. He is the kind of writer who toys with the shadow of death by using the idea of a blade instead of blood.
Alice Xin Liu’s translation perfectly conveys the details and the mood of the text itself, as many historical facts are made easily approachable through her words. This is not an easy task for a novel with a strong connection with China’s tumultuous past.
If the purpose of this story is to “commemorate the past and enlighten the future”, Ai Wei certainly delivers. Half a century later, we now more than ever need to be reminded of the dire consequences of conflating violence with heroism.
Aiden Heung is a prize-winning poet born and raised on the edge of Tibetan Plateau. He holds an MA in literature from Tongji University in Shanghai, the city he calls home. His poems have been published or are forthcoming in numerous online and offline magazines including Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, Literary Shanghai, Proverse Anthology, The Shanghai Literary Review, New English Review, The Bangalore Review, Esthetic Apostle, Mekong Review, among many other places.He can be found on twitter @AidenHeung or www.aiden-heung.com