Editor's Pick: Claire Zhou | Poetry

Translation

1. 亲爱的：

今年的冬天格外的冷。我们的梅花不幸地谢了。

                                                                                                                                    李温煦

                                                                                                                        2021年1月8日

    2. The sky is a blue caldera and you are swimming in it, clothes twined in a tangle of

bushes, voice high and sweet as you call my name. There is an eagle gentling your hand,

its beak arched like a rose window. You are soft, your laughter as round as an apple, and

we swim together. This is a dream, which is to say it is a memory. Which is to say the

sky is a blue caldera and you are drowning in it, and a fly buzzes over a film of milk as

heavy as fustian cloth, and you are dead. I wish I could translate you into a language you

could understand. I can’t.           exhibit A: How do I translate crap? 卧槽 is reminiscent

of the curse, 屎 of the literal meaning. They are not the same thing. They are not

you.           exhibit B: The sky is a blue caldera and there is a car barrelling down the

streets. Your face softens towards mine, innocent as a pup, and your hair sweeps wet

across my cheek. You take one step backwards and die.           exhibit C: My personal

favorite. We dance with the blinds drawn, my hands looping your waist, yours looping

mine, and we are tumbling, fumbling, clumsy, tripping on the carpet edges, two old men

playing young. You kiss me on the teeth, and say, Pain is all relative. Then you die.

Where you die, my translation begins.

3.   My love,

            This year’s winter is abnormally cold. Our plum blossoms have

unfortunately withered.

                                                                                                            Thomas Li.

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A Moment with Claire Zhou

PDS: Tell us a little about your writing process.

CZ: Writing is like dealing with an old friend on the other side of the world. I can have lunch with it only when it’s free—and it picks and chooses when to visit me. It knows me better than anyone else, but sometimes, because of time zone differences, different priorities, the busyness of day-to-day life, we get into frequent arguments that we don’t really mean. I say that I hate it and it flies away in a fit of anger. We can go months without seeing each other. But we always come back to each other. When I’m watching a really good TV series, or scrolling on my phone and find an interesting video, or getting coffee at an antique-styled coffee shop, I can’t help opening my laptop to call it. We know each other intrinsically. 

All this is to say that I write very spontaneously—especially poetry. My poems usually write themselves in a matter of minutes; I’ll open a Google Docs page and a poem sprouts wings in that sort-of ugly size eleven Ariel font. I’m actually quite impatient with my poetry, which is something I’m trying to work on remedying. I usually give it a couple of read-overs and submit it to a literary magazine, or else abandon it and find it a few months later. My prose, on the other hand, I work on step-by-step. I peer over every pore of my prose like I’m looking at my face in a mirror. I think it has to do with how poetry is more of an in-the-moment thing for me, a split-second way of expressing oneself, whereas prose resembles a marathon I have to pace myself through.

With that said, no matter what form it comes to me in, writing is an old friend I’ll never stop meeting. 

PDS: Who do you seek to represent or speak to in your work? In other words, what communities & people inspire you to write?

CZ: I try not to purposefully think about representing a certain community in my writing. As individuals, the only people we can really speak for are ourselves and our lives. Yet, because our lives are unable to be distanced from those we have interacted with in the past, other people slip in through the cracks: my parents, my little sister, my friends, people I’ve hated, strangers I’ve sat next to on subways, the puppy curled a hand away from me on a thirteen hour flight. So it’s really everyone. The world, if you will. I want to speak to anyone that can look at my writing and think, this, I know about. This is the barista who smiled at me yesterday and got me really good coffee. This is the view of Lake Washington when I went paragliding at seven. This is my memory. For me, that’s my inspiration—the idea that I am an anthology of those I have loved and hated and felt ambivalent about, and that precisely this is what resonates with people I’ve never spoken to in the world. People are what keep me writing—whether audience or subject. 

PDS: This poem feels so layered, almost brimming over the top with imagery and emotional dives and streams-of-thought tangled with the constraints of language and interpersonal communication. As a reader, I felt immediately thrust into these dreamscapes (or memories, as the speaker says) and allowed to participate in the movement & entanglement of the poem's speaker and subject. My question is: how do you feel your poem achieves such a dynamic resistance to and embrace of language and bodily movement/fluidity? Or how do you attempt to grapple with these kinds of themes in your writing?

CZ: In “Translation,” I tried to encapsulate the fluidity of language and of the body through repetition—rather oxymoronic, I know. As one of the earlier poems I wrote when I was fifteen, I was fascinated with how phrases—even if they are spelt the same way, even if they are the exact same phrase—can differ in meaning depending on what context they are used in. Language is such a powerful and unique communicative construct; though each language is typically made of objective building blocks, like the alphabet in English, they retain a subjective nature because not one phrase means the same thing to every person. In “Translation,” for instance, “the sky is a blue caldera” is the phrase that is constantly repeated throughout the poem—but this phrase leads to a different scene every time it is repeated. There’s a kind of automatic and intrinsic fluidity in that. 

Generally, I tend to grapple with fluidity in my writing through translation. Translation creates an inherent environment of fluidity, because we’re jumping in-between two—or more—languages. On a deeper level, though, translation of the mathematical kind occurs in every poem, because we translate ourselves from scene-to-scene through vectors. We move the body through tethered coordinates, like “the sky is a blue caldera,” or “you are dead,” into different dreamscapes. Fluidity. Hands, arms, voices. Indeed, the speaker translates his “you,” because I think that, ultimately, just like the speaker, we are all creatures that yearn for beauty. It is easier to envision that death is beautiful rather than ugly. It is easier to translate than to remember.

On the other hand, I also think that fluidity is something that is ephemeral. Even in “Translation,” there is an implied barrier to fluidity due to the final Chinese-to-English translation. The speaker’s “you” can never be translated in a language they understand, because the “you” is not a Chinese-speaker. They will never get the chance to be. 

PDS: What are some books and writers that have influenced your writing style?

CZ: That’s always a hard question! I find myself loving things like a magpie does—easily distracted by the next beautiful glint of silver in a bookstore. I’m also guilty of not reading as much poetry as I should. With that said, writers that have stayed with me for a long time include Haruki Murakami, Yoko Ogawa, Ted Chiang, Vladimir Nabokov, Sappho, Sanmao (三毛) and, of course, Ocean Vuong. Ted Chiang’s Stories of Your Life and Others has lived in my mind like a furiously nibbling parasite after I first read it three years ago—specifically “Story of Your Life.” Language and its intimate interweaving in how we learn to understand the world is something that has always fascinated me. I’m extremely devoted to understanding how we can portray narrative in poetry—how world-building can occur in a limited and restricted space. Poems, especially formal poetry, written on a strictly language-based level are incredible; “Sestina: Like” by A. E Stallings is definitely one of these.

This summer, I fell in love with Diana Khoi Nyugen’s “Triptych” from Ghost Of. Her deft manipulation of poetic form is something I hope to eventually achieve in my own writing. Recently, Cormac McCarthy’s writing has also made me consider how we can break-down language on a molecular level. How does our language change when our world breaks down? How has colonialism impacted the way we speak our mother tongues? How do we treat language, and how are we, in turn, treated by language?

PDS: Do you have any tips or words-to-live-by that keep you motivated as a writer?

CZ: Be kind to yourself. It’s okay if you haven’t written for a long time. It’s okay if you feel that everything you touch is cliché. It’s okay to just be sad instead of writing about how you’re sad. It’s okay to feel. I haven’t written any poetry for nearly six months, and I forgive myself for it. Writing isn’t a checklist or a task that’s imprinted on your to-do-list. It’s something you love. Don’t forget that. Let yourself step back if you want to. And, above all else, remember to be kind.

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Claire Zhou is a student currently residing in Suzhou, China. Her work has appeared in Chestnut Review. 

Find Claire Zhou on Instagram @kaeli_nnn