chris

“I Ask My Mother to Sing"

She begins, and my grandmother joins her.
Mother and daughter sing like young girls.
If my father were alive, he would play
his accordion and sway like a boat.

I’ve never been in Peking, or the Summer Palace,
nor stood on the great Stone Boat to watch
the rain begin on Kuen Ming Lake, the picnickers
running away in the grass.

But I love to hear it sung;
how the waterlilies fill with rain until
they overturn, spilling water into water,
then rock back, and fill with more.

Both women have begun to cry.
But neither stops her song.”
― Li-Young Lee

“...grief.
If you eat too much of it, you want more, you can never get enough.”
― Ai .

“Roads? Who spoke of roads? We go by the moor and the hills, and tread granite and heather as the Druids did before us.”
― Daphne du Maurier, Jamaica Inn

“Betrayal. Translation means doing violence upon the original, means warping and distorting it for foreign, unintended eyes. So then where does that leave us? How can we conclude, except by acknowledging that an act of translation is then necessarily always an act of betrayal?”
― R.F. Kuang, Babel