Impossible Paradise

by Chen Yuhong

Genres: Poetry
Pages: 152
Rating:

Synopsis:

One of Taiwan’s most celebrated poets, Chen Yuhong draws on both Western and Asian literary traditions, inflected by her work as a translator of contemporary English-language women poets (Glück, Oswald, Duffy). This selection makes her art widely available in English for the first time.

Her award-winning translators, George O’Connell and Diana Shi, carry across the richly metaphorical lexicon of her poems and their uncanny inhabitation of places both real and imagined, conjuring mood, angles of thought or light, animal presence, and the tides of the seasons.

In a world where much that seemed united has frayed, Chen Yuhong’s finely balanced poems bring us news of other imagined worlds, and acknowledge the unexpected, its capacity to terrify or astonish.

I decided recently to try a bit more poetry in translation, and this collection of Chen Yuhong’s poetry, Impossible Paradise, is one of the picks that came out of that urge. The translations are collaborations between Diana Shi and George O’Connell, and there’s a translators’ note about the poems they picked and their methods of going about translation, which is pretty interesting.

There are also some brief notes on individual poems, but they’re presented after all the poems, which is kind of unhelpful. Luckily I didn’t find them too necessary to understand the poems.

I enjoyed Chen Yuhong’s work, all in all; I connected better with some poems than others, but I didn’t get impatient or immediately mentally disengage from any of them (which I always find myself wanting to do with certain poetic styles, e.g. poems full of apparent non-sequiturs, chained together like nonsense). There were a few I liked a lot, or sections of longer poems I liked — this one, for example:

You imagine
a seagull poetics,
each breaking wave
its turbulent poem,
a seagull theology
Solomon’s wisdom,
ceaseless Song of Songs.

I think the poem ‘Pharaoh’ was a favourite, pretty unsurprisingly from me.

So overall a good experience, I’d say!

Rating: 3/5 (“liked it”)