In conversation with Chen Yuhong

SH: Readers in Taiwan know you as a poet-translator of the works of contemporary Anglophone poets into Chinese, Carol Ann Duffy, Louise Glück, and, most recently, Alice Oswald, to name a few. How did you choose the poets you want to translate?

I was first introduced to English poetry at university, but as you know, the curriculum at Taiwan’s foreign language departments doesn’t really cover modern poetry. But I was trained quite well in classical Chinese poetry. After moving to Vancouver in the eighties, I came across Margaret Atwood’s poems by accident. I’d only known her as a novelist! As I read her work, I kept thinking how I could recreate her poetry in Chinese. But it wasn’t until I read Carol Ann Duffy’s work that I began to think seriously about translating English poetry into Chinese.

That’s interesting. Why is that? Is it the strong feminist voice in her work?

Many people think that’s the case. It’s true that Duffy’s work is described as highly political and feminist, but actually, it was the gentle voice in her collection Rapture that caught my attention. To me, love and compassion are the essence of all creative work. When poets write about ‘love’, family love or relationships, I believe that is when they show their true passions for poetry and humanity. That is what I found inspiring in Duffy’s Rapture: how every poem is an opportunity to explore a very focused, centralised theme in the metres, words and forms of her choice, as though she was composing a symphony. That was a very different Duffy I was reading, and I felt the impulse to bring this voice to the Chinese-speaking world. I was happy that the publisher decided to include in my translation of Rapture the English originals, enabling the readers to appreciate Duffy’s beautiful words. I feel sorry that sometimes, for some particular reasons, the publisher couldn’t include the original language.

A bilingual comparison would’ve been nice for sure. So what about Jack Gilbert? He’s the only male poet you’ve translated.

I really appreciate his eccentricity and honesty. I love how he used simple language to speak so openly and directly about his feelings about love, desire, loneliness and death. He was a serious romantic! Have you noticed I tend to translate works written by poets at or around the age of fifty?

Not really. But I do remember you saying that ‘the age of fifty is one’s best time to write’.

In Taiwan, many readers doubt that poets over forty can’t produce any significant work, especially if a poet has achieved literary fame at a younger age. But I think the opposite. I believe poets are at their best at fifty. Good poetry requires language and craft, and by this age, poets would have mastered their style and voice after years of experimentation. On top of that, they would’ve been nourished by their life experiences to inject richness and flavour to their writing.

On that note, can you speak about your translation practice?

Like many poets of my generation, my education in Taiwan grounded me in the classical Chinese poetry tradition, Tang poems, Song lyrics etc. The lexical compactness, rhyme, rhythm and syntax were what I was used to. So, when I translate, I’d always look at a poem’s formal properties. I’d analyse an English poem word by word, line by line, and syllable by syllable to highlight its nuances. Every repeating vowel and consonant sound matters to me because I want to retain as much of this formal integrity as possible in my rendition.

That would take a very long time to translate each poem!

And so it should. When I translate, I do abide by Yan Fu’s three tenets of translation: ‘Faithfulness, Expressiveness and Elegance’. I remain faithful to the original in terms of its contents and stylistic properties, and communicate the poem in a language accessible to readers. As to elegance, that’s a real test of any translator’s linguistic capacity. Recognising the poetic language in the source text and recreating it in the target text is already challenging. A translator must also capture and recreate the flavour, and that is never a straightforward process. When I translated Sappho’s love poems, for example, I wanted to make sure readers could feel the passion and the sense of freedom I felt in the source text. Although I didn’t translate directly from ancient Greek, I did have several different versions of English and French translations on hand to compare, and tried playing with tone and rhythm to recreate them in my translation. Translation is recreation, and it takes a lot to get things right. Surely you understand that as you also translate?

I sure do, and do you think poetry is best translated by poet-translators?

Of course, it’s best when poets can translate poets. Translation really is a labour of love. And isn’t writing poetry also a labour of love? I see the role of a poet as very similar to that of a translator. As a translator, I mediate between two languages and cultures, trying to carry across the voice I hear in the host language to the target language. As a poet, I feel the impulse to write, to channel that voice that I hear inside, inspiration you may call it, faithfully into the present, like Pythia repeating Apollo’s words. I translate, I create, and I re-create.

I love how you draw parallels between writing and translating. In your own poetry, I have noticed that you engage in dialogue with poets of both Eastern and Western literary traditions, the Song poet Li Qingzhao, American poets like Elizabeth Bishop and Sylvia Plath etc., and your collection Suōyǐn is almost like a homage to Sappho. Can you talk a little about how these poets have influenced your poetics?

I love these poets’ work. I love how the simplicity of their language conveys such depth about their life’s philosophy. But there’s something we have in common: we’ve all travelled quite extensively. A lot of my poems were written during my travels, inspired by the landscapes I saw: the seashores of Vancouver where I went for walks, and the lakes I visited in Mongolia, for example. Bishop also wrote a lot about her travels, didn’t she? I tried to document the sentiments triggered by what I saw, smelt and felt there and then in my poems. Are love poems not also about the same there-and-then’s? It is these personal experiences that shape my perspectives and my creative voice. Think about Plath, and the way she wrote about her anger, sorrow and despair in her poems. It was her life: what she experienced as a person, moving across continents and across cultures, and it’s a deeply personal voice.

And Li Qingzhao?

She’s probably the most prominent, if not the only, woman poet in classical Chinese literary history, isn’t she? She had a voice that was very open and honest about her feelings of love, expectations and later disappointment. She was also quite vocal about political matters! I love the compactness and the musicality in her poems. The stylistic features I find in her work, and in classical Chinese poetry from other dynasties, are something I try to blend into my own work. You’ll find other poets from Taiwan doing similar things in their work. Didn’t Xiang Yang craft his own regulated ‘Ten-Line’ poems inspired by the poetry (or songs) of Chu?

Yes, I’m aware of that, but I must say I am more familiar with his poems in Taiwanese. I actually attended a concert about his poems last year. So, how about modern Taiwanese poets? Am I right to say that you’re influenced by poets like Yang Mu and Ya Hsien?

It’s interesting you mentioned that. Back then, when I was the editor of our school journal at Wenzao Ursuline University of Languages, I took my very first creative writing course – taught by Ya Hsien! I guess you can say that he opened my door to the world of creative writing. Have you read the works of Yang Mu and Chen Li? You’d notice in their work that they allude to literature of both the East and the West. Their university training, like mine, was mostly in English or foreign language studies, and this exposure to literature from other cultures certainly enhanced our poetic expressions. Were I to speak of Taiwanese poets who have influenced me, it would have to be Yang Mu. We’ve just finished compiling his collections of writing. He was so well read and so disciplined in his writing. Reading his work makes me realise how much there’s still to learn! He blended East and West, classical and modern, so seamlessly into his writing. The richness and precision of his language are just exquisite and incomparable. He opened a new way of thinking about poetry or literature, and set a benchmark for all poets to come!

Like the Holy Grail in Taiwan’s world of poetry.

Absolutely. You must read his work. His entire collection of writing has just been published.

Sure. I’ll put it on my reading list! Moving on. I was wondering, as a woman poet, do you in any way intend your work, poetry and translation, to engage in gender politics?

I suppose some would think I am a feminist because I’ve translated the works of Margaret Atwood and Carol Ann Duffy. They use sharp language to expose gender inequality and protest against oppressive practices. I certainly do not disagree with that, but rather than labelling myself a feminist, I’d prefer to say that I write from a woman’s perspective about human experiences, about human rights; and I speak for the disadvantaged, the minority and the ones who suffer unfairness. After all, to put it simply, women’s right is human right. Agree?

I can see that. That reminds me of the elegies about 9/11 in New York, about the victims of the 1999 Jiji earthquake, about Syrian refugees, the Japanese tsunami victims etc.

And isn’t it a human right to love? But love is so hard to come by! That’s probably why I write so much about love and relationships! You mentioned Sylvia Plath earlier. When I read her poems, what flashed through my mind were things like, ‘What is her life like to have gone through such hardship and challenges? What kind of life did she lead? What pain she must have experienced!’ It’s empathy. But does that mean I am being political? I think not.

That’s a very profound thing to say. Following up on that, I’d like to speak about something I’ve noticed in your poems. Reading through your collections, the subject of life and death comes up quite a lot. But unlike many other poets concluding at the end of their contemplation, you seem to leave open endings. For some reason, I feel there’s something very Buddhist about it.

It’s interesting you said that. I don’t think anyone’s said anything about that. Do you practise Buddhism?

Yes, I do.

No wonder! It takes one who knows it to recognise it. I grew up in a Catholic family and received a Catholic education. I read and learned about God and Heaven in the Bible. But as I grew up, I began to wonder about life’s cycle and reincarnation, and I turned to Buddhist classics too look for an answer: the Diamond Sutra, the ‘Universal Gateway of Guanyin Bodhisattva’, etc. In fact, I took a suitcaseful of Buddhist books with me when I flew to Vancouver! They offered me a different way to look at the world, teaching me the impermanence of life and śūnyatā, or Emptiness. To quote the Diamond Sutra, ‘All phenomena are like a dream’. I realised that in space, we are just like a grain of sand in the vastness of the universe, and in time, we, or life, are only a phenomenon, a process. Will I ever have an answer to all my questions about life and death? Perhaps not.