Driving in the Dark with Sandra Cisneros
"For a novel, you kind of have a roadmap. You say, ‘OK, I’m gonna go to Cincinnati. I think I’m going to get there maybe by way of California, but I might go by Kathmandu.' But poetry, you don’t have a map. All you have is this impulse to get on the road. And you have to chase after something you can’t see, you can only feel it. It’s something that has no visualizations. It’s a feeling that has no clarity. It’s blurry. And you’re driving in the dark."
via CHICAGO SUN-TIMES |
|
|
What Sparks Poetry:
James Shea on Yam Gong's "Startling Hair"
"My co-translator Dorothy Tse and I, however, took a small gamble by shifting to present tense for the speaker’s memories. We felt there was an opportunity to signal the fluid sense of past and present in the Chinese, so we used an em dash to prepare the reader for a shift in temporal perspective. Tense cannot be avoided in English, so by mixing verb tenses in the translation, we tried to dislodge the reader from being fixed in a single tense." |
|
|
|
|
|
|
