Succour for the Spirit – Issue 9
Sunday Reading with writer, poet & translator Ouyang Yu
Talking about eating fish ‘On a Sunny Noon’, Melbourne in winter, Ferfe Grofe, stretching the limits of language, and more.
#SuccourfortheSpirit #SilentDialogueEvents
“i want to go home
i do not want to leave.”
In Conversation
with
Ouyang Yu (OY) & correspondences’ Emma Thomson (ET)
Nature, food or art?
Nature
Favourite place near home
OY—Bundoora Park. I feel very lucky because I live in a place that is very close to the park, about five minutes’ walk. And, I have been living here since 1992. So it is a long time, almost 28 years. And, its been a constant source of inspiration for me in my writing as a novelist and poet. I visit the park every day and do my walking. I feel very good about the whole place. It is part of my ‘Indigenisation’ as well, to keep in touch with the Australian nature, and to turn that into my own art forms of poetry and fiction or non-fiction.
ET—Readers, to hear more from Ouyang, listen in to the video below, which was made on the occasion of the virtual launch of Silent Dialogue, just pre COVID-19. Here you can also hear Ouyang recite his poem ‘Can’ from his book ‘Flag of Permanent Defeat’, which we discuss further in the video and in our interview below.
All-time favourite place
OY—No ‘all-time favourite’, but one is part of nature and can’t live without it.
ET—Yes, I can relate to that sentiment. Thinking about nature and our place within it, I’m reminded of one of your poems I love best — ‘On a Sunny Noon’ — which you have kindly recorded for us below. Would you tell us a little bit about how this one came about?
The poem in English — Press ‘Listen in browser’
OY— It’s actually a self-translated poem based on the original poem written in Chinese, collected in my book, Self Translation (published by Transit Lounge Publishing), and it presented itself while I was eating the fish. As soon as the idea came to me, I stopped and wrote it on my dining table, also my work desk, as I’ve done for many years whenever poems offer themselves to me.
听中文诗 — Press ‘Listen in browser’
ET—How lovely! As readers, I think we often imagine writers and poets bent over their computers, spending hours and hours writing and finessing words. It is wonderful to think about the spontaneity of the poetic act.
‘On a Sunny Noon’ is such an evocative poem; it immediately calls to mind the Australian landscape. At the same time, there is something unmistakably Chinese about the verse —and so it is very interesting to hear that it was first written in Chinese. One can almost imagine sitting there with you as you eat the fish. There is such a sense of joyfulness in that act! However, there is also a tinge of sadness or a sense of loss that we feel through that fish and the association with the river.
Perhaps, this feeling stems from the idea of moving between cultures and places - what we gain and what we lose in the act of migration? Or, maybe that sense of loss is also informed by my own interpretation, when I think about the environmental destruction of the Murray.
‘Winter’
ET—OY, I’ve been thinking a lot about the seasons lately. In Melbourne each year I so enjoy the autumn, but this year I found myself distracted, and it seemed to fly by unnoticed. Now that its winter, I feel myself reconnecting, noticing the small things outside as I take my daily walk, but also wondering where the time went. Many of your poems have explored the seasons, and of course much more surrounding them. I particularly love ‘Winter’, from ‘Two hearts, two tongues and rain coloured eyes’, which was published in 2002 by Wild Peony Press.
I understand the poem was originally written in Chinese, two years after you first arrived in Melbourne in 1991. The poem feels very reminiscent of Melbourne in winter – especially those first three lines (“the melancholy of a fine rain") and that reference to “101.1TTFM” (admittedly not my station, but I do listen to the radio while I walk). At the same time, is feels like a personal story of adjusting to life in Melbourne. Can you tell us a little about the poem?
OY— I’d say it’s a poem about my complex feelings about Melbourne at a time when I had no idea what I was going to do, stay or leave, when I finished my PhD studies. I got stuck, mentally in a place that I didn’t want to quit, but also felt that I could not stay on. In late 1994, I handed over my thesis and in early 1995, I got the degree and stayed. But, poetry is a vehicle through which one carries one’s feelings in a particular time about a particular place.
Some say that poetry is timeless, meaning that attaching information about dates and places of writing would date it and make it dated. I don’t agree. A poem is like a painting, an artwork. Giving it a date or place or both, helps readers to understand it and appreciate it better.
A few years ago when I went to the University of Wisconsin, I visited a gallery and saw paintings, each of them with a date. I started wondering to myself what would happen if the date was removed, leaving the painting completely ‘in the nude’ time-wise. And, I thought of an academic article on my poetry by someone who quoted my poems without a sense of time. As a result, some poems I wrote years ago before I arrived in Australia were unfortunately treated as if they had been written in Australia.
ET—Yes, I couldn’t agree more. Time and place are inextricably linked. Poetry can still be understood across space and time if it has a sense of context. Feelings and experiences evolve and inform artistic practice, but situation in a particular time and place is what makes art - and by extension the human experience - so deeply fascinating.
What are you reading?
OY—I’m reading at least 15 books at the same time, in both Chinese and English. I don’t like everything I read of everything. I only like aspects of them. For instance, I like Kenneth Koch for his energy, James Dickey for his strange word-play, Thom Gunn for his diction, etc. One book that I enjoyed immensely was an English translation of A Surgeon’s China, a book by French author Albert Gervais that I read more than 20 years ago, and had completely forgotten about until recently.
ET— OY, In addition to being a poet and a writer of fiction and non-fiction, you’re also a translator. So, you’re certainly one person who is always reading - by necessity and for pleasure.
OY—I have been translating and publishing works since 1991 when my first translation of Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch was published in China. Since then, I have had scores of translation works published in both China and Australia, and four books of nonfiction, two in Chinese and two in English, discussing all sorts of issues I’ve encountered in translation, the simplest being the reversals, e.g. your mum and dad compared with our dad and mum, your ‘fall in love’ with someone and our ‘climb up in love’ with someone, etc.
ET—I find these differences endlessly fascinating and wonderful. More recently you translated ‘The Flame’, a collection of Leonard Cohen’s last poems and writings, selected and arranged by him in the final months of his life. Needless to say, as an enormous fan of you both, I bought a copy. Lately, I’ve been looking at his poem and your translation of ‘Dimensions of Love’, pages 26 and p36 of the English and Chinese translation respectively. Perhaps a conversation for another day!
What are you listening to?
OY—I’ve been listening to Beethoven and Bach, and also Ferde Grofe who I admire for his ‘Grand Canyon Suite’, so much so that the latter actually inspired me to write a longish Chinese poem in my late 20s in China. I like all these composers and musicians and more for their poetic inspiration.
ET—Readers, the poem Ouyang wrote in response to Grofe’s work is entitled《大峡谷》/ ‘The Grand Canyon’. If you would like to read a translation and listen to a recording in English and Chinese, please support our ‘It Takes Two’ initiative and we will arrange a special piece to be published. More information → here.
Tell us about one of your creations
Where did this title come from?
OY—It’s from Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, on the first page, where the rolled-up sail looks like a ‘flag of permanent defeat’. I liked it so much I used it as the title because I think that’s what poetry is about and what life is all about.
What was the starting point?
OY—The book contains some of my bilingual poems written as far back as 1982 in China. But, the idea of getting a bilingual book out was only a more recent one, after I returned to China to teach in the latter half of 2012. There, I not only wrote the bilingual poems but I also taught my students, postgraduates and undergraduates, to write them. If you want to know about the ‘starting point’, I don’t really know and I would have to do some research into my own work. But living in Australia, a multicultural and multilingual country, could be said to be the starting point, and my professional practice as a bilingual translator informed that.
What were you striving to explore?
OY—To stretch both the English and Chinese languages to the limit, to explore their potentialities, particularly when the words and characters are mixed together, like what the artist Huang Yong Ping did when he put a Chinese art history and a Western art history textbook in a washing machine and washed them for two minutes. But more than that, I coined new words in each language and created new sounds for the languages.
ET—Listen to the video at the start of the interview from 3:18 mins to hear Ouyang discussing ‘Flag of Permanent Defeat’ further. Read more about Huang Yong Ping’s art here and here and watch/read two further fascinating interviews with him here.
What are you working on now?
OY— I’m writing at least 5 books at the same time. I can’t reveal anything except to say that I have been writing an English novel with a grant from the Australia Council and it now stands at about 170,000 words after many drafts.
ET—Ouyang also has a new book that has come out recently, entitled ‘Terminally Poetic’, published by Ginnindera Press. Australian poet, novelist, writer and editor John Kinsella had this to say about it…
‘Terminally Poetic is Ouyang Yu working through the colonial alphabet and undoing it and himself at various turns and forks in the road. This is the individuated poet - one of the most committed poets who undoes poetry as an act of principle, who asks questions of 'who's to blame' in startling and nuanced ways - counting down (or up) through the letters so we can make new words from the poems. He confronts reductionism by disowning it while experiencing it, he confronts expectations of style and mode of writing it by writing it and then laughing at himself and the expectations of his readers. Excoriating and yet strangely vulnerable, the poet takes on the poet and poetry's failure to be noticed, to matter, to be what it wants to be.’
- John Kinsella
If you’re looking for a new title to add to your library, we recommend!
What else can supporters do?
Pre-purchase our book for Silent Dialogue. Featuring Ouyang’s piece and ten other original pieces of writing by some of the country's finest writers alongside beautiful imagery from our participating visual artists, it is going to be special.
Nominate Ouyang as part of our ‘It Takes Two’ campaign. Ouyang will be exhibiting next April for our Silent Dialogue exhibition. Every contribution helps ensure we are producing a great show and extra support can also lead to new satellite performances / opportunities.
Follow Ouyang on social media to keep in touch with his news at: i (yu_ouyang); and, f (yuouyang). You can also follow him on WeChat by reaching out to ‘ouyangwoshi’.
Share and like our SD news via social media via i: silent_dialogue & f: silentdialogueevents. It introduces us to new supporters!
Biography
Ouyang Yu is a Chinese-born poet, novelist, editor and translator based in Melbourne. Since arriving in Australia in 1991, he has published over 100 books of poetry, fiction, non-fiction, literary translation and literary criticism in English and Chinese. He edits Australia’s only Chinese literary journal, Otherland. His poetry and translations have been included in major Australian collections such as, The Penguin Anthology of Australian Poetry, The Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature and The turnrow Anthology of Contemporary Australian Poetry. His noted books include his award-winning novels, The Eastern Slope Chronicle (2002), The English Class (2010) and The Kingsbury Tales: A Complete Collection (2012), and his acclaimed books of poetry include, Songs of the Last Chinese Poet (1997) and New and Selected Poems (2004), to name but a few. In 2011 he was nominated one of the Top 10 most influential writers of Chinese origin in the Chinese diaspora.
Image credit (banner): Photograph by Ouyang Yu
