(after Yusef Komunyakaa)A broken machine gunhangs as a wind chime,rat-a-tat-tat, hugginga willow climbed by a toddlerwho keeps singingabout craterswith American eyesthat overflow. —from “Toys in a Field” (Volume 66, issue 1) Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.The first I remember, I was likely about six years old. They . . .
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This county town’s famine is faraway, and mooring here is so miserable. Themountains advance from the south, the Yangtze’s gurgle carries up northward. —from 峡江县 (XIAJIANG COUNTY) and 黄金洲 (GOLDEN ISLAND), poems by Zhang Xun, translated by Bijaan Noormohamed (Volume 65, issue 3) Tell us about one of the first pieces you . . .
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Two middle-aged men before an ancient mapLook for where they are The bronze birds are now rottenCloser to Giacometti—from “In the Exhibition Hall” by Ye Hui, Translated from Chinese by Dong Li (Volume 66, Issue 2) Tell us about one of the first pieces you translated.The first full-length book that I have . . .
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66. IT SHOULD be noted that, to date, there is no physical evidencethat Anna Kavan had cats. Her surviving letters, diaries, notebooks, marginalia, memorabilia,and photographs contain no signs of felines. Nevertheless, a substantialbody of Kavan scholarship has formed around the question of Kavan’scats.—from Steven R. Kraaijeveld’s “Anna Kavan’s Cats” (Volume 66, issue . . .
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What I mean is, there are waysback in when your brain has checked you out:singing badly, for example. Making uglinessa god of sorts. Knowing yourself as a person thatcan be unwillingly . . .
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Not just one death,one victim tells another:they killed me by the roadside. —from Ibrahim Fawzy’s translation of Maya Abu Al-Hayyat’s “Not Just One Death” (Volume 65, issue 4) What role does language play in resisting colonialism and precipitating liberation? How does your piece engage with this question?Language is not merely a medium . . .
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A light split the room where Rubén Darío was trying to write. On that side, a copy of Don Quixote; on this side, the untrimmed sheets of paper with words crossed out and the unread letter from a young poet in search of guidance and assistance. —from Mark Schafer’s translation of David . . .
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I greet an ancient refrigerator,once my father, now reduced to bare bones, yetit remains unbearably heavy. —from Jack Saebyok Jung’s translation of Heeum’s “The Use of a Window” (Volume 66, issue 3) Tell us about one of the first pieces you translated.One of the earliest pieces I translated was a poem by . . .
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“Brianna80.” I like the round number, eighty. 4s, 8s, multiples of 10, a number I would have written as a child on and on, practicing my numbers: 8 then 0 then 8 then 0, looping like kids holding hands in a playground. The number eighty, attached to the temporary name Bri-anna, was . . .
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The sun has coppered his brownas it has the mud on which we walk.Palms banana trees grow against the whitewall we barely see. Blue finches singin the wire cage he carries. Its greenperch is the same green as his trunks. —from Myronn Hardy’s “The Cage” (Volume 66, issue 3) Tell us about . . .
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