Today is #GivingTuesday! If you’ve been enjoying our Translation Tuesday showcases at the Asymptote blog and on The Guardian, consider signing up to be a sustaining member at just $5 a day. We’re still several members short of reaching our target; each additional membership helps us get closer to being able to continue beyond April 2017.
For today’s showcase, we’re thrilled to present poetry by the celebrated poet Chou Meng-tieh, named the first Literature Laureate by Taiwan’s National Culture and Arts Foundation in 1997. But his literary achievement belied a lifetime of monastic poverty, decades of which he spent selling books out of a roadside stall. Two years after Chou’s passing in 2014, without any surviving family, our editor-in-chief presents a new translation of one of Chou’s seminal poems, marked by his characteristically ascetic vision.
look at winter in a certain way
look at winter in a certain way
start from sunlight—
clumps of parasites up to no good
puncturing holes in snow’s body
snow that never moans, never says no
one punctured hole…
while the good mood lasts, I’ll turn
sadness into the dead sadness of years past
one punctured hole…one
burial
on one certain hushed-up night
what is meant to surface, will out one day
look at winter in a certain way
winter—with its way of amplifying everything
even days grow longer,
nights warmer, a black cat’s
pupils—blacker, rounder, brighter
as they turn and illuminate
the surrounding emptiness
all fallen leaves are destined to return to their branches
all trees being—as always—an extension
of my own diverging hands
though winter treads lightly,
its footfalls never cease—if you
look at winter in a certain way
Chou Meng-tieh was named the inaugural Literature Laureate by Taiwan’s National Culture and Arts Foundation in 1997. In literary circles, he is highly regarded and considered a “national treasure.”
Lee Yew Leong is the founder of Asymptote, winner of the 2015 London Book Fair Award for Literary Translation Initiative. As Asymptote’s Fiction Editor and Editor-in-Chief, Yew Leong has presented a newly translated story or poem in The Guardian every Tuesday since November 2015. Based in Taipei, he works as a freelance editor and translator of contemporary Taiwanese literature. Among the three book-length works he has translated, Fu-chen Lo’s From Taiwan to the World and Back is the most recent publication. Winner of the James Assatly Memorial Prize for Fiction (Brown University), he has written for The New York Times, among others, and recently served as one of the judges for PEN International’s 2016 New Voices Award.
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