Pressing Matters: 50 Years in Publishing

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Congratulations on Black Moss Press 50 years in publishing.  Thanks for inviting me to contribute contribute my memories and reflections on your work with Black Moss Press and Marty Gervais. I was very grateful for Black Moss and Marty Gervais publishing two of my poetry collections:

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Being Human

I first knew Marty Gervais from John B. Lee’s poem: “Being Human”. I was doing editing then and decided to translate the poem into Chinese and publish it. In the poem, Marty and John were middle-aged men but longing for the carefreeness and passion of youth while sleeping in a farm house watching the stars. At that time, I didn’t know who Marty was but one day fate would connect us. A few years later I got an invitation for the 2013 Windsor Bookfest from Marty. He said he really liked my poetry and asked me to read there and talk about my books as panelist. Due to Marty’s health, we didn’t meet personally. Later he sent an email to congratulate me on my reading, asking me to submit poems to Black Moss Press. What a joy and surprise!

I felt so lucky and was deeply grateful. However, after I read his book “Lucky Days’, I knew why he liked my poetry and it wasn’t just luck after all. I realized that he understood how hardship shaped both his poetry and mine. I was touched and wrote a poem with the same title acknowledging his inspiration.

We finally met at Black Moss Author Reading event in Toronto in Jan 2014. He was exactly as I had thought he would be a gentle man and a trustworthy publisher. I was not surprised that he was also efficient in other regards such as poet laureate, writer and photographer. The Poet Laureate readings at Willistead Manor in 2015 and 2016 were my highlight moments with Marty. He was a talented event organizer and a great host. I learnt a lot from him and I was able to host Poet Laureate night in Mississauga. Thanks to the great readings from George Elliott Clark, John B. Lee and Marty Gervais there, it became a legacy of our city.

I was lucky to meet Marty and lucky enough to have two of my poetry collections find a home at Black Moss press. I have been always grateful for his sharp intuition and generous help. In my poem that he inspired (Lucky Days), I end with

“with luck, a life I know –

the way of poetry”

2018/10/24   Anna Yin

 

Glad to have new poems published in Arc Poetry and the Epoch Poetry Quarterly

Glad to have new poems published in Arc Poetry and the Epoch Poetry Quarterly. Thanks editors in Canada and in Taiwan.  Each of them has a national-wide reputation and long history, One in English, the other in Chinese.  Thanks for including my new poems.  Also I want to thank Miguel Ángel Olivé Iglesias from Cuba to publish my poems in Envoy 91! and review my poetry in In a Fragile Moment which includes 31 poets in Canada and will be used to as an introduction to Canadian Literature (and Canada) to students in University of Holguín, Cuba.

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Glad to receive a foreword by George Elliott Clarke

George Elliott ClarkeOn Translating Poetry: To Be Precise

In 1967, U.S. Country-&-Western singer George Jones issued a tune whose refrain swore, “If my heart had windows, / Use yours for love just for you.” The idea was, the male lover would be able to enjoy vicariously the female’s love, even if it were only for herself. In other words, his heart would be able to translate her self-love into a shared love. I think that the translation of poetry works similarly: One peers lovingly—even squints upon—the original work, and then seeks out equivalently fresh, equally true, meanings in the diction of the receiving or importing language.

But I imagine that a similar process occurs in writing any poem—even in one’s native tongue, for each poem is a translation of inspiration, of lived experience, of the whole language distilled into one set of terms. My own mother-tongue, English, is itself always in the midst of translation—evolution and devolution—having originated as a mishmash of Anglo-Saxon-Germanic-Norse grunts and growls (sounded while were dudes spearing bears or clubbing down boars) plus the courtly, diplomatic suavité of the Norman French, plus the polysyllabic Latin of the Catholic monasteries, so ideal for euphemism, legalism, and abstraction. Thus, when I come to write a poem—ostensibly in English—I’m echoing its origins in my diction, in my mix of monosyllables and polysyllables, and then via the lingoes (plural) specific to me as an African-Canadian, born and raised among the Bluenosers (in Nova Scotia), but of African-American (partial) roots. Thus, my poetry “translates” English into Canadian, Ebonics, Nova Scotian, and even shards of French (an official language in Canada), plus the academic diction in which I’m steeped as a scholar….

Inescapably too, all contemporary translators of English are the (bastard) brood of U.S Modernist poet Ezra Pound, who remodelled English poetry—“made it new”—by ogling enviously the ways in which Chinese, French (Provençal), Greek, and Latin—seemed to be able to get—succinctly—at “Truth” (or so Pound chose to believe), that Flaubert’s le mot juste was M.I.A. in English on occasion, that one had to find it elsewhere. Translation was a way, for Pound, to locate the Truth in Mythology, the Drama in History, the perpetual Tragicomedy in Political Science….

In Mirrors and Windows: East West Poems with Translations, Anna Yin follows Pound in striving to make contemporary poetry in English accessible to Chinese audiences while, simultaneously, granting English poets a purchase on our contemporary, Chinese peers. Her talent as a translator is a gift of genius to the world. However, it is also necessary diplomacy in an age when global, corporate capitalism calls us to battle stations (again) to make war on each other so as to defend their environmentally destructive and genocidal profiteering. But we poets will have the last word—as always (eventually)—and it is Peace.

George Elliott Clarke
4th Poet Laureate of Toronto (2012-15)
7th Parliamentary Poet Laureate of Canada (2016-2017)

–Thank George Elliott Clarke for writing this foreword for my book of translations:Mirrors and Windows…. (it will be included in my upcoming book with Chinese translation ….)