Solitude

By Ouyang Yu
                                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 as this one i’m finishing when you ring’
‘read it to me’ ‘i’m attaching notes here about spending two weeks in two countries
but it’s not till i actually started the poem when i realized that i’d spent three winters’
‘read it to me’. poem read. ‘you know, i no longer care about the need to
communicate; i’d rather die in opacity or semi-it if you like, this world too well-
connected for the dead’s comfort. i’m into otherworldly linkages. and i’ve finally
come to terms with this real, real hard thing.’ ‘i’ve got a cold, a very bad cough. let
me check if 13th’s okay, oh, no, peter and teresa are coming. 20th’s we are going to
castlemaine. 12th? let me check. yes, that’ll be fine. but we won’t talk about that; it’s a
bit superstitious, i know’
(from http://www.peril.com.au/edition3/solitude )

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

LOWER DOWNS, RUBBISH AND LOW POETRY by Ouyang Yu

By Ouyang Yu
Beauty is so far from being the dominant principle of modern poetry that many of the most splendid modern works are clearly portrayals of ugliness - Friedrich Schlegel ( On the Study of Greek Poetry , 1797) Contemporary Chinese poetry has unashamedly turned from the sublime and sacred to the vulgar and profane. In April 1999 at the Panfeng Conference in Pinggu County, Beijing, poets split into two camps, the  zhishi fenzi  (intellectual) and the  minjian . 1  The poets in the intellectual camp (Wang Jiaxin, Ouyang Jianghe, Xi Chuan, Zang Di and others) were mostly well-published, anthologised, critically acclaimed, well-travelled and internationally well-connected. As university professor and poetry critic Cheng Guangwei noted, much of their poetry reflects the influences of Western literary masters such as Yeats, Rilke, Lowell, Pound, Baudelaire, Milosz, Pasternak and Brodsky. 2  The  minjian camp (Yu Jian, Yi Sha, Xu Jiang and others) critiqued these infl...
Read more

Self Publishing, a poem by Ouyang Yu

By Ouyang Yu
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...
Read more

Wenche Ommundsen: Not for the Faint-Hearted: Ouyang Yu: The Angry Chinese Poet

By Ouyang Yu
Image
Wenche Ommundsen: Not for the Faint-Hearted: Ouyang Yu: The Angry Chinese Poet [PAGE 595] In the title poem of Ouyang Yu's first collection,  Moon Over Melbourne , a homesick Chinese poet compares the Australian moon with the moon celebrated by countless poets in his homeland. The moon is the same, but at the same time it is different. Like the ancient Chinese moon, it inspires poetry—and madness. But in Australia, that poetry is born of frustration and loss, and of everything this foreign moon fails to be. The ‘bastard’ moon over suburban Melbourne even looks Australian. ‘Mooching’ along in an ‘air-conditioned’, ‘I-wouldn't-care-less’ kind of mood, it mimics the country's indifference towards the newcomer and towards everything else: ‘you hang on you all right you no worries mate’. 1  Australia and China are both colonizers, but they colonize differently. While Australia is content to plant ‘the rag of a flag/among your rocks’, and then retreat into lazy indifference,...
Read more