A Celebration of Upheaval
Rain in Plural by Fiona Sze-Lorrain (USA: Princeton University Press, 2020)
Reviewed by Lara Norgaard
Fiona Sze-Lorrain’s much-awaited fourth poetry collection, Rain in Plural, is a polyphonic gathering of wide-ranging themes. It is tempting to pull out one thread from the collection and peel back layers of meaning to display the sense of Sze-Lorrain’s poetry. But the collection—and one poem in particular—gives pause to any critic attempting the difficult task of reviewing the poet’s work:
To Critics
who dig up a word or a clause from its grave
expose its antipodal
limbs, pick at the bones (their chemical
truths): don’t
you fiddle with my heroine who looks
to the dawn as “awakening” (on her train to seventh heaven
before a natural catastrophe).
Here, the critic is a kind of medical examiner carrying out an autopsy on dead poetry—a detective seeking stable truth and literary value in a disorderly world of verse where words are in flux, slipping in and between meanings. But embedded in this poem and many others across Rain in Plural is a rejection of stability. In this volume, language has not yet been buried: it is in movement, a celebration of upheaval, of meanings unmoored and multiplied.
It is only appropriate, then, for me to write about this collection in that same vein: as a critic-translator who, rather than organizing meaning or accessing an original, chemical truth buried in verse, attempts to approach the text in an ongoing project of recreation and resignification.
Indeed, the metaphor of the critic-translator is particularly apt for Sze-Lorrain’s work. The poet, born in Singapore, lives between languages. She speaks Chinese, English, French, and Spanish and received her master’s degree at New York University and her doctorate at the Sorbonne in Paris. She is herself a translator of Chinese poetry into English and American poetry into French. Her multifaceted fluencies also extend to music: she plays the guzheng professionally and performs worldwide.
Translation is of thematic as well as biographical relevance to Sze-Lorrain. Her three previous collections of poetry—Water the Moon (2010), My Funeral Gondola (2013), and The Ruined Elegance (2016)—all traverse borders and boundaries between languages and cultures, between silence and speech. Rain in Plural finds meaning in translation in the broadest and most generative sense of the term. In addition to expressing the liminal spaces of language itself, these poems approach the translation of past into present, politics into poetics, music and color and taste into language.
Sometimes, moments of translation come across in punctual, synesthetic details that weave across the collection, tying the written word to embodied sense. My copy of Rain in Plural is thoroughly dog-eared from my impulse to trace these moments. More a truffle pig than a critic, I sought out and gathered together the following scattered lines:
“Dogdom is a word I masticate. Its virtues I lap and swallow in a gulp.”
“I am a print media at this benefit”
“Hills fidget when clouds are painted to make them scream.”
“Handwritten in green, on scraps of rice paper. As I penned my thoughts, the radio crackled”
“Instead of letters, I dropped October”
“Heartbreak can be lean and acoustic.”
“the pulse of reason writ into insufferable verbs”
“Blues of a third language seeking new stories”
Through each of these condensed reflections on writing and sense, the word on the page takes on agency: language is a vital matter, a palpable, pulsating thing that connects internal and external worlds, that joins sight and touch, sound and taste to inhabit the borderlands of experience. Rather than being an abstraction, language is corporeal and mobile—an idea that takes center stage in the poem “Far From Description”:
Day after day,
this sentence grew longer. The verb ran faster
than expected. Pushy
as ever, it hurt the feelings of its own
speaker.
The subject in this verse is the sentence, which grows; the verb, which runs and pushes. The speaker is the figure affected by words on the page, the entity who wrestles with a wild language. The tight line and stanza breaks contrast with the description of a long sentence and a fast-running verb. Meaning emerges in the movement between language and its speaker, who is aware they are not fully in control.
It is the push and pull of Sze-Lorrain’s agentic language that characterizes the movement of the collection overall. The book’s structure is not one of linear development, but instead of polyphonic crescendo towards a zone of indeterminacy, towards fleeting contact between areas of experience. Poems in the first section of the collection, “Closer to Clouds,” balance a poetics of intimacy—interiority or moments of memory, family, the body—with reflections on philosophy, literature, politics. “Small Storms,” the second section, creates turbulence in the themes introduced in the first section. The movement from calm clouds to stormy skies, highlighted by the alliterative parallel between the two section titles, indicates this shift. The later poems enter the unstable space between language and art to which the first part gestures, playing with the borders between theater, poetry, and the body and meditating on the relationship between print journalism and the social realities of death and pain. Part III, "Nine Solitudes,” stands out as an interlude, more unified in form than the other parts, offering a series of prose poem vignettes that craft scenes of longing and mourning. Part IV, “Django Fontina,” returns to the liminal with the most formal experimentation—encapsulated in the allusion to visual poetry in the title—while the final poems in Part V, “Child Don’t Hide,” inhabit and expose the slippery third space of language: they make visible, even inescapable, a punctum in the written word.
The final two sections are where translation emerges most clearly as a theme, becoming the subject of the verse rather than its subtext. Take “Give Up Thinking Twice,” one of the many meditations on music in Rain in Plural. The poem opens with a section titled “Acoustic”; the following section, entitled “Electric,” then translates the first into a new musical mode. The two parts of the poem begin in nearly the same way, but for a series of careful shifts in line breaks and the removal of repeated lines:
I
[Acoustic]
Instead of Cohen, I heard another bard.
Some thought him thunder, some found him uphill.
So what if rain must fall hard, one grumbled.
Cut inside each chord, but surrendered for time.
Some thought him thunder, some found him uphill.
I listened to each repetition, an apology in the fewest words.
Cut inside each chord, but surrendered for time.
I would have given up a mountain for this storm.
. . .
II
[Electric]
Instead of Cohen, I heard another bard.
Some thought him thunder, some found him uphill.
So what if rain must fall hard, one grumbled.
Cut inside each chord, but surrendered
for time. I listened to each repetition, an apology
in the fewest words. I would have given up a mountain
for this storm.
The two sections of the poem differ in rhythm and sound, not in lyrical meaning. Notably, the first difference between the two lands on segmenting the line “Cut inside each chord, but surrendered for time” into “Cut inside each chord, but surrendered / for time.” This cut generates velocity, a forward impulse that takes us swiftly to the next verse, a change that stands in contrast to the more contained rhythm of the acoustic mode where meaning settles on one line. Here, translation is layered, multi-faceted, and in movement. Sze-Lorrain transforms music into writing while shifting from one kind of sound to another.
The movement and multiplicity at the core of Sze-Lorrain’s synesthetic translations becomes a motor for her poetics, as we see in another poem, entitled “Self-Portrait as a Landscape without Its Memories and My Age,” in the final section of the collection:
Color to begin as a vertical verse: a reach for pure
sugar, a route
to pleasure and the quiet.
Edible petals stare upwards,
plain—
enough to ask for praise.
Mauve, ruby, shades of beaver or carmine,
outpacing the light,
angled and troubled on the fringe
of what must shut.
The logic of sensation in Rain in Plural can be understood through the translation of color into verse in the opening line. “Color to begin as vertical verse: a reach for pure,” followed by the line break, propels the poem forward like a hand extended outward, grasping, creating pathways and routes. It is a poetics not of being, but of becoming: words are active participants in the creation of their own meaning. Far from stable, stiff, preexisting material, language shape-shifts to create meaning.
The rushing movement of multiple meanings, the vitality of language—this is what Sze-Lorrain invites critics to grapple with when she addresses those who analyze her in the poem “To Critics.” After dissuading the critic from reading language as dead words pulled from their graves, she offers a different approach: “Look not for an aperture, / but a hole where mice revolt / when the cat appears.” Thus, translation is only one of many metaphors around which these poems congeal and become tangible. There are many other points of entry into Rain in Plural, including allusions ranging from Heidegger to Kazuo Dan, Jorge Luis Borges to Alda Merini.
It is also one of the poet’s more political collections. One of the more biting poems in the collection, “Not Meant as Poems,” combines concerns about authoritarianism and ideology with meta reflections on poetic expression. The first section of the poem, “Power in a Crystal Sarcophagus,” opens with the explicitly political “Like Kim Il-sung. / Like Marcos. / Like Lenin. / Behind his glossy face, he tears at his own skin.” And the final stanza of the same section questions what it means to engage with politics as a poet: “I am not a journalist / or a part-time activist, I come here / on a whim, of free will. / For a poem . . .” This statement may seem to celebrate opportunistically the representation of politics in poetry, in contrast to other modes of expression. But the line is, in fact, more complex: the title of the group of poems—"Not Meant as Poems”—ambiguates Sze-Lorrain’s intentions. The speaker may come to politics for a poem in its idealized form, but the title suggests that the stanzas on the page are meant to engage in a different kind of discourse. Rather than asserting a clear political message, the poem begs the more abstract question of what it may offer to politics: namely, a language that inhabits borders, that expresses liminality, that resides in the interstices between the intimate and the social.
At every point of entry into Rain in Plural, the mobile, agentic language Sze-Lorrain employs opens up moments of contact. This is, indeed, the source for the book’s title, which comes from the poem “Sea Ballads,” from its fifth section “Late Shower”:
Lips against lips, we feel the roof and a birth so immediate so smooth inside each other that I listen—before and after, without translation. Nostalgia, heal my lacuna. I’m porous, away from loose ends and against injury, mindful of boundaries like now or tongues set free . . . Water in plural, moments flicker so simply that when you say you are my old mailbox, a familiar tanka to anchor reverie, I look for a sign to renounce our blind rain.
Lips and tongues are where bodies meet language. In the midst of a linguistic embrace, we find a momentary freedom, a porous opening between boundaries, a connection across the gap between interiority and creative expression, between our intimate selves and other bodies moving in the world. Sze-Lorrain’s work allows us to grasp, for a moment, the points of contact that translation perpetually seeks. Therein lies the philosophical importance of Rain in Plural: eschewing equivalence, Sze-Lorrain crafts a poetics of border spaces and contact zones.
Lara Norgaard is a literary critic and translator of Indonesian, Portuguese, and Spanish into English. Her essays and translations have appeared in publications including Asymptote Journal, Public Books, The Jakarta Post, and the Cuíer anthology of LGBTQ+ Brazilian literature (Two Lines Press, 2021). She is a 2021 PEN/Heim Translation Grant recipient for her in-progress translation of the Indonesian novel 24 Hours with Gaspar by Sabda Armandio. Currently, she is a PhD student in comparative literature at Harvard University, where she researches post-dictatorship Latin American and Indonesian fiction.
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