酷我-北美枫

[ericcoliu]

A Life in Translation


Dear Chen-ou:

Thanks for your insightful advice: don't let life make your heart hard.

At this stage of my life, I have had great difficulty understanding these four letters LILE, and I am constantly confused by various interpretations of it. According to the Jewish sages, by forty, one attains understanding. In English people would say that life begins at forty. Based on Confucius’ teaching, forty is characterized as the age of no doubt. I will be four years more than forty in two months, but I have more doubts and less understanding about myself and my life than ever before.

In my view, life can easily thrust us into troubling circumstances that threaten to undo our superficial mastery over those things that matter most. Usually, most of us don’t have the luck that Prince Siddhartha Gautama enjoyed, the prince who lived in a walled palace and who was totally sheltered from all kinds of human predicaments, or possess the wisdom that the Buddha revealed, who fearlessly stared at the harsh realities of Life: birth, old age, illness, and death.

I have long found myself mesmerized by a painting of Pablo Picasso’s entitled “The Head of a Medical Student”. This painting is of a face in the form of an African mask with one eye open, and the other closed. Medical students during their medical training learn to open one eye to the pain and suffering of patients , but also to close the other eye to protect their seemingly naïve belief that they can do good and change the world for the better, to protect their own self-interest such as career building and economic gain.

I can generalize about the provocative poignancy of this painting to suggest how we live our lives. One of our eyes is keenly open to the dangers of the world and the uncertainty of our human condition; the other is closed, so that we do not see or feel these things, so that we can get on with our lives.

Yes, Life truly makes one of my eyes open and the other closed.

As for my choice of writing in English exclusively, it has been a years-long mind-boggling and heart-wrenching struggle for me. Since my emigration to Canada five years ago, I have both wrestled and been despaired with learning English, and I eventually came to a conclusion two years ago: I, a non-English speaking person aged over forty, had no way of mastering two languages at the same time; therefore, I needed to break with my Chinese self and to re-build a new English self in order to achieve my goal -- becoming a writer.

Generally speaking, writing is hard; writing in a foreign language is harder than I ever thought it would be. It is always an ongoing struggle to bridge the gap between what I think, what I'm going to write, and what I'm able to write. Writing, sometimes, seems to me as displaced on the broken line between the promised and lost way of thinking. Worse, the awareness of and concern about my intended readers may distract me from expressing my own thoughts. Writing is, as it always has been, a toiling act of expressing myself.

Writing in English is very different from writing in Chinese, linguistically and culturally. The modern written Chinese language is highly literary and highbrow and detached from the spoken language. Comparatively speaking, it doesn’t possess the flexibility of English, which is very expressive and has a strong capacity for playing games with words and diction that are close to the spoken language. In Chinese, especially if you write a literary work, you don’t write in plain speech; if you do so, you’re definitely looked down on as a third-rate writer. A lot of words and phrases are deeply rooted in a century-old literary history of allusions and should be skilfully yet not self-inventively used in the context of the Chinese classic literary tradition.

To write in English requires a different way of thinking and more focuses on the expressivity and innovation of words and phrases. During the course of my adjustment to English writing, I have slowly begun to squeeze the Chinese literary mentality out of my mind, and I have learned to write down what I tried to say, truthfully and innovatively. As Chinese American writer Ha Jin, author of the National Book Award-winning novel entitled Waiting, once said to John Thomas in Emory Magazine, “it was like having a blood transfusion, like you are changing your blood.”

Up to this moment, I've gone through a blood transfusion for a little less than two years. English writing, for me, has been and still is a twisting process of heart and mind. During the writing process, in the strain of translating one spontaneous idea or heartfelt feeling into a grammatically and semantically correct sentence, I have to, due to a lack of enough active vocabulary or literary expressions, simplify the way I think and write; thus I force myself to put on a kind of writing persona.

Writing is hard, and writing in English is even harder.

Honestly speaking, I had felt depressed for months, not sure of my future in Canada. Early this year, on a January morning, I had been walking on the snow-covered streets of Toronto for almost an hour with no destination in my mind. All of a sudden, feeling an uncontrollable urge to cry out, I stopped walking and raised my head, screaming towards the sky, “I’m really tired of starting over. It feels like no matter what I do, it gets wiped out and I am left with nothing and need to begin again. I want to build something in my life and have something meaningful left behind. I cannot live a life that it is like walking on a snowy day with no footprints left behind.” Everybody around me at the time was scared away.

About two weeks after my Screaming Incident, I was surfing through the Internet and came across an excerpt of a talk given by Ha Jin. At the request from his audience to offer some words of encouragement to aspiring writers, "In this profession," Ha Jin urged, "the only thing that will wait for you is failure." He also went on to describe his philosophy about the craft of writing, "Writers don’t write for success, and they do it because that’s their way of life. That’s how I confronted failure." I was deeply moved by his unflagging spirit in learning English and unshakable commitment to English writing; all of a sudden, I was enlightened and liberated from my depressed feeling of being afraid of failure and starting over.

Almost seven months have gone by. I still keep the practice of English writing:

I have
Always tried
Always failed
Never mind
Try again
Fail again
But fail better next time
That's all about writing.

As the poet Robert Louis Stevenson once claimed, "Our business in this world is not to succeed, but to continue to fail in good spirits."

I find that writing practice can be a way of paying attention and acknowledging traces, revisions, and erasing. I have gradually come to a conclusion about my life: I am always, in some way or another, starting over, and building means beginning again.

Writing in English oftentimes forces me to see, think, and write differently; thus it broadens the horizon of my world and knowledge, which is the main reason I emigrated from Taiwan to Canada.

Ludwig Wittgenstein once said,” If we spoke a different language, we would perceive a somewhat different world.” In line with this sort of thinking, if we wrote in a different language, we would perceive a somewhat different world.” For me now,

To write in English is
To attempt
To test
To make a run at something
Without knowing whether I am going to succeed.
It points a way for me
To function with relative freedom
In an unfamiliar world.
To write in English is
To strike out toward the unknown
To make myself up from moment to moment.

Writing in English is the key to The Door of No Return, helping chart my journey of immigration. I will not cease my English writing; after all, it seems to be one of the possible ways, sometimes even the only way, to work through my inner turmoil caused by my displaced experiences, and to reach out to the bigger society around me. Maybe the end of my writing will arrive where I started and know what English writing means to me for the first time.

I oftentimes think literary writing in general, poetry writing in particular, is an outcry of pain in textual forms. For the time being, writing in English, is a way of sorting out my tangled feelings, expressing my wounded self, and thus, hopefully, healing.

To write about the difficulties I've encountered since my emigration to Canada is to revisit these tormenting experiences, the darkest tunnel of memory. It needs not only courage and determination but also faith -- faith that there will be light at other end of the tunnel. The hope of writing as healing is such a light, and the hope of being read is another; the two are inextricably linked.

Chen-ou, thank you for your time reading my letter. This means a lot to me, a glimpse of light at the end of the tunnel.


Very truly yours,
Eric
_________________
Time is nothing but a disquiet of the soul

[[ericcoliu]]

A Life in Translation


Dear Chen-ou:

Thanks for your insightful advice: don't let life make your heart hard.

At this stage of my life, I have had great difficulty understanding these four letters LILE, and I am constantly confused by various interpretations of it. According to the Jewish sages, by forty, one attains understanding. In English people would say that life begins at forty. Based on Confucius’ teaching, forty is characterized as the age of no doubt. I will be four years more than forty in two months, but I have more doubts and less understanding about myself and my life than ever before.

In my view, life can easily thrust us into troubling circumstances that threaten to undo our superficial mastery over those things that matter most. Usually, most of us don’t have the luck that Prince Siddhartha Gautama enjoyed, the prince who lived in a walled palace and who was totally sheltered from all kinds of human predicaments, or possess the wisdom that the Buddha revealed, who fearlessly stared at the harsh realities of Life: birth, old age, illness, and death.

I have long found myself mesmerized by a painting of Pablo Picasso’s entitled “The Head of a Medical Student”. This painting is of a face in the form of an African mask with one eye open, and the other closed. Medical students during their medical training learn to open one eye to the pain and suffering of patients , but also to close the other eye to protect their seemingly naïve belief that they can do good and change the world for the better, to protect their own self-interest such as career building and economic gain.

I can generalize about the provocative poignancy of this painting to suggest how we live our lives. One of our eyes is keenly open to the dangers of the world and the uncertainty of our human condition; the other is closed, so that we do not see or feel these things, so that we can get on with our lives.

Yes, Life truly makes one of my eyes open and the other closed.

As for my choice of writing in English exclusively, it has been a years-long mind-boggling and heart-wrenching struggle for me. Since my emigration to Canada five years ago, I have both wrestled and been despaired with learning English, and I eventually came to a conclusion two years ago: I, a non-English speaking person aged over forty, had no way of mastering two languages at the same time; therefore, I needed to break with my Chinese self and to re-build a new English self in order to achieve my goal -- becoming a writer.

Generally speaking, writing is hard; writing in a foreign language is harder than I ever thought it would be. It is always an ongoing struggle to bridge the gap between what I think, what I'm going to write, and what I'm able to write. Writing, sometimes, seems to me as displaced on the broken line between the promised and lost way of thinking. Worse, the awareness of and concern about my intended readers may distract me from expressing my own thoughts. Writing is, as it always has been, a toiling act of expressing myself.

Writing in English is very different from writing in Chinese, linguistically and culturally. The modern written Chinese language is highly literary and highbrow and detached from the spoken language. Comparatively speaking, it doesn’t possess the flexibility of English, which is very expressive and has a strong capacity for playing games with words and diction that are close to the spoken language. In Chinese, especially if you write a literary work, you don’t write in plain speech; if you do so, you’re definitely looked down on as a third-rate writer. A lot of words and phrases are deeply rooted in a century-old literary history of allusions and should be skilfully yet not self-inventively used in the context of the Chinese classic literary tradition.

To write in English requires a different way of thinking and more focuses on the expressivity and innovation of words and phrases. During the course of my adjustment to English writing, I have slowly begun to squeeze the Chinese literary mentality out of my mind, and I have learned to write down what I tried to say, truthfully and innovatively. As Chinese American writer Ha Jin, author of the National Book Award-winning novel entitled Waiting, once said to John Thomas in Emory Magazine, “it was like having a blood transfusion, like you are changing your blood.”

Up to this moment, I've gone through a blood transfusion for a little less than two years. English writing, for me, has been and still is a twisting process of heart and mind. During the writing process, in the strain of translating one spontaneous idea or heartfelt feeling into a grammatically and semantically correct sentence, I have to, due to a lack of enough active vocabulary or literary expressions, simplify the way I think and write; thus I force myself to put on a kind of writing persona.

Writing is hard, and writing in English is even harder.

Honestly speaking, I had felt depressed for months, not sure of my future in Canada. Early this year, on a January morning, I had been walking on the snow-covered streets of Toronto for almost an hour with no destination in my mind. All of a sudden, feeling an uncontrollable urge to cry out, I stopped walking and raised my head, screaming towards the sky, “I’m really tired of starting over. It feels like no matter what I do, it gets wiped out and I am left with nothing and need to begin again. I want to build something in my life and have something meaningful left behind. I cannot live a life that it is like walking on a snowy day with no footprints left behind.” Everybody around me at the time was scared away.

About two weeks after my Screaming Incident, I was surfing through the Internet and came across an excerpt of a talk given by Ha Jin. At the request from his audience to offer some words of encouragement to aspiring writers, "In this profession," Ha Jin urged, "the only thing that will wait for you is failure." He also went on to describe his philosophy about the craft of writing, "Writers don’t write for success, and they do it because that’s their way of life. That’s how I confronted failure." I was deeply moved by his unflagging spirit in learning English and unshakable commitment to English writing; all of a sudden, I was enlightened and liberated from my depressed feeling of being afraid of failure and starting over.

Almost seven months have gone by. I still keep the practice of English writing:

I have
Always tried
Always failed
Never mind
Try again
Fail again
But fail better next time
That's all about writing.

As the poet Robert Louis Stevenson once claimed, "Our business in this world is not to succeed, but to continue to fail in good spirits."

I find that writing practice can be a way of paying attention and acknowledging traces, revisions, and erasing. I have gradually come to a conclusion about my life: I am always, in some way or another, starting over, and building means beginning again.

Writing in English oftentimes forces me to see, think, and write differently; thus it broadens the horizon of my world and knowledge, which is the main reason I emigrated from Taiwan to Canada.

Ludwig Wittgenstein once said,” If we spoke a different language, we would perceive a somewhat different world.” In line with this sort of thinking, if we wrote in a different language, we would perceive a somewhat different world.” For me now,

To write in English is
To attempt
To test
To make a run at something
Without knowing whether I am going to succeed.
It points a way for me
To function with relative freedom
In an unfamiliar world.
To write in English is
To strike out toward the unknown
To make myself up from moment to moment.

Writing in English is the key to The Door of No Return, helping chart my journey of immigration. I will not cease my English writing; after all, it seems to be one of the possible ways, sometimes even the only way, to work through my inner turmoil caused by my displaced experiences, and to reach out to the bigger society around me. Maybe the end of my writing will arrive where I started and know what English writing means to me for the first time.

I oftentimes think literary writing in general, poetry writing in particular, is an outcry of pain in textual forms. For the time being, writing in English, is a way of sorting out my tangled feelings, expressing my wounded self, and thus, hopefully, healing.

To write about the difficulties I've encountered since my emigration to Canada is to revisit these tormenting experiences, the darkest tunnel of memory. It needs not only courage and determination but also faith -- faith that there will be light at other end of the tunnel. The hope of writing as healing is such a light, and the hope of being read is another; the two are inextricably linked.

Chen-ou, thank you for your time reading my letter. This means a lot to me, a glimpse of light at the end of the tunnel.


Very truly yours,
Eric
_________________
Time is nothing but a disquiet of the soul

[anna]

Eric, for me, writing in poetry is another world opened.

I don't remember who said writing is to escape. I agree.

but more is to build and gain a true self.

Most of my part time, I enjoy reading. Because through reading and writing, life is viewed more profound.
_________________
---------------------

Anna Yin

《爱的灯塔-星子安娜双语诗选》
<Nightlights> <Seven Nights with the Chinese Zodiac> ...

http://annapoetry.com

[[星子安娜]]

Eric, for me, writing in poetry is another world opened.

I don't remember who said writing is to escape. I agree.

but more is to build and gain a true self.

Most of my part time, I enjoy reading. Because through reading and writing, life is viewed more profound.
_________________
---------------------

Anna Yin

《爱的灯塔-星子安娜双语诗选》
<Nightlights> <Seven Nights with the Chinese Zodiac> ...

http://annapoetry.com

[ericcoliu]

Thank you for your sharing. It’s been very helpful.

For me, one of memorable quotes about writing as escaping is from Escape into the Open: The Art of Writing True by Elizabeth Berg:

"You feel the call. That's the important thing. Now answer it as fully as you can. Take the risk to let all that is in you, out. Escape into the open.”

Another one is from the American playwright Neil Simon:

"Writing is an escape from a world that crowds me. I like being alone in a room. It's almost a form of meditation -- an investigation of my own life. It has nothing to do with 'I've got to get another play.'"


I enjoy reading, too. Reading constitutes the bulk of my life here, and, for me, is a proactive act of conversing with intelligent minds and of keeping me alive and present to the world around me.

We read to know we are not alone -- C.S. Lewis
_________________
Time is nothing but a disquiet of the soul

[[ericcoliu]]

Thank you for your sharing. It’s been very helpful.

For me, one of memorable quotes about writing as escaping is from Escape into the Open: The Art of Writing True by Elizabeth Berg:

"You feel the call. That's the important thing. Now answer it as fully as you can. Take the risk to let all that is in you, out. Escape into the open.”

Another one is from the American playwright Neil Simon:

"Writing is an escape from a world that crowds me. I like being alone in a room. It's almost a form of meditation -- an investigation of my own life. It has nothing to do with 'I've got to get another play.'"


I enjoy reading, too. Reading constitutes the bulk of my life here, and, for me, is a proactive act of conversing with intelligent minds and of keeping me alive and present to the world around me.

We read to know we are not alone -- C.S. Lewis
_________________
Time is nothing but a disquiet of the soul

[ericcoliu]

Writing is like gutting yourself
Always taking out a piece of yourself
It's a mixture of pain and pleasure
Fashioning yourself in perspective.
_________________
Time is nothing but a disquiet of the soul

[[ericcoliu]]

Writing is like gutting yourself
Always taking out a piece of yourself
It's a mixture of pain and pleasure
Fashioning yourself in perspective.
_________________
Time is nothing but a disquiet of the soul

[Champagne]

Your piece of “confessional writing”, which confesses to the “crime” of writing exclusively in English, puts me back directly to my intense reading of Ha Jin’s latest Novel entitled A Free Life, which is his first novel set in America and about a Chinese immigrant man making a drastic decision to change his life in order to write poetry in English, in a borrowed-tongue language. In his “Epilogue: Extracts from Nan Wu’s Poetry Journal,” the protagonist Nan Wu confronts being scolded for writing poetry in English. One of poems reveals the emotional-charged argument about writing in English:

You have been misled by your folly,
determined to follow the footsteps of Conrad
and Nabokov. You have forgotten
they were white Europeans.
Remember your yellow face
and your puny talent—unlikely
to make you a late bloomer.
Why believe you can write verse in English,
whose music is not natural to you?

Ericcoliu, welcome to be a holy fool in the Promised Land of Literature.
_________________
I'm Champagne,
Bottled poetry with sparkling joy.

[[Champagne]]

Your piece of “confessional writing”, which confesses to the “crime” of writing exclusively in English, puts me back directly to my intense reading of Ha Jin’s latest Novel entitled A Free Life, which is his first novel set in America and about a Chinese immigrant man making a drastic decision to change his life in order to write poetry in English, in a borrowed-tongue language. In his “Epilogue: Extracts from Nan Wu’s Poetry Journal,” the protagonist Nan Wu confronts being scolded for writing poetry in English. One of poems reveals the emotional-charged argument about writing in English:

You have been misled by your folly,
determined to follow the footsteps of Conrad
and Nabokov. You have forgotten
they were white Europeans.
Remember your yellow face
and your puny talent—unlikely
to make you a late bloomer.
Why believe you can write verse in English,
whose music is not natural to you?

Ericcoliu, welcome to be a holy fool in the Promised Land of Literature.
_________________
I'm Champagne,
Bottled poetry with sparkling joy.

[老婆婆]

Depressed? But life is so wonderful, full of happyness and sorrow.

whatever language you choose to write, you just want to express yourself and what you are thinking in your life to others. Thinking has no limitation. It can be through Chinese or English or other languages to express yourself.

I think, if you can write well in English, you can also write well in Chinese.
But most of all, once you set up your mind, don't give up.

Best wishes!
_________________
请大家多多指教，谢谢！

[[老婆婆]]

Depressed? But life is so wonderful, full of happyness and sorrow.

whatever language you choose to write, you just want to express yourself and what you are thinking in your life to others. Thinking has no limitation. It can be through Chinese or English or other languages to express yourself.

I think, if you can write well in English, you can also write well in Chinese.
But most of all, once you set up your mind, don't give up.

Best wishes!
_________________
请大家多多指教，谢谢！