Living it Line by Line

Six years separate the publication of Kim Cheng Boey’s Gull Between Heaven and Earth from Hossein Asgari’s Only Sound Remains. The former came out in 2017, and the latter in 2023. Yet the novels have something in common: they are both works of fiction based on the lives of iconic poets – respectively, the mid-twentieth-century Iranian poet Forugh Farrokhzad (1934 – 1967) and the Tang-dynasty Chinese poet Du Fu (712 – 770).

Boey and Asgari sat down with the SRB for a conversation on rendering historical fact into fictionalised narrative, translating poems from one language into another, and deploying prose to describe the circumstances that compel poetry’s creation.

SRB: These are both novels that pay tribute to great poets, and these projects were obviously undertaken with great love and care, requiring not only an intense amount of historical and biographical research, but also skill with regard to rendering the poetry into English. What compelled each of you to undertake such intense labours of literary admiration?

Hossein Asgari (HA): The idea came to me after a conversation with my uncle. That day, we were talking about Forugh Farrokhzad’s poetry and how strange it was that no one had ever written a novel based on her life – though, the year after, a novel came out in America. But at the time, there was no novel based on her life.

So, we were talking, and then I thought, Okay, maybe I should start writing something. That would be an interesting project. And I decided to borrow some of the characters from another book I've written in Farsi, which I've never published, called ‘The Imaginary Narrative of a Real Murder’. It’s about Saeed losing his best friend, Payam, and writing about it to come to terms with his death. I came up with this idea that maybe it should be Saeed’s father, who, considering the age and era, knew Forugh. The father would come to visit Saeed in Adelaide and confess the unrequited love he had for Forugh.

But from the very beginning, I knew this book wasn’t going to be just about Forugh. Because, if I was borrowing from that book, everyone in that book was involved heavily in politics, so I knew it was going to be about history and politics. But it took me a while before I realised that this book was also about outsiders in Iran’s history.

Kim Cheng Boey (KCB): (To HA) When you said that nobody had written anything about Farrokhzad, it was exactly the same thing with Du Fu. And that was one of my motivations for writing the novel: he’s the greatest Chinese poet, and I was just shocked that nobody had written anything like this about him. 

HA: I would love to hear more about your world-building process. One thing that stood out for me was that the setting of your story is an ancient, not contemporary one. Yet you still managed to masterfully build such a detailed, colourful world.

KCB:  I think the most important thing was doing the field work. I made about two or three trips to China to track down the places where Du Fu travelled and lived. And that was very vital to the work, getting the sense of place right, and the terrain that he trekked through, and appreciating how tough it was. I mean, he didn’t have a horse for many of his journeys. He travelled on foot, dragging his family along. I think being there really helped. And of course, reading his poems. You know, he left about 1,400 poems, but I think quite a few were lost.

That’s the reason why Du Fu is called ‘the Poet-Historian’. No other poet in Chinese history has left such detailed accounts of the times they lived in. Just incredible details, eyewitness accounts of famine, but even, in happier times, vivid details of the great city that Xi’an was – Xi’an was called Chang’an back in the Tang Dynasty. And Du Fu left accounts of that: his stay in the city, the different quarters, and how cosmopolitan it was – all the religions and faiths and cultures and people coming together. So it was really a pleasure and revelation to read his poems, and to pick up all the details that I needed for the work.

HA: So, what were the common themes of poetry in China at the time?

KCB: Love was one of them, I guess. But done in an almost abstract way. I mean, you look at most of the poems written at that time before Du Fu, and events described could have happened to anybody. The details, the circumstantial details just weren’t there; they were lyrical poems. There were popular love poems in which the persona would be a woman – even though it was a male poet – pining for her lover who has left for a job in some distant province, or who has gone to a frontier posting.

And there were friendship poems, because in those days, obviously, it took a long time to find out the fate of your friends, especially in turbulent times. Letters from home, as Du Fu says in one of his poems, were worth a thousand gold pieces. All the Tang poets wrote friendship poems, where the poet is thinking about his friend, or friends, wondering whether they are still alive. And homesick poems, lots of homesick poems, like the famous one by Li Bai, on thoughts about home on a moonlit night. People travelled a lot in those days, especially poets, it seems – and very few returned home. They either died in exile, or far from home.

So, these were some of the common themes. But it wasn’t until Du Fu that we get very detailed accounts of what it was like to live in that period: when the An Lushan Rebellion broke out, the famine, the plight of the peasants, the people he saw around him suffering, and even his own infant child dying of hunger. These are very personal details, personal narratives, but they’re also political, and express the collective grief and trauma of the nation. So I guess that’s why I was drawn to Du Fu’s work – because he doesn’t just write beautiful quatrains about love or friendship. These poems are rooted in very real details that we can see and touch and feel.

HA: So his personal accounts were very political as well.

KCB: Yes, but they weren’t didactic, or making any moral gestures or statements. Just what he observed and experienced.

SRB: Could you both speak about the process of working with both poetry and prose? Especially since, Kim Cheng, you tend to be more of a poet than a prose writer, and Hossein, you’re more of a prose writer than a poet. What were the challenges you faced, and the discoveries you made in marrying these two elements together?

HA: Honestly, I didn't find the process of incorporating Forugh’s poetry challenging. It gave me a lot of opportunities. For instance, there are parts of the story I wrote only because I wanted to use a certain line, or certain poems. So I was thinking, how can I incorporate those lines, those poems into the story? I had to come up with different scenarios that would allow me to have that poem. One example is ‘Only Sound Remains’. This is a poem I really like. It’s one of my favourites. Those things that I have Ismael write in that piece in the newspaper – they are to provoke Forugh into writing that poem.

KCB: I don’t think there was any big challenge reconciling the two. I think at a certain stage in a poet's life, you turn to prose – and I had already turned to prose when I was writing Between Stations; I wrote an essay about Du Fu there. I think it’s also got to do with middle age, wanting to slow down and review the past. You want to tell stories and the lyric isn’t sufficient, as it compresses and distils the emotions and experiences. I think prose gives you the sort of latitude, the sort of room you need to get the details and stories in.

Also, with Du Fu’s longer poems, they don’t lend themselves well to translations. For one thing, they’re epic. And there are so many allusions, so many historical and literary references that cannot be conveyed in the translations. So, what I did was to take these longer poems, turn them into narrative prose, and incorporate some lines. So, for example, that episode when he was lost in the snow. That comes from a long, long poem. You read it in the original and it’s great. It’s such a powerful poem because it’s really happening. He really is on the verge of starvation, you know, trying to feed his family and desperately digging the frozen earth for roots and tubers. But it doesn’t come across in the translation. So what I’ve done is to expand and flesh it out into a full account of the desperate straits he is in, what has led him there, and the physical exhaustion and hunger and the cold and darkness closing in.

It wasn’t that difficult to translate the poetry into the prose because the material was there already. It was just translating the voice and finding Du Fu’s voice and being truthful to it. I think that was challenging. It also allowed me the freedom to add a little here and there. For example, there’s a poem that I made up. It’s my own poem, but…

SRB: Oh!

(General laughter)

KCB: … I won’t tell you which one. There are gaps in his work. I think he must have lost many poems, travelling from place to place, especially when he was fleeing the rebels – just imagine him carrying all these scrolls along. So I thought, you know, it’s highly possible that quite a few poems were lost, because the poems – the 1,400 odd poems – account for the time when he started out as a young man, but there’s a gap of a number of years where there’s not a single poem about that period. So I kind of took the liberty of inserting, inventing that poem, and adding it to the work. And then, of course, I was also able to translate other Tang poets, like Wang Wei – poets that I felt had a sort of affinity with Du Fu – and add them to the novel.

SRB: The role of poetry is a thematic concern in both these novels. Kim Cheng, in your novel, there is a conversation between Du Fu and his poet friends, where one of them asks outright, ‘What is poetry for? Why do we spend our lives chasing lines that are useless?’

And in your novel, Hossein, there is this moment where the narrator’s father locates what sets Forugh’s poetry apart from the rest: where he realises that to write ‘like “that” was to write like a prophet’ and ‘like an oracle. Oracle of life. Death. Rebirth.’  And this idea is repeated: the sense that her poetry is somehow prophetic, oracular, because it is pure and true, not empty or posturing or with ulterior motive.

For the both of you: how did the process of writing these novels reflect or change your own thoughts on the function and purpose of poetry?

HA: I’m not a poet myself, but I don’t think any poets write thinking about the purpose of poetry, right? I’m sure when they are asked later, they might come up with something to justify it – oh, I’m writing because of this, or I’m writing because of that. But, personally, I think they write it, probably, because they don’t have a choice. The idea, the emotion, whatever it is, comes to them and wants to be expressed, and then poets use words to do it.

And usually, good poets are emotionally intelligent and intuitive people. They can sense and see things other people can’t. And because of that, occasionally, they sound like oracles.

KC: (To HA) You mention that sort of oracle-like power, that role that a poet has. I mean, it goes all the way back to Homer, the Greeks. But Farrokhzad’s work seems prophetic in the sense that she speaks about the plight of Iranian women right now, and she wouldn’t have been allowed to write, or even live, inside present-day Iran. So I think the political nature of the work comes through that way, in that she was breaking taboos and wasn’t afraid, she was courageous. So that’s how I understand her work to be prophetic, and political.

HA: I think that’s true. You know, when Iranian society seemed really stable, she would sense all this tension. In ‘I Feel Pity for the Garden’, basically, the garden is the country, and she describes all the tension, all these kids who are carrying bombs in their backpacks. When she says, ‘I think the garden can be taken to a hospital’, she’s talking about reform. She’s not for revolution; you talk about reform if you sense there is a revolution on the horizon. You think, oh, this is not the solution. We should take the garden to the hospital rather than doing anything radical, right? And now, forty-five years after the revolution, I think even the revolutionary people know that they probably should have taken the garden to the hospital rather than destroying it and trying to rebuild it.

SRB: In both of your novels, poetry plays such an active role in intellectual, social, political life.

KCB: Yes, it’s incredible to me, that without the printing press and without the circulation of poetry, these Tang poems – and they are great poems – managed to survive all the tumult and be preserved.

Back to the question of politics, I think Du Fu’s poems, the fact that they survived and left such a vivid account of the turbulent times he lived in, that’s a testament to the power of poetry. No matter what you say about poets being so useless, or helpless in the face of tyranny, in the face of people like Trump.

I think in the end, the strength of poetry lies in its ability to stand its ground, and to be faithful to the language, to beauty, and to what cannot be measured in material terms. That discussion of poetry and politics I put into the book – I took the inspiration from WH Auden’s poem, actually. That famous poem where he says, ‘For poetry makes nothing happen’. I think that’s the most confronting question: does poetry matter in the end? And poets have faced it since the Second World War, or even the First World War – people like Wilfred Owen writing poems about the carnage in the trenches.

I think that’s a kind of evidence in itself, that poetry can matter, because you can’t see these things through history books. You can only experience them in poems, where they are so real, so vivid. In the middle of that poem for WB Yeats, Auden states, ‘for poetry makes nothing happen', but then the poem moves to the closing lines:

That’s an affirmation of poetry’s role. That the poet can matter.

SRB: Both your books are set during seemingly stable times that then turn very turbulent politically. And they’re written in the context of these cultures, societies, where poetry does play a consistent and very obvious role in the fabric of public and community life. Forugh Farrokhzad’s poems cause such scandal when they come out in magazines, and are exchanged and copied out and quoted in the wider community. In the intellectual elite circles that Du Fu moves in, poetry circulates widely, exchanged among friends, read out in court, gaining reputation as they go, committed to memory.

What did it feel like to revisit those times, when poetry and literature were more of a part of communal life, the communal consciousness, than they seem to be now?

HA: I agree that, probably, at the moment, literature no longer has the same sort of immediate social or political impact, partially because we have a lot of distractions: social media, internet, Netflix, video games, all sorts of things. But I’ve personally experienced the power of the written word – and, I think, ironically, because of censorship.

When you live in a country where, for instance, the Ministry of Culture must approve the publication of a book, then you can imagine: if a book which shouldn’t have survived censorship survived it for whatever reason, it could create a stir. Then everyone – well, not everyone, but those who are interested in literature – they all want to have a copy of the book before it disappears from the bookshops!

Another example I can give you: twenty-five, twenty-six years ago, we had this reformist president. He came to power, and for two glorious years, we had free newspapers, who would basically publish anything. And because of that, I could see people queueing to get the latest issue of a newspaper, because that newspaper had published something controversial: an article, a satirical poem or caricature, for instance.

I think that literature – or the written word – still has some power, and I’ve seen it because I lived somewhere with censorship. And censorship makes people thirsty. Just try this experiment: today, tell people in Australia, You can’t have that book. In five minutes, all the copies will be sold.

KC: Poetry was the highest art form that Tang scholars aspired to. Even the emperors wrote poems. And scholars were tested in the Imperial exams on their knowledge of classical poetry, and they had to compose poems too, as part of the exams. I think that sort of reverence for the art form – that doesn’t exist anymore, of course. And that sort of community that you referred to, again, it’s quite miraculous, incredible, that it happened, because there was no media to bring people together, but somehow the Tang and Sung poets knew of each other’s work. And they had this tremendous knowledge of poets past, and could recite whole pages of poems and poetry, and that brought people closer together in those days. Though, of course, the commoners could not read, it was only the elite and those brought up in scholar families and those who could afford to read and write.

I’m not sure if the sort of community you see now – critics and writers brought together by journals online and writing circuits and conferences and university writing programs – I don’t know if you can call it ‘community’. I think it was much more sincere back in those days, because I think they wrote out of profound respect for each other, and also, out of friendship and need.

SRB: Speaking of respect and admiration for poetry, which poem did you find the most satisfaction in translating?

KC: It’s hard to pick one. I think the thrill of translation is that it allows you to connect to the poem on such an intimate level, that you live it line by line. So, I think that one I mentioned, you know, about him being lost in the snowstorm. That was quite visceral. I felt I had to wait for it, and then feel myself there in the landscape.

And there’s the one about his cottage, the famous poem about his cottage being destroyed during an autumn gale. That was quite a powerful moment, translating it: there he is, spending days building this cottage after trekking for months over the mountains to arrive in Chengdu, and to have the most peaceful period of his life in the cottage by a stream – two or three years of peace – and then the autumn wind just levels it. And he wrote about it so graphically. You can see it, all the visual details, and feel the other sensory details. It places you right there with the despairing poet.

And there is not a shred of self-pity. He’s looked around him, and is aware that all the others are suffering too, made homeless, shivering in the cold. And he looks further afield, all these peasants still suffering from the An Lushan rebellion, millions starving and dead. He is able to move out from his own situation to empathise with the others. That sort of compassion is what he’s known for now. He’s called not only a poet-historian, but a poet-saint as well. That was a great poem I felt honoured to translate. So, maybe that one.

But every one of the poems mattered to me a lot. There’s also a poem written by Wang Wei that I inserted into the novel, about retreating from the world, and being a recluse, and retiring from the court. And that poem meant a lot to me when I was in academia, each day wanting to get out and to retire. I lived that poem every day. (Laughs.) I love that poem. It’s a retirement poem. I took a lot of pleasure in translating that one.

SRB: And Hossein, if you had to choose one, what was your favourite poem, or favourite lines?

HA: I think if I had to choose just one, I would go with ‘Only Sound Remains’. I just love the energy that poem has. It’s about life and art and creativity, and also, I found her anger really interesting. This woman was angry! She was like, ‘why should I stop when the cockroach talks’?

It was a difficult poem to translate. Honestly, there were a few lines where I thought, I can’t translate this, not for the life of me. I translated ninety per cent of the poem, but for those lines, I just put three dots. But I really, really love the energy in that poem. It’s about all the love she has for movement, and for life, and for art, and for creativity. And that poem captures it.

And the second one is, ‘I Feel Pity for the Garden’. It’s such a personal poem, but at the same time, it captures the essence of the time, Iranian society at the time, how people were thinking and living.

KC: In the process of translation, I found it very, very difficult, very challenging to get the equivalences – semantics, sonic, and formal – and to move a poem from one language to another without the loss of the power of the original work. A lot was lost in translation. (To HA) What were your difficulties in translating Farrokhzad’s poetry? Do you think your translations have managed to capture the spirit of her work – that rebellious and non-conformist free-thinking spirit?

HA: I think the difficulty I had is one that everyone faces when trying to translate poetry from one language into another. Every word has certain connotations that are specific to that culture, history, poetic tradition. They will, most probably, be lost. People need to live your culture, to read your poetry, in order to understand those connotations.

Another thing is those unique lyrical rhythms – those are lost. I was talking to my friend Shannon Burns, who is an Adelaide-based author, and he was talking about how a writer, when he writes, he tries to seduce the reader with language. And that’s also really important in poetry, this seduction with words. And that’s also lost to a certain extent. But for me, what I tried to do was to focus on concept and imagery. I thought, those are things that you can preserve.

So my focus was on concept and imagery – and things that I couldn’t do anything about, then I just let them go. I can’t be the judge. It’s so difficult to be sure that we have done justice, you know? We can never be sure.

SRB: What did you want to get at with your translations of Du Fu’s poetry, Kim Cheng? That you felt others had not?

KC: I think it was the voice. Perhaps the hardest thing when you translate is getting at what you perceive to be the voice – and the sound of the poem, the music of the lines. I mean, with some of the older translators, they have tried to reproduce the rhymes but they don’t sound right. They sound a bit too neat. And some of the freer translations, Ezra Pound or Arthur Waley, they’ve taken too much liberty, especially Ezra Pound I think, with the lines and line breaks and all that. So, I think my task was to get the sound of the poem across, as best as I could. The music of the poem.

I think Chinese, especially classical Chinese, is devilishly hard to translate, because it’s so compressed. My focus was trying to get to the heart of the poem as accurately as I could. It’s just such a challenge to get the sound of it across, as Hossein said. A single word in Chinese can demand maybe a few words in English to get it right. And there are no pronouns in classical Chinese poetry; they don’t use I or we. The other thing is there are no tenses, so these are things that make it doubly hard to translate Chinese poetry. And also, of course, there are the formal requirements. The form itself is so disciplined, and especially the Tang quatrains, the rising accents and the rhymes. It’s just impossible to replicate in English.

SRB: (To HA) Did you end up consulting any other translations of Farrokhzad’s poetry?

HA: Initially, my plan was to use other people’s translations. But reading different translations, I realised, Okay, this person has translated this one poem well, and that other person has translated that other poem really well. And if I wanted to use them, then I would face this problem of voice. The voice wouldn’t be consistent. Different translators have different voices. They basically recreate the form.

So that’s why I decided to translate, for the sake of consistency – because I’m not a translator, I was a bit afraid of translating. But then, at some point, I realised I didn’t have a choice. If I wanted to have that consistency, I had to translate them myself.

KC: (To HA) Just wondering, were there personal elements in your work?

HA:  I mean, we cannot avoid having a bit of ourselves in what we write, right? So, there is a little there. But even when we take something from real life, we keep fictionalising it, and in the end, it will be something completely different.

I think it was Mario Vargas Llosa who said that writing is like striptease in reverse. You keep adding clothes and clothes until you cannot recognise the person anymore. So I think there were elements of that. The father losing his memory is something that I have experience with. That was from my personal experience.

SRB: Kim Cheng, were there any elements of Du Fu’s character that were based on personal experience?

KC: Well, the dream of escape. The desire to be freed from all the worldly shackles, of having a job, of having to work and to feed a family. And the tussle, I guess, between being in the world and wanting to be out of it. And that sense of family. I dragged my family all over China to research this project, and so, I guess my children and my wife are there too, in the novel. We undertook some physically challenging journeys, especially to the western parts of China, just to get a feel of the kind of places Du Fu lived in, the harsh terrain and conditions he had to drag his family through to get there.

I mean, we never had it as tough [as Du Fu and his family]. But yeah, just having the family with me, and realising how vulnerable, how fragile everything is – that it could all disappear. That was an invaluable lesson.