TRANSCRIPT

I’m Maggie Smith, and this is The Slowdown.

Every weekday, we spend time on this show expressing gratitude for poets. We’re grateful for their insights, their language, their craft. We’re grateful for the enormous spaces that even the briefest poems create for us, and in us. Poems are deceptive in that way, aren’t they? It reminds me of Mary Poppins’ famous carpetbag. She reaches into her purse and pulls out things that couldn’t possibly fit inside — a coat stand, a floor lamp, and much, much more.

Poems are like that, too. I’m so grateful for how vast they are, even if they are only a handful of lines long.

But I want to spend some time today expressing gratitude for translators. They make it possible for us to read the work of poets who write in languages we don’t understand, opening doors for us that would have otherwise stayed closed. They enlarge our lives.

Sometimes, creative constraints lead to what feels like greater freedom. We explore the full capacity within those constraints, finding new nooks and crannies of possibility. They can seem exponential. Poetry in translation is perhaps one of the best examples of this; the difficult, constrained choices of translators lead to surprisingly beautiful things.

Every once in a while, a poem comes along with imagery so startling, phrasing so original, I have to read it several times in a row to be sure I’m taking it all in. Today’s poem is one of them.

The Burning Kite
by Ouyang Jianghe, translated from the Chinese by Austin Woerner

What a thing it would be, if we all could fly.
But to rise on air does not make you a bird.

I’m sick of the hiss of champagne bubbles.
It’s spring, and everyone’s got something to puke.

The things we puke: flights of stairs,
a skyscraper soaring from the gut,

the bills blow by on the April breeze
followed by flurries of razor blades in May.

It’s true, a free life is made of words. 
You can crumple it, toss it in the trash,

or fold it between the bodies of angels, attaining
a permanent address in the sky.

The postman hands you your flight of birds
persisting in the original shape of wind.

Whether they’re winging toward the scissors’ V
or printed and plastered on every wall

or bound and trussed, bamboo frames wound with wire
or sentenced to death by fire 

you are, first
and always, ash. 

Broken wire, a hurricane at each end.
Fire trucks scream across the earth.

But this blaze is a thing of the air.
Raise your glass higher, toss it up and away.

Few know this kind of dizzy glee:
an empty sky, a pair of burning wings.

“The Burning Kite” by Ouyang Jianghe, translated by Austin Woerner. Used by permission of the translator.