I will play the translation, but I'll read the note first.
Translation, over the course of this book
I have taken the literal meanings
Dr. Fu-Sheng Wu has translated for me
to produce what is the most likely, if not always accurate
outcome.
I know my English titles are poor renditions of his Chinese,
at once too strict and wildly erratic.
Scholars will disagree with this translation,
I do not know Chinese.
And since so few people in my family now speak it
I know that I will never learn.
My family's loss of language means my own exclusion
from their past.
Does this matter?
And does it matter I haven't shared the other poem with you
here, the second half of that pair carved
into the walls of Angel Island?
I haven't told you what characters comprise that poem
and though I know it's been translated as its own work,
I don't know whether the Chinese would
allow me to read across both poem's lines
stitching the two together so that the sense of one
bleeds into the other.
Perhaps the poems are only complete when read this way,
perhaps each should stand apart.
I suspect both.
Regardless the subject of both poems
is the same, the loss, the striving, the hope,
the death that is startling and continuous.
Perhaps having read one poem you long to see
the other, start over, grief is, but one moment of time.
The elegy goes on forever.
And I will play the translation for you.
Let me see.
I'm going to skip to the end.
[VIDEO PLAYBACK]
- We cannot count all the dead.
- This is the sound of a train.
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
- This is the sound of a train.
- This is a sound of a train.
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
- This is the sound of a train.
- We do not ride on the railroad--
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
[END PLAYBACK]
And I'll stop before we get into the granters.
But anyway, I just want to thank you all for coming out,
and enjoy.
[APPLAUSE]