Posts filed under 'cross-genre'

Rudderless in the samidare-rain: On Naoko Fujimoto’s Reinterpretation of Heian Period Japanese Woman Poets

September 25, 2024  |  in Reviews  |  by Tiffany Troy

. . . Fujimoto has rendered her translations to “restore some of the freedom of form in which these original works were made.”

09/09 Nine Japanese Female Poets / Nine Heian Waka Poems, translated from the Japanese by Naoko Fujimoto, Toad Press/Veliz Books, 2024 

My parents were criticized for allowing a girl to study advanced language skills and piano lessons–for what–“Why don’t you keep your daughter in Nagoya?” Some teachers looked at me saying, “You are not even the smartest, nor a boy.”

Have you ever wished to be a boy? And have you ever interrogated the root of that wish? Perhaps you have been told by your family members that a woman’s role is not to utter garbage-talk like a hen pooping. Or perhaps your family’s insistence that you get married off has grown more insistent over the years. Maybe it’s shameful to admit that you’ve never been seated at the center of the table, that you’ve internalized a certain misogyny, or that you live in a society that has instated men as the heads of households, as breadwinners and intellectual superiors—not because they are smarter, but because they were given the opportunity to pursue their education.

This was the case for the men and women in my grandparents’ generation, who grew up under the Japanese occupation of Taiwan and the Confucian teachings that compare the “tiny man” (the scoundrel) with the “women.” I grew up learning about the Nineteenth Amendment and the Declaration of the Rights of Women in a neighborhood that largely continues to unlawfully segregate jobs by gender. The number of times I have been told that my writing is “frivolous” and that I was “not serious” about my literary career is innumerable.

How remarkable it is then to behold 09/09 by Naoko Fujimoto as a testament to the resilience and remarkable artistry of Japanese women writers during the Heian period (794 to 1185), a time of both gender segregation and cultural flourishing. I find myself seeing my obstacles mirrored in the Heian court custom of referring to women by their relationship with their male relative, or in Fujimoto’s lament in being called out as “not even the smartest”—with smart being measured by her ability to repeat what she has memorized verbatim on these make-you-or-break-you high stakes examinations that are characteristic of East Asian countries like Japan, Korean, or Taiwan. The idea that only the “best women” are afforded the same education as the most ordinary man is pernicious and deeply ingrained in East Asian society, even with the ongoing women’s rights movements in those countries. That identity is further complicated in East Asian-American communities overseas, where western values of independence clash with Asian values of Confucian filial piety and female subservience to men, and where leadership positions continue to be wielded by men in all types of professions. READ MORE…

Deconstructing, Reconstructing Memory: Copy by Dolores Dorantes

July 4, 2022  |  in Reviews  |  by José García Escobar

I like to think of the poems and their fractured sentences as evidences of memory and its various permutations. . .

Copy by Dolores Dorantes, translated from the Spanish by Robin Myers, Wave Books, 2022

This book is an object, a memento, a testimony, memory, road, destination, vessel, a circle.

Dolores Dorantes’ Copia first came out in the Netherlands as a bilingual (Spanish-Dutch) double-sided booklet titled Copia/Kopie (Publication Studio Rotterdam) in 2018, the result of Dolores’ residency at Poetry International. Three years later, it was released in Spanish under the Mexican press Mangos de Hacha, and in 2022, Copy made its way into English, translated by Robin Myers for Wave Books (US). I’ll start with a mundane statement: Copy’s nomadic nature is the result of opportunity and communion between its author and visionary translators and editors. But after reading it, experiencing it—after crossing its many borders, trying to hold its overwhelming weight, I can’t help but think that Copy’s many editions, shapes, colors, and mediums have also strengthened, confirmed, and laced its themes and motifs: migration, displacement, exile, the loss of one’s place, the loss of one’s address, the loss of one’s identity, movement, uprootedness.

Copy opens with the following line: “It gets fainter and fainter.” Quite the opposite happens. The work is unrelenting, fast-paced, filled with discomfort and existential dread. “You live because you removed yourself from your condition”; “To reassemble oneself. Proactivity, opportunism: an order. A tongue, leaving. A gesture, setting sail: a singular place.” They’re also subtle, violent, proliferate with grotesque imagery: “The soldiers plotted a safe shelter with your blood.” “The tower with its hook-mouth.”

All this to say—Copy is an experience. Dolores invites us to feel, to leave one’s skin. Discomfort, confusion, hurt, relief, and hope are found equally amidst her intricate wording, her syncopated and crushing sentences. Images and interactions emerge, but as flashes, not scenes. They seemed distorted as if one were to peek through a window or a camera lens (the poet, in fact, worked as a journalist in Ciudad Juárez, south of the Río Grande as a young adult). Put together, however, they form a vivid and accurate testimonial. The work is fortified with suspense. “You let the boot of structure advance over you thinking, scornfully: to not be.” It is decorated with absurdity. “Gentlemen, I’m going to ask you to rid yourselves of your sense of pity.” And with imagery that, at times, is devastatingly beautiful. “You live because the moon touched the stone jutting out of the pond to show you, copiously, its edges”; “Just like the petal that peeks a single tip out of the ashes.”

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Sadness Has No End, Happiness Does: An Interview with Maryam Monalisa Gharavi

September 21, 2020  |  in Interviews  |  by Serena Solin

I’m okay with “hybridity” and “identity” in the sense that they are procedural, but not to the extent that they are arrivals and conclusions.

Maryam Monalisa Gharavi is an artist working across mediums, from poetry and translation to net art, film, theory, and performance. Her work explores the relationship between politics, aesthetics, and phenomenology, with a particular focus on the vacillating potential of the internet as a public and personal space, equal parts diary and mechanism of empire. I first encountered her work in Algavarias: Echo Chamber (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2016), a translation of Syrian-Brazilian poet Waly Salomão. Gharavi renders Salomão’s “poems of ideal architecture” in all their immense complexity, as humorous as they are solemn, as splintered as they are universal. 

Serena Solin (SS): Something that intrigued me throughout Algaravias: Echo Chamber was the fragmentation of image. I’m thinking particularly of this quote from the poem “CARIOCA STREET 1993”: “clippings, replicas, reshowings, free samples, clots without blood, prostheses of the fantasmagoric Soap Street.” Virtual realities and “handycams” are also represented. As a contemporary artist, is fragmentation or reflection across multiple screens something you think about? Do you believe there is now, or ever was, an unbroken space for art?

Maryam Monalisa Gharavi (MMG): I think that Waly Salomão was certainly ahead of his time in writing that poem in the early nineties. Naming a poem “.doc” before we had AOL and Hotmail accounts is especially interesting for an artist in South America who was attuned to the burgeoning virtuality of how we see each other and ourselves.

One of the things I’ve been doing under quarantine is watching period dramas. If I were just living my ordinary, non-quarantine life, I wouldn’t be watching Vanity Fair and The Age of Innocence, but it’s fascinating to think about the idea that there was ever a time when the whole could be contained. We have a fantasy of ourselves as contemporaries, being post-everything, and to some extent there may be truth to that; our tools have shaped us to be different than Martin Scorcese’s characters. But watching period dramas and experiencing a different visual repertoire from my own, I’m struck by how much virtuality and narrativizing of lives and selves there was in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Maybe we as contemporaries are so hungry for control that we have an impulse to find containers for everything. I think control is part of the artistic impulse, as well as a directive under quarantine—to not lose your mind, to think about the very few things within your control. I don’t know that I can draw a ready line to virtuality, but often our tools give us that sense of control. At the same time they are not just tools; they shape us.

SS: With regard to period dramas, I thought quarantine might be a good time to read Anna Karenina for the first time, and I was enthralled by the way the plot is reflected through characters who weren’t actually present for an event but heard about it from someone else—in other words, gossip as narrative style. Perhaps the conclusion is that there’s nothing new under the sun—not virtuality, not narrative fragmentation.

MMG: Anna Karenina was actually on TV the other day, dubbed into Portuguese, a real experience. Postmodernism is maybe the most boring topic ever, but the first thing to be given that word in literary theory was that moment in Mrs. Dalloway when multiple spectators are watching an airplane. That refractory self and the breakdown of representative, directive viewership is where postmodernism starts to exist historically. But I think we can go further back, and wider culturally.

At the same time, I think we are living something different. I live in the time of Uber. It’s significant that we know the technology we rely on is working when it’s most erased, which is profoundly interesting and understudied—we would have to give more attention to that to fully understand ourselves. READ MORE…