Customer Reviews

Crossing the Sea: Poems in Exile/Poems in China

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Any amateur of Duo Duo's poetry will notice at first glance that many of the titles and and even more of the lines of this collection of Duo Duo's poems betray a remarkable resemblance to those in a previous anthology translated by Gregory Lee and John Cayley, "Looking Out From Death" published by Bloomsbury in 1989. A number of translations, in particular that of "I've always delighted in a shaft of light in the depth of night", also resemble Lee's tranlations in The Manhattan Review, translations which antedate Robinson's book. The provenance of translations into English are notoriously difficult to police. However, this book fulfilled the function of making available Duo Duo's poetry in English translation once the Bloomsbury book was out of print...

Any amateur of Duo Duo's poetry will notice at first glance that many of the titles and and even more of the lines of this collection of Duo Duo's poems betray a remarkable resemblance to those in a previous anthology translated by Gregory Lee and John Cayley, "Looking Out From Death" published by Bloomsbury in 1989. A number of translations, in particular that of "I've always delighted in a shaft of light in the depth of night", also resemble Lee's tranlations in The Manhattan Review, translations which antedate Robinson's book. The provenance of translations into English are notoriously difficult to police. However, this book fulfilled the function of making available Duo Duo's poetry in English translation once the Bloomsbury book was out of print. Happily, a new collection of Duoduo's poems translated by Gregory Lee, including most of the poems appearing in Robinson's book, but also many of those written by the poet subsequently, has now been published by Zephyr Press under the title "The Boy Who Catches Wasps". Lee's translations have once again given us an immediacy of access to what Kazim Ali in the Electronic Poetry Review (issue number 4 ...) calls Duo's Duo's "brilliant work".