Moon Fevers: Poems

Translating Feminisms

by Nhã Thuyên, Kaitlin Rees (Translator)

Translating Feminisms showcases intimate collaborations and conversations between some of Asia’s most exciting women writers and emerging-star translators: contemporary poetry of labour and language, alongside essays exploring how, where and by whom feminist writing and female bodies are translated.

For us at Tilted Axis Press, feminist publishing means working against the fetishisation of ‘oppression’ and demands that authors explicitly subscribe to what white women recognise as feminism, or even foreground their femaleness in their work. We work towards ensuring that the women we publish have the creative agency to contextualise their own work, resisting the commodification and/or erasure of their femaleness on their own terms.

As part of Tilted Axis’s wider project of decolonisation through and of translation, and in response to seeing women authors of colour misread through a white feminist lens, we wanted to re-imagine the possibilities of a fully intersectional, international feminism. In the process, we’ve expanded our own conception of feminist writing and being – we hope these chapbooks will do the same for you.

Nhã Thuyên has authored several books of poetry, short fiction and some tiny books for children. Translations of their poetry and writing appear in Poems of Lu Diu Vân, Lu Mêlan & Nhã Thuyên (Vagabond Press, 2013) and in journals including RHINO Poetry, Asymptote, Eleven Eleven, Cordite Review, Sand, Full Stop, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, Tongue, Asian American Writers Workshop. Their most recent poetry book words breathe, creatures of elsewhere (t th, nhng ngi l) was published in Vietnamese (Nha Nam, 2015) and in English translation by Kaitlin Rees (Vagabond Press, 2016). With Rees, they founded AJAR, a small bilingual publisher with an online journal and a mini-poetry festival in Hanoi. Nhã Thuyên is shaping a book of essays on absent presences in contemporary Vietnamese poetry and a book of nonsense poeticized prose for which Kaitlin Rees, the translator, was awarded a PEN/Heim Translation Fund grant in 2017.

Genres: Poetry

50 pages, Paperback

First published February 14, 2019

Reviews

[Jule · Rating 2 out of 5]

This collection of anthologies by Tilted Axis Press translates female and feminist poetry from Asia into English. There are four parts:

“Against Healing”, nine Korean poets
“Desire Become Demons”, four Tamil poets
“Moon Fevers” from the Vietnamese poet Nhã Thuyên
“Night” from the Nepali poet Sulochana Manandhar Dhital

Reading all of them almost back to back, I felt they were a mixed bag overall, but verging on the negative side. Now, poetry is always very subjective, so just because I did not like it does not mean it is truly bad. My main problem was that I could not find a connection to the material, the symbolism, the issues and feelings, the history discussed. And that might be just as much my problem as the poets and / or editors.

“Moon Fevers” adressed the basic femaleness: womanhood, sex, the body. It is very physical and quite sexual. Also a modern collection, this mixed various forms and experiments with styles. I could recognize the heavy use of fantastical metaphors, but again failed to truly and properly read them.

Overall, all of them were an interesting glimpse into literature that you do not often get your hands on and that is not often translated and thus discussed. So it was great to read all of them, but a true connection was rarely possible.

[bianca · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.5