On Mourning and Solidarities, on Poetry and Translation: A Note from the Associate Editor

By publishing these works by the Chinese Artists and Organizers (CAO) Collective (Li Li Cao 离离草), we at positions hope to amplify their actions in solidarity with Palestine, inviting reflections on how to mourn the myriad lives lost to ethnonationalism and state violence. Two members of the CAO Collective and I collaborated on reworking their Chinese-English translation; after exchanging our respective versions, we met online to discuss and unify them for publication.Translating these poems was unusual, among other things, in that it was neither a self-translation nor one entailing a clear division of labor between an author and a translator. The coauthors (not all members of the CAO Collective) are Chinese queer feminists living in the United States whose main working language is English. Collective composition offered them a rare chance to write in Chinese and provided a self-affirming space, based on the idea, CAO told me during our conversations, that poetry exists “within us and between us.” As for the two members of the CAO Collective who cowrote and translated the poems, they had to navigate plural and potentially conflicting commitments: to the process of writing, to their coauthors, and to the multilingual lines they had jotted down, on the one hand; and to the aspiration to convey those lines with intention and care and ensure that they'd work as serious poetic experiments in English, on the other. While the tension between faithfulness and recreation underlies all efforts at literary translation, our collaboration was complicated by the fact that we had different ideas on how to navigate this tension: although not an experienced poetry translator, I thought we should try to find creative and artful renditions for every word, while they were invested in the possibility of not translating. As they wrote about another translation project they recently undertook, This artful translation is an inquiry into the tensions between political legibility in English and the disruptive untranslatability of the texts and the affective life-worlds they have inhabited, rooted in specific movement language and invocations of recent events in China that are impossible to render in English. What is the politics and aesthetics to not translate something? How can the translation, mostly by a single translator who readily has access to the entire text, resist the urge to impose a consistent thread into the whole poem, when the writing process itself was intuitive, messy, without knowing how your words will be carried through another's voice? How can we juggle the different political affect between retaining the original chaotic entanglement and rendering a stand-alone poem in English? (CAO Collective 2023)While I saw my task as that of rendering the texts as legible as possible, they saw value in opaqueness and illegibility. As they put it elsewhere, We hope to carve out a space for Chinese expressions that might seem opaque or illegible to English readers. Because these poems were collectively written by six to eight people in workshops, there are many different voices within each poem, as well as conversations between writers. Sometimes, we have to make creative or even imaginative decisions, while other times we take a step back to leave space for multiple interpretations. These collaborative processes rebuild our own lifeworlds and languages that traverse national, geographic, and generational borders. (CAO Collective 2024)To add to this, the very status of these texts as literature was contested by a member of the positions editorial staff who expressed reservations on how they read in English and questioned that they qualified as poetry at all. It was in fact in response to my colleague's discomfort that I had volunteered to work with the authors to help improve their English readability and smooth over awkward lines. Misguidedly so. For I soon realized that CAO wanted readers to be confronted with these texts as translations of writings that weren't intended as “high poetry” to begin with: readers ought to “feel the glitches” (as they put it during one of our conversations) of the collective writing process and perceive the shadow of the bilingual and multivocal originals. The translation ought to occasionally adopt creative solutions, but at other times also call attention to what was difficult or even impossible to translate in the source text. In order “to rebuild lifeworlds and languages that traverse national, geographic, and generational borders,” sometimes the translation ought not to be a translation. In short, I had to let go of my assumptions about how literary translation ought to work.Our collaboration unfolded through several email exchanges and three online meetings each more than two hours long. We compared our renditions line by line and word by word, at times reading entire stanzas aloud, at times justifying our respective choices with etymological explanations of both English and Chinese terms. After considering alternatives, we often returned to the most literal rendition of each word, even if it sounded jarring. An exception was the phrase “ru cuilei de ziwei 如催泪的滋味” (“Untitled #1”), which I had rendered as “tasting like teargas” thinking of riots and clashes with army or police, but which CAO rendered as “like the taste of tears” to keep the reference to the thus titled November 2019 live concert by the Hong Kong band My Little Airport, a band that had supported the Hong Kong protests unfolding during those months. I came to understand CAO's translation choices as being aimed at keeping audible the soundscape of the scene of writing and the memories of earlier sounds that the act of writing itself had evoked. We debated at length on how to render onomatopoeias: should “dadada”—the sound of typing in “Untitled #2”—simply be transposed into English, inserted as a sort of phonological calque, or should it be translated into what to me sounded as a more natural and conventional “tac tac tac”?The problem of how to balance reproduction of sound and rendition of meaning was in turn related to the more general question of whether to use pinyin transliterations, including those of common nouns. Contrary to my sense that pinyin transliterations are too opaque for readers unfamiliar with Chinese and are therefore best avoided, CAO convinced me we ought to retain them because they reflect the everyday language use of the mostly bilingual coauthors (e.g., “Pink guasha boards” [“Untitled #1”]).References to literary expressions that already circulate in more than one English translation presented yet another kind of challenge. Should the term nahanzhe 呐喊着, a clear reference to Lu Xun's work (“Untitled #2”), be translated as “those who call to arms,” thus borrowing Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang's published translation (Lu 1981), which is probably best known to Sinophone diasporic readers, or “those who cry out,” following more recent renditions that better convey the ambivalence of the original?Both at the level of each stanza and considering each poem as a whole, these texts were disjointed. We initially struggled to make sense of non sequiturs but eventually did not attempt to create flow or coherence where there was none, except by occasionally inserting a “but.” We mostly refrained from adding a subject when the subject was not given and tried not to “ennoble” plain words (Goodman 2017). At the same time, whenever possible, we borrowed words from the English translations of the Palestinian texts the authors and I had been reading. “Stamp-sized sky” (“Untitled #1”), for instance, draws on a passage in the “Gaza Youth's Manifesto for Change” (Gaza Youth 2011: 211): “We are . . . sick of the wall of shame that separates us from the rest of our country and keeps us imprisoned in a stamp-sized piece of land.”I still do not know how to answer this question. Rereading Rebecca Watts's (2018) critique of “Instapoetry” and the reverberations and backlash it provoked (e.g., Bucknell 2020; Ailes 2018, 2020) did not help gain clarity, although it allowed me to understand some of the dichotomies undergirding the nonpoetry/poetry debate: improvised, hasty writing versus careful crafting; ignorance of poetic traditions versus subtle allusions; “myopic immersion in the culture of a particular moment” (Bucknell 2020), versus the lasting appeal of true poetic verse. As someone conducting research on amateur writing, I am more interested in what reclaiming poetry allows individuals or groups to do than in what poetry is supposed to be (on this, see van Crevel 2023; Ting 2023). If poems are words that touch us emotionally, I tend to be touched by the process of composing together, by the “poetry” of collective social practice.My initial reaction to this question, at any rate, was to defend CAO's work as poetry because of the conversations it was generating. In an email addressed to other members of our editorial staff, I wrote: Perhaps we have to see the poetic elsewhere, in the conversations we're having, in the listening to the other person reasoning why they are attached to certain words . . . , even if these words invoke resonances that I cannot hear. So I want to think about what the claim to poetry or practice of alleged poetry allows them/us to do, rather than what poetry is or should be: it allows them/us to mourn together, and not evade the awareness of continuous violent death. What this awareness of violent death does politically—what difference does it make IF we feel it—and whether such (non-)poetry can really generate it in readers remain open questions.All the while, I conceded that not all of these texts might work as poems: “And yet the question remains on whether we should make space and time for words that fail to touch us. Our immediate reactions matter: if their language feels dull, there is no way I can engage.”At one point I asked the CAO Collective for help: did they as authors consider their work poetry? How or why? CAO members offered eloquent responses but suggested that rather than paraphrase them, I reflect on what their reclaiming their texts as poetry did to me as a reader.The claim of poetry demands a certain mode of reading. Poetry, then, is hardly a quality inherent in the text, but rather a request to be read as if it were poetry. We may heed this request or refuse it. Heeding it entails suspending the expectation for straightforward communication and giving the text the benefit of the doubt—the doubt that it might work as poetry, if given the chance.Giving these texts a chance entailed retranslating them for myself and taking the time to figure out how each of them worked, or which elements stood out to me in each of them. The first poem begins with an image and a sound: the separation wall and the wails, which evoke memories of resistance and violent repression elsewhere, and of the grief that ensued. “Untitled #1” thus traces a temporal arc from the present into the past back to the present in an effort to reimagine a collective future. Emphasizing the difficulty of writing poetry, “Untitled #2” repeatedly refers to the scene of writing, and to the wish (one that can only be voiced as a self-addressed question) to be able to speak or write more bluntly. I read “Untitled #2” as confronting the authors’ own coming to terms with an education that hasn't prepared them for the tragedies unfolding in front of their eyes. The poem also denounces the ineffectiveness of well-trodden forms of cultural critique (“those who cry out in the iron house / ruptured their own eardrums”). Finally, the mordant “Win-Win” offers an ironic recounting of the political battles of some of its authors (the struggle for student unionization) and the disappointments that ensued as new hierarchies of power take the place of old ones.Overall, I read these poems as rebellious expressions of grief, of a groping for words, of aspiration for meaningful action, and as an effort to account and mourn for deaths as yet unmourned. As a verse in “Win-Win” goes, “I need ten thousand recorders for those who have or will have disappeared.”Another consequence of heeding the invitation to read these texts as poems was to read more of the works that had inspired them, the Palestinian poets who have been keeping the tabs of ongoing devastation. Amid the obfuscating language of most mainstream media, the CAO Collective's poetry joins the Palestinian poets who express a demand for clarity and truth: not for oversimplification but for a sober reckoning with death, displacement, destruction.In her speech of acceptance of the Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought, Masha Gessen (2023) notes how “we fail to think of historical events as developing over time.” Gessen's reminder underscores the time that has passed between October 2023 and the present moment in the summer of 2024, when we translated the verse “baoli you bei xinde baoli longzhao” (暴力又被新的暴力笼罩) into “violence outdone by new violence.” The verb longzhao 笼罩 could be also rendered as “cover” or “enshroud,” but we chose “outdone” to convey the relentlessness with which the onslaught on Gaza has been getting more and more violent, in ways that we had not anticipated nine months ago. “The Holocaust”—Gessen (2023) writes—“was singular in part because of how many people were killed over a short period of time. But even the Holocaust took years. People lived, had hopes, tried to make sense of what was happening, and resisted.” As the violence and terror in Gaza stretches on, every day bringing “violence outdone by new violence,” poetry draws attention to the interminable passage of this time of bearing witness. The poetry published here is written and translated in solidarity with Palestinian people and with the poets who sought and seek to convey the resilience of life, the hope that does not die, who try to make sense of what is happening and voice the effort to resist.This is a companion piece to the Chinese Artists and Organizers (CAO) Collective's contribution to this issue, “On Mourning and Solidarities,” which may be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1215/10679847-11500468.