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The Birth of Eric Liu on a Wintry Morning (revised)

 
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ericcoliu[ericcoliu]
ericcoliu作品集

二品总督
(刚入二品,小心做人)
二品总督<BR>(刚入二品,小心做人)


注册时间: 2007-05-29
帖子: 1393
来自: GTA, Canada

帖子发表于: 星期三 二月 04, 2009 4:17 pm    发表主题: The Birth of Eric Liu on a Wintry Morning (revised) 引用并回复

Reading and Writing: Life on the Page



The Birth of Eric Liu on a Wintry Morning


Two years ago this month, on a wintry morning, I was ready to give up learning to write in English. 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 at the top of my lungs about all the frustrations pent up since I chose to write in English exclusively a year before, “I’m really tired of starting over. No matter what I do, it gets wiped out. I want to leave something meaningful behind.” Everybody around me at the time was scared away.

pass by each other
then disappear --
footprints in the snow

Two years have gone by, swiftly and silently. I have always tried and always failed to succeed in English writing, but I still keep on 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." Based on my own writing experience, I find that writing can be a way of paying attention and acknowledging traces, of revising and erasing. For me now, to write in English is to attempt, 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 the unfamiliar world of the alphabet, and it helps me to make myself up from moment to moment and to gradually turn my old Chinese self into a new one.

Eric, an alphabet apprentice
thwarted by time’s passing --
pines to be a poet
_________________
Time is nothing but a disquiet of the soul


最后进行编辑的是 ericcoliu on 星期四 二月 26, 2009 3:59 pm, 总计第 1 次编辑
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ericcoliu[ericcoliu]
ericcoliu作品集

二品总督
(刚入二品,小心做人)
二品总督<BR>(刚入二品,小心做人)


注册时间: 2007-05-29
帖子: 1393
来自: GTA, Canada

帖子发表于: 星期三 二月 04, 2009 4:19 pm    发表主题: 引用并回复

In an interview with Dave Weich, the Chinese American writer and two-time winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction Ha Jin claimed that the most important work of immigrant literature for him is Nabokov's Pnin. As he emphasized, “[It] deals with the question of language, and I think that's at the core of the immigrant experience: how to learn the language--or give up learning the language!--but without the absolute mastery of the language, which is impossible for an immigrant. Your life is always affected by the insufficiency.”
_________________
Time is nothing but a disquiet of the soul
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christine[christine]
christine作品集

四品府丞
(封疆大吏也!)
四品府丞<BR>(封疆大吏也!)


注册时间: 2008-02-25
帖子: 304

帖子发表于: 星期三 二月 04, 2009 8:02 pm    发表主题: Re: The Birth of Eric Liu on a Wintry Morning 引用并回复

A heartfelt description of survival and adjustment in an alien land, and of the firming-up of a literary vocation.


ericcoliu 写到:



Two years have gone by. I have always tried and always failed to succeed in English writing, but I still keep on 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." Based on my own writing experience, I find that writing can be a way of paying attention and acknowledging traces, of revising and erasing. For me now, to write in English is to attempt, 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 the unfamiliar world of the alphabet, and it helps me to make myself up from moment to moment and to gradually turn my old Chinese self into a new one.

Eric Liu, an alphabet apprentice
thwarted by time’s passing --
pines to be a poet


This view echoes that of Samuel Beckett:

Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.
-- Worstward Ho by Samuel Beckett
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ericcoliu[ericcoliu]
ericcoliu作品集

二品总督
(刚入二品,小心做人)
二品总督<BR>(刚入二品,小心做人)


注册时间: 2007-05-29
帖子: 1393
来自: GTA, Canada

帖子发表于: 星期三 二月 04, 2009 9:31 pm    发表主题: Re: The Birth of Eric Liu on a Wintry Morning 引用并回复

christine 写到:


ericcoliu 写到:

Eric Liu, an alphabet apprentice
thwarted by time’s passing --
pines to be a poet


This view echoes that of Samuel Beckett:

Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.
-- Worstward Ho by Samuel Beckett


I have
Always tried
Always failed
Never mind
Try again
Fail again
But fail better next time
That's all about writing.
_________________
Time is nothing but a disquiet of the soul
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ericcoliu[ericcoliu]
ericcoliu作品集

二品总督
(刚入二品,小心做人)
二品总督<BR>(刚入二品,小心做人)


注册时间: 2007-05-29
帖子: 1393
来自: GTA, Canada

帖子发表于: 星期三 二月 04, 2009 10:05 pm    发表主题: Re: The Birth of Eric Liu on a Wintry Morning 引用并回复

christine 写到:


A heartfelt description of survival and adjustment in an alien land, and of the firming-up of a literary vocation.



Thanks for your perceptive comment.

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
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ericcoliu[ericcoliu]
ericcoliu作品集

二品总督
(刚入二品,小心做人)
二品总督<BR>(刚入二品,小心做人)


注册时间: 2007-05-29
帖子: 1393
来自: GTA, Canada

帖子发表于: 星期三 二月 04, 2009 11:36 pm    发表主题: 引用并回复

Below are replies from my friend:


This a heartfelt piece, nicely accomplished. The reader feels your need to succeed. You express it so well that we feel the pain and difficulty along with you.

-- Christopher T George

Chen-ou- I was really taken by your use of a birth to describe the process of becoming a writer in another language. Great idea.

I have so much respect for people who master more than one language. I remember reading Lolita for the first time and thinking about how hard that must have been to write. I also loved reading Jerzy Kosinski because he found so many interesting ways to use give his characters a voice.

-- Lazarus
_________________
Time is nothing but a disquiet of the soul
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ericcoliu[ericcoliu]
ericcoliu作品集

二品总督
(刚入二品,小心做人)
二品总督<BR>(刚入二品,小心做人)


注册时间: 2007-05-29
帖子: 1393
来自: GTA, Canada

帖子发表于: 星期四 二月 05, 2009 1:05 am    发表主题: Re: The Birth of Eric Liu on a Wintry Morning 引用并回复

ericcoliu 写到:


All of a sudden, feeling an uncontrollable urge to cry out, I stopped walking and raised my head, screaming at the top of my lungs about all the frustrations pent up since I chose to write in English exclusively a year before, “I’m really tired of starting over. No matter what I do, it gets wiped out. I want to leave something meaningful 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.
_________________
Time is nothing but a disquiet of the soul
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fanfan[FFFFFF]
fanfan作品集

四品府丞
(封疆大吏也!)
四品府丞<BR>(封疆大吏也!)


注册时间: 2007-12-27
帖子: 353
来自: Canada

帖子发表于: 星期四 二月 05, 2009 6:56 am    发表主题: Re: The Birth of Eric Liu on a Wintry Morning 引用并回复

ericcoliu 写到:


All of a sudden, feeling an uncontrollable urge to cry out, I stopped walking and raised my head, screaming at the top of my lungs about all the frustrations pent up since I chose to write in English exclusively a year before, “I’m really tired of starting over. No matter what I do, it gets wiped out. I want to leave something meaningful behind.” Everybody around me at the time was scared away.

pass by each other
then disappear --
footprints in the snow




ericcoliu 写到:


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;



Subtle use of rhetorical devices: metaphor and allusion.
_________________
Don't imitate me;
it's as boring
as the two halves of a melon.
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dundas[dundas]
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五品知州
(再努力一把就是四品大员了!)
五品知州<BR>(再努力一把就是四品大员了!)


注册时间: 2008-02-23
帖子: 214

帖子发表于: 星期四 二月 05, 2009 4:16 pm    发表主题: Re: The Birth of Eric Liu on a Wintry Morning 引用并回复

fanfan 写到:


Subtle use of rhetorical devices: metaphor and allusion.


I think you also need to include the following passage:

ericcoliu 写到:

Based on my own writing experience, I find that writing can be a way of paying attention and acknowledging traces, of revising and erasing.


_________________
My throat knew thirst before the structure
Of skin and vein around the well
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ericcoliu[ericcoliu]
ericcoliu作品集

二品总督
(刚入二品,小心做人)
二品总督<BR>(刚入二品,小心做人)


注册时间: 2007-05-29
帖子: 1393
来自: GTA, Canada

帖子发表于: 星期五 二月 06, 2009 7:44 am    发表主题: Re: The Birth of Eric Liu on a Wintry Morning 引用并回复

dundas 写到:
fanfan 写到:


Subtle use of rhetorical devices: metaphor and allusion.


I think you also need to include the following passage:

ericcoliu 写到:

Based on my own writing experience, I find that writing can be a way of paying attention and acknowledging traces, of revising and erasing.



Thanks for your thoughtful replies.

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 has always been, a toiling act of expressing myself.
_________________
Time is nothing but a disquiet of the soul
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robarts[robarts]
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六品通判
(官儿做大了,保持廉洁哦)
六品通判<BR>(官儿做大了,保持廉洁哦)


注册时间: 2008-03-24
帖子: 114
来自: Canada

帖子发表于: 星期一 二月 09, 2009 2:06 pm    发表主题: Re: The Birth of Eric Liu on a Wintry Morning 引用并回复

ericcoliu 写到:


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 has always been, a toiling act of expressing myself.


Yes, I concur!

I write; therefore, I am!
_________________
If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.
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ericcoliu[ericcoliu]
ericcoliu作品集

二品总督
(刚入二品,小心做人)
二品总督<BR>(刚入二品,小心做人)


注册时间: 2007-05-29
帖子: 1393
来自: GTA, Canada

帖子发表于: 星期二 二月 10, 2009 11:31 pm    发表主题: Re: The Birth of Eric Liu on a Wintry Morning 引用并回复

robarts 写到:



I write; therefore, I am!


Thanks for the read and your thoughtful comment.

Keep on Writing

I write, I write; I keep on writing
I take refuge in written words
The words I weep with and for
As long as I am writing
My pain is less piercing
_________________
Time is nothing but a disquiet of the soul
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ericcoliu[ericcoliu]
ericcoliu作品集

二品总督
(刚入二品,小心做人)
二品总督<BR>(刚入二品,小心做人)


注册时间: 2007-05-29
帖子: 1393
来自: GTA, Canada

帖子发表于: 星期四 二月 26, 2009 4:01 pm    发表主题: 引用并回复

I’ve revised my poem.

slow and methodical
work of editing and rewriting
persists through the frustration.


Yes, this is the wrenching process of writing.
_________________
Time is nothing but a disquiet of the soul
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