酷我-北美枫

[ericcoliu]

Reading, Writing, and Life on the Page


(The following piece has been accepted and will be published in the Spring 2008 Issue (online & print) of The Stellar Showcase Journal, a literary journal affiliated with The Ontario Poetry Society. A related piece entitled Lost in Translation, a reflection of my inner struggle with spoken English in the context of identity-formation, was accepted and published in the Winter 2007-2008 Issue (online and print) of The Stellar Showcase Journal. You can read its online version at
http://www.stellarshowcasejournal.com/winter2007/winter2007.htm )


Writing in English: The Writing Life in Transition and Translation


In her most renowned poetry book entitled She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks, Canadian poet and essayist Marlene Nourbese Philip explores themes of race, place, gender, colonialism and, always, language; she exposes the tension between father tongue –the white Euro-Christian male canon, and mother tongue –Black African female. Most quoted is the chant like refrain at the core of her innovative poem entitled “Discourse on the Logic of Language:”

... and English is
my mother tongue
is
my father tongue
is a foreign lan lan lang
language
l/anguish
anguish...

Yes, I concur with her words whole heartedly: “English is / … / language / l/anguish.”

Since my emigration to Canada five years ago, I have both wrestled and 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 to be displaced on the broken line between the promised and lost ways 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 self.

Writing in English is very different from writing in Chinese, linguistically and culturally. The modern written Chinese language is highly literary and highbrow, and it is detached from the spoken language. Comparatively speaking, it doesn’t possess the flexibility of English, which is highly 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 centuries-old literary history of allusions and should be skilfully yet not self-inventively used in the context of the Chinese classical literary tradition.

To write in English requires different ways of thinking and focuses more on the expressiveness and innovation of words and phrases. During the course of my adjusting 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 try to say truthfully and innovatively. As Chinese American writer Ha Jin, author of the National Book Award-winning novel entitled Waiting, said emphatically, “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 two years. For me, English writing has been and still is a twisting search into heart and mind. During the writing process, in the strain of translating spontaneous ideas or heartfelt feelings into grammatically and semantically correct sentences, I, due to a lack of mastered vocabulary and literary expressions, have to simplify the way I think and write when I force myself to put on my writing persona.

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

Honestly speaking, I had felt depressed for months, unsure of my future in Canada. One year ago this month, on a wintry morning, I had been walking on the snow-covered streets of Toronto for almost an hour with no destination in 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 about writing in English given by Ha Jin. Requested by his audience to offer some words of encouragement to aspiring writers, Ha Jin responded, "In this profession, 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; 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 his unshakable commitment to English writing. All of a sudden, I was enlightened and liberated from my depressed feeling of being afraid of failure and of starting over.

One year has gone by. I still keep the practice of English 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, of revising and erasing. I have gradually come to a conclusion about my life: I am always, in some way or another, starting over, and building a new beginning again.

Moreover, 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. Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once said,” If we spoke a different language, we would perceive a somewhat different world.” I concur! For me now, to write in English is

To attempt
To test
To make a run at something
To function with relative freedom
To strike out toward the unknown
To invent myself 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, and sometimes even the only way, to work through my inner turmoil, and to reach out to the bigger society around me. Maybe the end of my English writing will arrive where I started, and I will know what English writing means to me for the first time.
_________________
Time is nothing but a disquiet of the soul

[[ericcoliu]]

Reading, Writing, and Life on the Page


(The following piece has been accepted and will be published in the Spring 2008 Issue (online & print) of The Stellar Showcase Journal, a literary journal affiliated with The Ontario Poetry Society. A related piece entitled Lost in Translation, a reflection of my inner struggle with spoken English in the context of identity-formation, was accepted and published in the Winter 2007-2008 Issue (online and print) of The Stellar Showcase Journal. You can read its online version at
http://www.stellarshowcasejournal.com/winter2007/winter2007.htm )


Writing in English: The Writing Life in Transition and Translation


In her most renowned poetry book entitled She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks, Canadian poet and essayist Marlene Nourbese Philip explores themes of race, place, gender, colonialism and, always, language; she exposes the tension between father tongue –the white Euro-Christian male canon, and mother tongue –Black African female. Most quoted is the chant like refrain at the core of her innovative poem entitled “Discourse on the Logic of Language:”

... and English is
my mother tongue
is
my father tongue
is a foreign lan lan lang
language
l/anguish
anguish...

Yes, I concur with her words whole heartedly: “English is / … / language / l/anguish.”

Since my emigration to Canada five years ago, I have both wrestled and 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 to be displaced on the broken line between the promised and lost ways 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 self.

Writing in English is very different from writing in Chinese, linguistically and culturally. The modern written Chinese language is highly literary and highbrow, and it is detached from the spoken language. Comparatively speaking, it doesn’t possess the flexibility of English, which is highly 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 centuries-old literary history of allusions and should be skilfully yet not self-inventively used in the context of the Chinese classical literary tradition.

To write in English requires different ways of thinking and focuses more on the expressiveness and innovation of words and phrases. During the course of my adjusting 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 try to say truthfully and innovatively. As Chinese American writer Ha Jin, author of the National Book Award-winning novel entitled Waiting, said emphatically, “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 two years. For me, English writing has been and still is a twisting search into heart and mind. During the writing process, in the strain of translating spontaneous ideas or heartfelt feelings into grammatically and semantically correct sentences, I, due to a lack of mastered vocabulary and literary expressions, have to simplify the way I think and write when I force myself to put on my writing persona.

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

Honestly speaking, I had felt depressed for months, unsure of my future in Canada. One year ago this month, on a wintry morning, I had been walking on the snow-covered streets of Toronto for almost an hour with no destination in 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 about writing in English given by Ha Jin. Requested by his audience to offer some words of encouragement to aspiring writers, Ha Jin responded, "In this profession, 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; 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 his unshakable commitment to English writing. All of a sudden, I was enlightened and liberated from my depressed feeling of being afraid of failure and of starting over.

One year has gone by. I still keep the practice of English 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, of revising and erasing. I have gradually come to a conclusion about my life: I am always, in some way or another, starting over, and building a new beginning again.

Moreover, 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. Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once said,” If we spoke a different language, we would perceive a somewhat different world.” I concur! For me now, to write in English is

To attempt
To test
To make a run at something
To function with relative freedom
To strike out toward the unknown
To invent myself 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, and sometimes even the only way, to work through my inner turmoil, and to reach out to the bigger society around me. Maybe the end of my English writing will arrive where I started, and I will know what English writing means to me for the first time.
_________________
Time is nothing but a disquiet of the soul

[ericcoliu]

When I wrote this piece, I was reminded of the following verse from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's A Psalm of Life:

Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time;
_________________
Time is nothing but a disquiet of the soul

[[ericcoliu]]

When I wrote this piece, I was reminded of the following verse from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's A Psalm of Life:

Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time;
_________________
Time is nothing but a disquiet of the soul

[戴玨]

[[Edgar]]

[ericcoliu]

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