In the Same Light: 200 Tang Poems for Our Century

by Wong May (Translator)

Chinese poetry is unique in world literature in that it was written for the best part of 3,000 years by exiles, and Chinese history can be read as a matter of course in the words of poets.

In this collection from the Tang Dynasty are poems of war and peace, flight and refuge but above all they are plain-spoken, everyday poems; classics that are everyday timeless, a poetry conceived "to teach the least and the most, the literacy of the heart in a barbarous world," says the translator.

C.D. Wright has written of Wong May's work that it is "quirky, unaffectedly well-informed, capacious, and unpredictable in [its] concerns and procedures," qualities which are evident too in every page of her new book, a translation of Du Fu and Li Bai and Wang Wei, and many others whose work is less well known in English.

In a vividly picaresque afterword, Wong May dwells on the defining characteristics of these poets, and how they lived and wrote in dark times. This translator's journal is accompanied and prompted by a further marginal voice, who is figured as the rhino: "The Rhino 通天犀 in Tang China held a special place," she writes, "much like the unicorn in medieval Europe — not as conventional as the phoenix or the dragon but a magical being; an original spirit", a fitting guide to China's murky, tumultuous Middle Ages, that were also its Golden Age of Poetry, and to this truly original book of encounters, whose every turn is illuminating and revelatory.

Genres: Poetry, China

360 pages, Paperback

Published January 27, 2022

About the author

Wong May is a poet who grew up in Singapore, studied and worked in the United States, and now lives in Ireland. She was born in Chongqing, China in 1944 and moved to Singapore with her mother in 1950. Her mother, Wang Mei-Chuang, was a classical Chinese poet who taught history and Chinese literature. Wong May received her Bachelor of Arts degree in English Literature, from the University of Singapore in 1965. In 1966 she went to the Iowa Writers' Workshop where she received her Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Iowa in 1968.

A first book of poetry, A Bad Girl's Book of Animals, was published by Harcourt, Brace and Jovanovich in 1969.

While at MacDowell Colony in 1969, Wong May met Hilda Morley. Stylistically their poetry is closely associated.

Wong May's next book, Reports, published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, came out in 1972. Her Wannsee Poems, written during a DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) fellowship in Berlin, were translated as Wannsee Gedichte by Nicolas Born.

In 1973, Wong May married Michael Coey, Professor of Physics at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland. They have two sons.

In 1978 she published a collection of poetry called Superstitions.

In 2014 "Picasso's Tears", her fourth book of poems including work from 1978-2013, was published by Octopus Books.

Wong May lives in Dublin, where she writes poetry and paints.

Reviews

[Gregory Duke · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best works I've read in recent memory: an anthology that makes time physical, history swirling into the present. These are poems as space, nature oscillating in and out of one's being, imagism as virtual reality, felt. Gorgeous and affecting. Wong May claims that the translator must be hidden, yet her translations eschew formal orthodoxy in favor of movement and play, and her afterword makes up a third of the text, so "hidden" stretches basic meaning into irony (something Wong May revels in for much of the afterword, alongside much earnestness). Her indelible presence curates a legacy of Tang Dynasty poetry as a Golden Age that influences not just the Chinese literary tradition and larger culture, but much of "world literature" (a contentious, idyllic term). These translations are a testament to the enduring verve of Classical Chinese verse and the beauty of literature and translation as loci of memory (personal, cultural, historical) that the author exhales, the translator inhales, exhales, and we have the joyous opportunity to intake breath and, feeling our chests swell, clarified, replenished, finally come to exhale on our own, altered by alteration: poetry.

[Hao Guang Tse · Rating 5 out of 5]

(4.5 stars for the typos)

I had the immense privilege of encountering a draft manuscript of Wong May's In The Same Light in 2017, when it was still "just" 173 poems, she telling me "for your perusal only". My friend Daryl Lim Wei Jie's reviewed the book--pls read! (http://www.asianbooksblog.com/2022/01... I want to tack on some thoughts to those more tightly articulated in the review.|

"Translation is a process of subjecting 2 languages to extreme stress tests, the ruptures can engulf one, true, but the fissures also let in light." (https://carcanetblog.blogspot.com/202...)

Wong May's work I think falls uneasily in the tradition of modernists/imagists inspired by the economy of classical Chinese poetry, allured by the imagistic "purity" of the language which it doesn't really possess (Pound etc); and in the tradition of slightly more recent American poets trying, as I see it, to bring contemporariness into their translations, to make them also American poems (Weinberger, Hinton, Snyder etc). Yet here you have someone who is of quite a different profile: a native speaker of Chinese, a woman (overwhelmingly translating men), arguably an actual exile from China, etc. So perhaps it is unsurprising that even as her style seems heavily influenced by this tradition, her project departs from it in significant ways.

Weinberger says "In its way a spiritual exercise, translation is dependent on the dissolution of the translator's ego: an absolute humility toward the text." (19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei). He would have thought these translations bad. Wong May herself says "The translator should ideally be the missing person" (Afterword), and yet her missing translator is the late guest of honour. That Wong May is a native Chinese speaker suggests this is confidence, not egotism, at work, "a consciousness without the self" (Blog). She owns the original poems in a way that many translators do not, her mum reciting them to her through her childhood, and yet she can call English her own language. It's clear she sees translation as the practice of the exile: "To trance-late: Migrate / Transmigrate" (Afterword). Perhaps her missing person is rather more like the immigrant rushing to a meeting at the Embassy.

Wong May has a thing for endings. Some of the most outrageous (and outrageously beautiful) insertions of herself into the poems are in their final lines. As Daryl mentioned, the final poem of the book is not even a Tang poem, but is instead an even more ancient poem continued and ended by a much more recent poet. This poem clearly is a symbol for her approach to the book as a whole. Then you come to the bewildering Afterword, the most forceful expression of the pure products of Wong May.

In her Afterword Wong May casts herself as "a Rhinoceros in the China Shop", another way to hide herself by making herself stand out all the more, in this case complete with little images of cartoon rhinoceros heads in the margins giving comments in speech bubbles. The China shop is, of course, the accreted traditions of classical Chinese poetry and translations of this into Western languages. The rhinoceros is, of course, a species extirpated from China. Its horn had (questionable) medicinal and ritual uses, its endangerment due to the perceived potency of its products. There is some speculation that the mythical qilin comes from the memory of an ancient relative of the rhino called Elasmotherium.

There is a US version of this book coming out very soon (https://the-song-cave.com/products/in...). I have good intel that suggests the "minor kvetch" Daryl has towards the Carcanet edition's typos will not be an issue in the US edition. If there are significant differences in the translations themselves, I look forward to having yet another version (three altogether including 2017 ms) to compare, to catch glimpses of her editing process.

I hope this book also serves to clue people in to her poetry in general, her unicorn voice, a voice that simply gets it, "it" being my complete and undivided attention.

"'Colours are the deeds of light/ its deeds & sufferings'. Here I defer to Goethe. In the last throes of my travail as a translator, I render -- Suffer the light to become colours — yes suffer us.
Die Farben sind Taten des Lichts, Taten und Leiden." (Blog)

[SgJuliaKristeva · Rating 3 out of 5]

Technically a DNF, not bec Wong May's translations weren't beautiful (very insightful and evocative explorations on the interior, as usual) but bec I ended up searching for the original poems themselves and felt more compelled to read them.

Thanks for introducing me to more Tang poetry, I guess!

(Will forever complain about the failures of a 5-star rating system at capturing the nuances of opinion that a 10-star rating system can provide. Maybe I've just been spoilt for choice)

[andré crombie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sitting Alone on Jing Ting Mountain

Flock of birds disappeared on high

A lone cloud comes idly by —

Leaving us two

Never tired of looking at each other

The mountain & I

[Jes · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed the poems, but it was the afterward essay that really blew me away: dizzying, personal, historical, and totally compelling. I've never read anything quite like it and am still thinking about it.

[Vindex · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful book. It's amazing how these poems resonate today. The poets wrestle with authorities, isolation, and loss. But they also are keen observers of nature.

[Mary · Rating 4 out of 5]

Poetry