Yu Xiuhua, Moonlight Rests on My Left Palm: Poems and Essays, trans. Fiona Sze-Lorrain

 

WHEN I BEGAN TO TRANSLATE Yu Xiuhua, I had, to my embarrassment, only read one of her poems, “Crossing Half of China to Fuck You.” Widely known as Yu’s most “notorious” poem, it was posted online in October 2014 and went viral. With its catchy title and raw language, the piece speaks explicitly about sex and the poet’s craving for it:

            I penetrate a hail of bullets to fuck you
            I press countless dark nights into one dawn to fuck you
            I, as many, run as one to fuck you 

Given the patriarchal and Confucianist influences that dominate contemporary Chinese society, it is rare for a “foreigner” like me to come across a Chinese woman poet not yet forty writing about sex so openly—and “desperately”—let alone a farmer with cerebral palsy who is completely self-taught. Yu Xiuhua’s life and work has been mediatized nationwide, however. Reception in the male-dominated world of Chinese poetry has been mixed: some interpret the poet’s longing for love as plain “lust,” some feel offended by Yu’s “unrefined” language (she is a high school dropout) and are embarrassed by what they read, some show compassion for her difficult life and admire her courage, and others affirm the therapeutic and spiritual force of poetry, whereas others yet express their enthusiasm for this new confessional voice in the Chinese literary mainstream. (Fiona Sze-Lorrain, “Translator’s Note”)

I find myself captivated by Moonlight Rests on My Left Palm: Poems and Essays (New York NY: Astra House Publishing, 2021) by Chinese poet Yu Xiuhua, translated by Fiona Sze-Lorrain. Born with cerebral palsy in 1976 in Hengdian village, Hubei Province, China, Yu Xiuhua was, as the book copy offers, “Unable to attend college, travel, or work the land with her parents, she remained home. In defiance of the stigma attached to her disability, her status as a divorced single mother, and as a peasant in rural China, Yu found her voice in poetry.” The collection opens with the now-infamous poem “Crossing Half of China to Fuck You,” a poem that became an “online sensation” in 2014, and thus launched Yu’s career as a published writer. “Fucking you and being fucked by you are quite the same,” the poem begins, “no more / than the force of two colliding bodies, a flower coaxed into blossom [.]” I’m fascinated, as well, by how this book is structured, offering, after the opening poem, essays by the author as section-openers, which allow the possibility for more of the author’s own thinking around history, language, morality, suffering, disability, politics and poetry, and of exploring the possibilities therein. I don’t know if this was structured by the poet herself or her editor, but it allows for a collection built as a singular unit, incorporating the essays in conversation with the poems; as an essential part of the text, instead of the usual offering of including them at the end, almost as afterthought.

Set as eight essays, six of which open sections of poems composed as abstracts through direct statement, as the author writes her own way into being. “Yes, it can’t stand on its own,” she writes, to open the poem “Dust,” “so it leans west in the wind [.]” There is a meditative and even wistful clarity through these poems, as well as a self-deprecating humour, through a poet who writes of the erotic, of love and the land, and of her immediate and imagined landscapes. She writes with a clarity and a humility, offering her meditations in line with the nature poets, attentive to the movements and shifts of the world around her. There is something quite compelling in the way Yu writes, through Fiona Sze-Lorrain’s attentive translation, against such forces that would erase her voice, whether through her disability, her poverty, her gender or as a divorced, single mother. Through these poems and essays, she claims her own space in the world with an openness that refuses to be contained, while remaining a humble and quietly attentive observer, even of her own life, thoughts and experiences. As she writes to close the essay “I Live to Reject Lofty Words”: “I am desperately in love with this inexplicable and obscure life. I love its conceit, and the haze that surfaces at low points in my life. I am grateful for being well and alive, and all because of my lowly existence.”

Rain Falls outside the Window

But I kept saying on the spot where I dried, drank a bottle of wine
flipped and pushed it over, put it upright
then pushed it over
Rain outside the window neglected me: a drop hugged another, fell
and pushed each other, falling
Fusion is wreckage, wreckage fusion
But how long can one return to the sky, how long does it take to reach
a descent
a—when I flick a speck of cigarette ash, another has arisen
I love someone to death
Another is in my belly
Rain sounds different in different places
No one vanishes faster than another
No one arrives more compact than another
No one in the rain, or not in it

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Fiona Sze-Lorrain

Fiona Sze-Lorrain writes and translates in English, French, and Chinese.  She is the author of two books of poetry, My Funeral Gondola (Manoa Books/El Léon, 2013) and Water the Moon (Marick, 2010), as well as several volumes of translation of contemporary Chinese and American poets (Zephyr Press and Vif Éditions).  She lives in France, and works as an editor and zheng harpist.

www.fionasze.com

1.  How did your first book change your life?  How does your most recent work compare to your previous?  How does it feel different?

My work is modest.  To some extent, my debut book, Water the Moon, changes the course of my writing.  The second, My Funeral Gondola, is of a different aesthetic — and experience.  My editor and co-publisher from Manoa Books, Frank Stewart has been very much present when it comes to assuming its making.

2.  How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
By accident.

I was working on non-fiction pieces for some years before poems happened. 

3.  How long does it take to start any particular writing project?  Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process?  Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?

It is a slow process.  Drafts are private.

4.  Where does a poem usually begin for you?  Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

A poem begins with a failure of sorts.  It speaks to me when I can feel its pulse.  I don’t write with a “book” in mind.  It’d empower presentation and result more than the intimacy of writing.

5.  Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process?  Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I find readings meaningful when they resist becoming an outward performance / role-playing.  Or something that one does just to sell books or be seen in the literary community.  In short, I prefer readings that serve as a form of dialogue, with a precise social context to relate to.

7.  What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture?  Does s/he even have one?  What do you think the role of the writer should be?

I couldn’t help but think of Bialoszewski:

    First I went down to the store
    by means of the stairs,
    just imagine it,
    by means of the stairs.

    Then people known to people unknown
    passed me by and I passed them by.
    Regret
    that you did not see
    how people walk,
    regret!

8.  Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

More essential than difficult.

9.  What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

Not sure if this is the “best,” or an “advice” — Begin from where you are.

10.  How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to translation)?  What do you see as the appeal?

Difficult.  Appeal: to be immersed in another landscape.

11.  What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one?  How does a typical day (for you) begin?

I don’t write every day, but I work on the harp every day.  I also write letters. 

12.  When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

Bach.

13.  What fragrance reminds you of home?

My grandmother’s herbal soup.

14.  David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

Yes, most, if not all, of what you’ve mentioned: botany, music, and visual art. 

15.  What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

Homer, Montaigne, Proust, Tolkien, Blixen, Rilke…

16.  What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

Magic. 

17.  If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be?
Fencing.

18.  What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

I don’t know.

19.  What was the last great book you read?  What was the last great film?

I’m unsure about “great”…  but am happy to recommend Marcel Carné’s Les Enfants du paradis (1945), and Steve McQueen’s Hunger (2008).  Recently, I re-read a few of Jane Austen’s novels.

20.  What are you currently working on?
Phytotherapy and organic desserts.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Fiona Sze-Lorrain, My Funeral Gondola

Sixteen Lines, Autumn 2010

In past autumns, I saw the world differently.

Swans looked graceful

because their bodies were white.

Crows were soothsayers—black

wings, black cries.

In those autumns, death was a small affair.

One leaf fell.

Another.

This autumn, death gets even smaller.

Leaves tilted by wind, into ashes of the earth.

Swans grew fatter,

dropping two or three feathers

into water.

Crows, mouthing air in bare elder trees.

Look: a long sundown.

No more black and white.

The second trade poetry collection from poet, translator and zheng harpist Fiona Sze-Lorrain is My Funeral Gondola (Honolulu HI: Mānoa Books/Berkeley CA: El León Literary Arts, 2013). There is an intriguing disconnect between her lines, akin to some of the work that has been done over the years in the Canadian ghazal (John Thompson, Andy Weaver, Phyllis Webb and Douglas Barbour, for example). The disconnect allows for her poems to exist as clearly between the lines as through them, allowing the collision of the occasional disconnect and pause to resonate new and unseen connections. Through My Funeral Gondola, Sze-Lorrain’s is an attention to lyric detail, to smallness, and some of the poems give the sheen of koans, providing directions and the occasional wisdom. She writes a series of meditations on history, perception, memory, loss, experience, departures, music and ancient distances. “Grief cannot be quarantined – it must / be a battle.” she writes, in “My Death,” one of the poems that make up the first section, “The Title Took Its Life.” Throughout this section, poems write from a sequence of dark triggers, with titles such as “Notes from My Funeral,” “My Death,” “My Melancholy,” “My Nudity” and “My Funeral Gondola,” as well as the section title poem, a thread that exists throughout the collection, into the succeeding two sections.

Japanese Wayang

First, smoke. The elders grope

into the theater. Like hidden

bronze mirrors, midnight lanterns

glow. I don’t ask

when the play begins. Ocher moths

over the whiteness

of the screen where trees clutch

the hungry rain, running

after wrong spirits. Someone is making

room for the wind. Inexplicable,

long fingers of light drag up a torn

hero. Self by self, he steals

away from his body. Gamelan enters:

the neighborly dark

roams. Watch the shadows, not

the puppets.

Her voice is an authoritative one, and yet one that wishes not to be the only authority, exploring uncomfortable spaces and dark thoughts. Perhaps not entirely a darkness throughout the collection, there is certainly an unsettledness, highlighted through such as the first line of the poem “François Dead,” that reads, “Without improvisation, we empty the drawers.” There is a curious restraint in her densely-packed poems that highlight just how deliberately each word is placed, and yet, there is no simple way to discuss the poems. The final poem, “Return to Self,” is very much a poem of sentences, focusing the strength of her lines into self-contained sentence-stanzas in the most appealing way, nearly a lyric cousin to works by Lisa Robertson. I can’t tell if the subtitle, “not in order of appearance,” allows a clarity into the poem, or weakens it, somehow; perhaps, somehow, it manages both. The piece opens:

The whiteness of this page can’t appease my hurt.

In the Letter to His Father, Kafka wrote about Hermann’s threat, I’ll tear you apart like a fish. Writers copied it in their diaries.

My sister accepts her ordainment with joy. She learns that we are traditions, we will die. I believe in myths and write love letters with leaves.

Last night is always more poetic than last year.

A colleague plants sadness in her head. To continue her dark novels, to cry with her mouth gagged.

My government is eager to give me two passports.

Grain magazine 39.4: unstrung,

I CAN ALMOST SEE THE CLOUDS OF DUST

A herd of cattle walks on a tar road

I imagine them stirring up clouds of dust

If they run, startled

I’ll imagine bigger clouds of dust

They’re clean, they walk on a city street

like a group of men in the city

They walk they run they’re startled

like men sweating under the scorching sun

A herd of cattle walks on a city road

They come one by one

They pass by me (Yu Xiang; translated from the Chinese by Fiona Sze-Lorrain)

Every so often I become more aware of the fact that so many literary journals in this country are deeply in love with metaphor-driven lyric narrative poems. Why is that? There are so many other varieties of writing currently being composed and explored in various corners of Canada, why do so many journals simply focus their attentions upon one particular strain? Perhaps I’ve become wistful lately, recalling just how much I enjoyed the days of Toronto’s late, lamented Queen Street Quarterly, for example. In this issue of Saskatoon’s Grain magazine, the summer 2012 issue subtitled “unstrung,” there isn’t much that really strikes out at me, with a few exceptions. The meditative poems of Yu Xiang, as translated from the Chinese by Fiona Sze-Lorrain, are quite lovely, and her first major collection in English translation, I Can Almost See the Clouds of Dust (Zephyr Press) is forthcoming. Still, some other things intrigue, such as some of the lines by Christopher Lee Miles, but some of the finest and most intriguing have to come from Kirya Marchand, in her striking five-part poem “FIVE WAYS I HAVE FOUND OF TOUCHING MY OWN BODY,” that includes:

III. CLICKING MY TONGUE-RING ACROSS MY TEETH

I talk like a clock

would.

I talk and my talking counts time

caught

in the ossuary,

I walk through like a monk

would.

I

strike

time.

Otherwise, I love that the “Haiku Horoscopes” by Winnipeg’s “Jonathan Ball, Registered Fraud” is a regular occurrence, striking and odd enough to be one of the highlights of every issue.

TAURUS (April 20—May 20)

The Secret’s out—the

Reason Stonehenge was built was

Just to annoy you

It’s always good to see new fiction by Toronto writer Stan Rogal, as well as by Victoria writer Oscar Martens who, some two decades ago, was living in Ottawa and hanging around The TREE Reading Series. The opening of his story “No Call Too Small” reads:

We sit in our cruiser at the far end of the lot in Belcarra Park, where all is calm except for the two squirrels I’ve been tracking. Observed but unreported, one has scored a cheese doodle from under the picnic bench, and the other seems determined to take it by force, spiralling up the truck on a nearby pine. Subject is a few inches tall, half a pound, light brown fur, bushy tail, nervous darting eyes, and twitchy body language. Victim is a few inches tall, half a pound, light brown fur, bushy tail, nervous darting eyes, and twitchy body language. The sharp crack that startles me is not gunfire, but a seagull dropping a clam onto the pavement to smash open its skull. This seagull of interest is known to police and has been seen in the area with his associates, harassing the eagle that now sits atop an eighty-foot cedar. Current conditions do not warrant invention.