Graze on the face like a fly on honeydew,
bend over toward someone so that your entire body alights
imperceptibly, on the cusp of action, afternoon fretted
in long lines of light through a near-drawn shade.
Between what you do and what you don’t do, what you can’t
(but could) or haven’t (again) but have imagined,
fates hang suspended in the whirl of motes
over sugar, over a piece of fruit, over an orb
smashed on the ground. The bride walked out
of church with her bouquet, then seeing it
still in her hand, she dropped it. The airplane running low
on fuel cannot circle back. Hear its continual roar.

Walter Benjamin claimed in “The Task of the Translator” that “a translation issues from the original — not so much from its life as from its afterlife… a translation, instead of resembling the meaning of the original, must lovingly and in detail incorporate the original’s mode of signification, thus making both the original and the translation recognizable as fragments of a greater language.” The afterlife of Dante’s Inferno has been long and varied. In each case the translator has made formal and lexical choices based on what he or she believed would best capture the essence of Dante’s allegorical journey…

— EXCERPT FROM Creating a New Version of Dante’s Inferno
BY Mary Jo Bang

Instead, I grow quiet trying to hear your voice. Simmering on my eardrum. It is a radio voice transmitting a whole night throbbing with fireflies, your whole mouth ringing with six hundred species of bacteria, six thousand tingling thrills. “Red rings inwardly…” Kandinsky muses, “It glows in itself, maturely, and doesn’t distribute its vigor aimlessly.”

When I turned twelve, my family moved into the woods. I did not have one friend that long summer. There are other details, but the point is: I developed a barely audible hum. Distressed, I rang out. A tiny, high diva voice emerged in soft spectacle from my throat. Mostly I did not know I was sounding off until someone called my attention to it. My hum asked for no answer. Yet my mother and brother noted my psychological leakage in annoyance — “knock off the lame tune.” Sometimes strangers cocked their heads at me with a worried look. The excess of it attracted judgment. The ambient sonority of it — wasp, bee, and fly hum — drove any potential companions away.

Contemporary Chinese poet Xi Chuan 西川 (the pen-name of Liu Jun 刘军) is a prolific “hyphenated” littérateur: teacher-essayist-translator-editor-poet. The American writer Eliot Weinberger has described him as a “polymath, equally at home discussing the latest American poetry as Shang Dynasty numismatics.”

Currently a professor in pre-modern Chinese literature at the Central Academy for Fine Arts in Beijing, Xi Chuan had also previously taught English language, and Western literature in Chinese translation. (He was an English major at Beijing University, and wrote an undergraduate thesis on Ezra Pound’s translations from the Chinese). His professional career path follows his poetic development: gaining recognition first as one of the post-Obscure poets in the late eighties, his writing was defined by a condensed lyricism in the Western modernist mode. Today, he writes expansive prose-poems that meditate on awkwardness and paradox at the individual and international levels…

Seeing the Light
(China, Gansu/Qinghai, 2007)
BY Larry Louie

The current pace of industrial development around the world has brought widespread concern about a loss of diversity in nature and the need to protect endangered species. But the changes brought by the forces of globalization, industrialization and urbanization affect not only animals and plants. People and cultures, ways of thinking, and ways of living that have been in existence for thousands of years are also at risk.

— EXCERPT FROM Vanishing Faces of Tibet
BY Larry Louie

Often I see the portrait in people’s houses or offices, or sometimes in magazines or books, a photo almost sixty years old that captured an image of men eating lunch on a girder over New York City in 1932. Yet, I see what others never can: the days and weeks and months surrounding that ensnared moment, and I see a space that pulses in the gray mist of cloud. I am now of the age to understand that seeing is a selective act anyway, that nothing is truly visible to us at all, other than in some intersection of time and memory, shallow imprints in the sands of what we call experience. None of us can ever prove that any one event has truly happened in the exact way we have perceived it, for perception is the slide of the world around us as we spin on its surface and imagine we are still.

—EXCERPT FROM Iconic
BY Brendan Moore

I think of the painter Paul Klee saying, “If I paint what I know, I bore myself. If I paint what you know, I bore you. Therefore I paint what I don’t know.” Each poem has to bring back something previously unknown or unarticulated. Each poem has to bring back something previously unknown… when a poet is willing to risk not-knowing, that’s when something might happen. That’s why an “idea” for a poem rarely results in the kind of surprise we hope for: a discovery or sudden insight that seems to come from somewhere outside or beyond us. When a poet merely expresses emotion or follows logic to a conclusion, or describes something, however beautifully or dramatically or precisely, what does he learn? That’s just craft. But when a poet is willing to risk not-knowing, that’s when something might happen. I think this is what Mandelshtam meant when he said that the poem should be an event on the page.