Jay Hopler

Here's one that's a bit backwards - my first attempt at a translation into Chinese, rather than from it. A relatively simple poem by Jay Hopler, I feel like I more or less got it across. Artfully? Who knows. Anywho.

喔, 無斑點的悲戚

著 / Jay Hopler 

譯 / Rob Voigt 

羅馬的女人那麼美妙,

就像漫動作地被打致死似的,

看著她們--; 就像流血.

因此我就不看

她們. 我看橄欖樹上棲息

的鸚鵡,

                      

某種古老的東西 (大約是教堂吧)

後面的月亮上漲, 前幾個昏星--. 從我書齋窗, 可以

見到伽利略發明望遠鏡的

那棟房子. 我要知道他那夜晚

在想著什麼 – 他首次

搜索蒼天的那個

夜晚; 要知道是否有什麼

他設法避免看到.

O, the Sadness Immaculate

Jay Hopler

The women in Rome are so beautiful,
It's like being beaten to death in slow motion,
Looking at them—; it's like bleeding.

So I don't look
At them. I look at the parrots nesting
In the olive trees,

The moon rising behind some ancient
Something-or-other (a church, probably), the first few stars—. From my study
    window, I can
See the house where Galileo invented

The telescope. I wonder what he was
Thinking about that night—that night
He first searched

Heaven; I wonder what it was he was
Trying not to see.

Chen Kehua Returns

Well, yay! I'm now working on a large set of translations for Chen Kehua (陳克華), and have met with him a couple of times so far. He's a really interesting guy and I like his work a great deal. I'm aiming to have the set completed by October so we can submit it for the Taipei City Gov't fund that could help with publishing costs. Exciting stuff.

I also noticed that my earlier post on him is now the #1 result for an English search for "Chen Kehua" on the Taiwan Google. Hoho! Not that anyone ever searches that. Anyway here's another of his that I quite like:

Loneliness – Autopsy

What is this loneliness? Each night

I raise my knife to perform a self-dissection,

dreaming that in some corner of the body

I might find that hidden locus of infection.

In the small room, a rigid corpse

flat upon the disordered bed, saliva and vomited foodstuffs,

all filth sprinkled on an unclean bedsheet.

Slicing through the ribs, opening fine lines inward

I find the viscera still in good order

but lacking a waxy luster – I probe with my fingertips

and as expected find they have long since frozen, hardened.

It must be glandular, what with these intolerable

periodic eruptions, physiological phenomena

in the blood, or in the thick green bile -

I discover an entire cavity soaked in some kind of rare

and strange hormone, draw it out

and concentrate it, and inject the guinea pigs

to make observations.

(What is this loneliness?)

In the end those small rodents begin to know

and die one by one. I mark down:

In that narrow, crowded cage

they trampled upon one another; they could not see

their own path of reluctant corpses

And so I reach a conclusion. When I

suture up the wounds, return the organs,

daybreak outside the window, crowd of birds chattering in the trees,

in the corner of the lab the myna bird raises an anxious echo,

fiercely beating itself against the bars of its cage.

“Are you lonely?” I go to feed him,

offering up my entrails.

May

May,
in transparent veins,
green blood cells swim…
May is just this kind of living thing.

May strolls naked through the streets.
In the hills, it breathes in golden hairs.
In the wilderness, it sings in silver light.
Just so, May wanders unseen.

Zhan Bing (詹冰)