How does Chung Kwok Keung incorporate translation into his creative process, particularly in poems such as "Sestina"?
Generate according to: as if hoping, amidst a rising fear, to rebuild a dream.
even if bats invert night and day, wampee fruits remain fruits.
of gravel and falling leaves, locking them up like circled calendar days.
a mystery, then a brick wall, aged green. Loneliness is our old brick house.
connected by root and blood, and the deserted tables’empty weight.
even vultures wouldn’t eat. In the park, we hear only the rain’s sound.
When Mother returned, it was as if she hadn’t, making no sound.
The water in the well didn’t ripple, streaks of rain didn’t enter the house.
then fresh water, a trench, plates stacked on plates, a bed without a dream.
It seems the steps we took have been retraced, adding no weight.
we got through with difficulty, fading out like wampee fruits.
of lightning storms carry such weight? In the rain stands a bright house.
Why didn’t she warm it up why didn’t she microwave it before taking a bite?
As a reader, I was drawn to these two poems by the Hong Kong poet Chung Kwok Keung for the ways in which they explore a mother-son relationship in poignant, warm, and vivid ways. As a translator, I was also struck by how Chung both includes and invites translation in his creative process, particularly in a poem such as “Sestina” that renders a traditionally French form so beautifully in Chinese.
“Sestina” appears in Chung’s latest poetry collection, A Bright House Standing in Light Rain (2018), although it was written years earlier. The poem is a tribute to Elizabeth Bishop’s poem of the same name, and similar images recur in both: the rain, a stove, a mother, a house. Both poems are also thematically connected by a sense of impending grief. Yet Chung’s poem stands on its own, and is remarkable for its detailed sketches of vivid scenes, as well as the different levels of sound that penetrate the poem’s soundscape. Due to the conciseness and compactness of the Chinese language, each line is able to carry more weight such that—as is written in the poem—every stanza “one by one gather[s] weight.” Translating a sestina very much resembles writing one—one hopes to avoid bloating stanzas, using extraneous words, or forcing end-word placements. Chung himself (who has also translated sestinas before) has written about the form’s intricacies, and the challenges it poses in translation. I found maintaining the poem’s form through the transformations and transposals of translation instructive for both the craft of composing and translating poetry.
A mother figure is also at the center of “Mosquitoes,” which appeared in Chung’s poetry collection Everydayness (2012), among a group of poems influenced in part by Seamus Heaney’s Clearances, an elegiac sonnet sequence he wrote in memory of his mother. Formally speaking, “Mosquitoes” is a ‘lighter’ poem that “Sestina.” It is even playful in the way it puns on the insect (the sound the microwave makes is a “叮” ding, which is also the character that denotes a mosquito’s bite) and uses onomatopoeia (“拍打，拍打” pai da, pai da, “slap, slap”). And yet, the poem also gathers weight in its own way, and becomes full of loneliness and nostalgia as the speaker draws a connection between the buzzing, nagging presence of mosquitoes he cannot ignore, and his feelings towards his home and his mother. The boundaries between mosquitoes, mother, and memory often seem blurred in the poem, such that the emotions associated with all three sting at the same time, and with familiar urgency. For the speaker, escaping the past is impossible—mosquitoes pierce through a pain he thought he had forgotten.
As is the case with many of Chung’s poems, “Sestina” and “Mosquitoes” evoke feelings of tenderness that—like the local wampee fruit and familiar buzz of winged insects—sing of home. Both poems use form and sound in careful, deliberate ways that demonstrate Chung’s attention to detail and his ability to strike a chord in readers’ memory. A fearless, experimental, and honest writer, Chung is a formidable force in Hong Kong’s contemporary poetry scene.
Robert Eric Shoemaker translates from the Italian. Original by Giuseppe Gioachino Belli.
This prompt doesn't seem malicious.