Tove Ditlevsen, trans. by Tiina Nunnally and Michael Favala Goldman
RaveAsymptoteIn her memoir, The Copenhagen Trilogy , [Ditlevsen] still commands the facts of her life with that same prolific, torrential force that has sprawled through dozens of texts, that tells of madness and poverty and femininity in the various violences they enact upon a single body—a fastidious discernment that is only concerned with what can be made material by ink and paper. In the reading of this monument to a life of letters, one is left with the sense that yes—a whole person is too much to take, in the way that anything, forced to be seen with such unimpeded clarity, is ... the author is herself grasping the glimmers of what can be told to make sense of the now ... Were I to speak with her, I believe Tove Ditlevsen would stand—at least in part—with me in my position that poets are born, not made. As such the efflorescence of a young devotion to language marks the most immediate, epiphanic, and tortured portions of Childhood ... To read Ditlevsen’s young verse here is sweet, consolatory; we know that within their immaturity, a certain glory is supine and patient. Poetics are glimpses at destiny; they indicate one’s innermost pursuits, discerns what is seen from what is looked at, and paves the path that the poet follows, in reverie ... With the first two parts translated by Tiina Nunnally and the last by Michael Favala Goldman, the English prose honours the lilting musicality that Ditlevsen has cultivated with her poems. They are of a careful, unexacting oratory—one hears within the chiming of the words an ease of someone who knows the fascination she evokes, the grip she exerts with her medium. Even as she describes herself in the tumult of insecurity, or shame, or regret, or the horrific deluge of her addiction, in the confines of the page she is fearless, precise in her remembering, commanding in her retelling.
Wang Anyi, Trans. by Howard Goldblatt
PositiveAsymptoteFu Ping...taken into a wonderfully equal rendition by Howard Goldblatt, exemplifies the thematic and aesthetic constants prevalent in her oeuvre, while simultaneously creating an illumination of city and community that leaves remarkably deep impressions by way of its quietude ... spareness, born in part out of scarcity, is embodied in Wang’s careful, exacting prose. Goldblatt does a remarkable job in the transference of this stoic voice into English, using transliteration where appropriate, and inserting lyrical pauses naturally in the language to mimic the freer use in Chinese of commas. As the novel is completely free of dialogue (conversations are written in the form of reportage), the maintenance of such a modest and—as Wang herself dictates—understated voice may earn the novel some criticism of being somewhat monotonous, but Goldblatt is entirely devoted to Wang’s original, and it culminates in an admitted slowness, the same way that a painting is slow—so it is that the reader is led to the details within the prose like a viewer is eventually led to all the contours and shadings of a portrait, coloured stroke by stroke until the entire world emerges ... Like so many Chinese stories told by mothers, grandmothers, and all the ones preceding, this one is in service to lives lived so that the world stands as it is today. In these voices, ordinariness rises to meet the sacred.
