Ouyang Yu Bilingual Blog

                                by Ouyang Yu you are supposed to be preparing your translation class. but, here you are at it again. driving at the philosophy of it the senselessness of it that somehow makes sense. ‘did you write about it?’ ups and downs, ups and ups’. ‘right now i’m getting beyond the point explicity’ ‘which doesn’t mean that it’s not good’. ‘coming to terms with it takes me 15 years, this loneliness, this solitude, in which you think you live a death, in which you are constantly hankering after some sort of contact of recognition, of voices at the ears’. ‘in the end, what matters is the text, not those who short-list you or award you or criticize you or slot you in here and there’ ‘nijinsky says: criticism is death’ ‘remember rilke’s letter to the young poet?’ ‘last month i wrote 40-odd poems, some work, others not quite, and 6 days into this month i’ve already done 16 poems, such ...

                                                                      Written in Chinese by Qi Guo                                                                       Translated into English by Ouyang Yu A red hat An orange tie A yellow shirt A green coat A black trousers (from: http://www.peril.com.au/author/ouyang 

In a way, everything is self publishing. When you open your mouth to talk, you are self publishing because you don’t want someone else to speak for you even if he or she were the speech writer for Howard or Bush or Mao Zedong. When the rain decides to fall it is self publishing, on a regional scale, sometimes on a statewide scale. You can’t dismiss it as unworthily self publishing because it doesn’t fall on a national scale or international scale. Rivers in the world are self publishing on a daily and nightly basis. Even a little creek is self publishing when it winds its way through an industrial zone clogged with toxicity and waste. Birds never remain quiet because they don’t get paid for calling, their ways of self publishing that never is actually recorded in human history, not even in birds’ history, and when sometimes it does get recorded as in relaxation music they still don’t get paid and they still keep singing, their ways of self publishing. Some great self publish...

Foreign Matter By Ouyang Yu, Melbourne: Otherland, 2004, 82 pages, paperback, $24.95. Reviewed by Tim Metcalf in the  June 2005  issue. Ouyang Yu won the 2003 Fast Books Prize for Poetry with  Foreign Matter , self-published by his Otherland Press. From a prolific author across several genres, this book was not written for the reader reclining at ease on their 'gilded cloud'. Indeed, this reviewer found assimilating the text an uncomfortable task. Foreign Matter  predominantly concerns the state of belonging, unfortunately parlous, of its Chinese born author to the Australia he emigrated to in 1991: a contemporary convict sent from China by my former self. (p 68) Anger and disappointment are the most pervasive emotions in sequences with titles such as 'Writing Poetry: An Un-Australian Activity', 'Citizenship', 'Democracy', and 'On Invasion Literature'; and white Australians such as myself are attacked repeatedly in direct English. In 'G...

(originally published on 6 February 2009) Reality Dreams  by Ouyang Yu Picaro Press, 2008 The Kingsbury Tales  by Ouyang Yu Brandl & Schlesinger, 2008 While we awaited the arrival of Ouyang Yu's  The Kingsbury Tales , a small treat came in the form of  Reality Dreams . It is not at all surprising that Yu has put out two books of poetry in one year; in fact he has put out three, one written in Chinese. And that does not even touch upon his fiction and non-fiction. The man must be one of the most prolific writers in Australia. As is common in his extensive library of writing, both Reality Dreams  and  The Kingsbury Tales  tackle cultural identity. But is this theme getting old? Have we had enough of the angry Chinese Australian poet grumping on about how dislocated he feels? I actually can't get enough. Yu keeps his old themes fresh by attempting something new with each of his books. In  Reality Dreams  he works with the subconscious. T...