The soul should always stand ajar, ready to welcome the ecstatic experiences. –Emily Dickinson
Category: Translation Corner
Works from Poets including Sir Andrew Motion, Dana Gioia, C.D. Wright, Molly Peacock and Canada Governor-General Award-winning poets: Al Purdy, P.K.Page, George Elliott Clarke and Richard Greene, A.F. Moritz, Alice Major and other award winner etc
David Mason, American poet, former Poet Laureate of Colorado. He teaches at Colorado College. His poetry, prose and translations have appeared in such periodicals as The New Yorker, Harper’s, The Nation, The New Republic, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Times Literary Supplement, Poetry, Agenda, Modern Poetry in Translation, The New Criterion, The Yale Review, The Hudson Review, The American Scholar, The Irish Times, and The Southern Review.
Poem: Turn / 轮换
Cally Conan-Davies’s poems have appeared in the Hudson Review, Subtropics, Poetry, Quadrant, the New Criterion, the Sewanee Review, Southwest Review, the Dark Horse, Harvard Review, and the Hopkins Review.
A special issue of Works by Seven Poets Laureate (Sir Andrew Motion, Dana Gioia, George Elliott Clarke, Alice Major, John B. Lee, Marty Gervais and Anna Yin) with translations in Chinese (七位北美桂冠诗人作品欣赏) spreads among Chinese communities globally on WeChat platform.
Other news: Two of my new poems in Chinese （借來的故事/一式兩份）were published in TaiWan The Epoch Poetry Quarterly
at the 2016 West Chester Poetry Conference with Dana Gioia
Dana Gioia is an internationally acclaimed and award-winning poet. Former Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, Gioia received a B.A. and a M.B.A. from Stanford University and an M.A. in Comparative Literature from Harvard University. Gioia currently serves as the Poet Laureate of California.
I was very grateful for a scholarship to attend the 2016 West Chester Poetry Conference and met Sir Andrew Motion, Dana Gioia and many other fine poets. I was touched by Dana’s poems that he wrote for his first son who died very young. Here is one of them. With Dana’s permission, I translated three of his poems.
Prayer
Echo of the clocktower, footstep in the alleyway, sweep of the wind sifting the leaves.
Jeweller of the spiderweb, connoisseur of autumn’s opulence, blade of lightning harvesting the sky.
Keeper of the small gate, choreographer of entrances and exits, midnight whisper travelling the wires.
Seducer, healer, deity or thief, I will see you soon enough— in the shadow of the rainfall,
in the brief violet darkening a sunset— but until then I pray watch over him as a mountain guards its covert ore
