Perhaps the most helpful way to approach West: A Translation, former Utah Poet Laureate Paisley Rekdal’s dazzling and exhaustive hybrid, elegiac, archival work, is to think of it as an old-fashioned piece of luggage. Specifically, a portmanteau — two halves kept separate but hinged together. A portmanteau that tries to capture and hold almost too much, bulging at the seams. A portmanteau carrying the past, all the churnings of 19th century Chinese railroad building history in the U.S., all its underpinnings and consequences, as it hurtles into today and the future.
The “outside” of the portmanteau, or the “leather” binding everything together, is an anonymous elegy poem from inside Angel Island Immigration Station, where Chinese migrants to the U.S. were detained after the enactment of the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882-1943). Rekdal provides the translated poem in full but also breaks it down into single Chinese characters and their literal translations, using the single words as titles for her poem and lyric essay pairs.
Readers are further encouraged to rearrange the characters on the book’s accompanying website and make their own order and, in effect, translation. It is as though she is interrogating poetry itself: just because words can be arranged in a linear order to make a poem, that order can be broken but something will still hold. Moreover, even as she calls this work a “translation,” Rekdal is constantly challenging the notion of translation, suggesting that archival work will always be a messy translation of the past, that there will always be something missing. “The English poem reflects the Chinese, but it is not the Chinese poem. The past is not simply a translation of the present,” she writes.
The first half of West: A Translation is fascinating in showing the power of poetry and archival work as well as Rekdal’s prowess as a poet. Sometimes rearranging text from primary source materials into poetry and other times writing in the voices of people from the past, she presents a puzzle in each poem: where does the text end and where does she begin? She shows she knows her research so well she can ricochet through time with all these ghosts, bringing diverse perspectives to a complicated history.
Just as Rekdal is nimble in the first half, in the second half she is heavy-handed. Each lyric essay feels like yet another tie laid down on a railroad brutally tearing through the landscape, destruction in its wake. The second half is difficult to read but perhaps the difficulty is the point, how impressive and pressing can be the same, two halves of the same baggage. In one charged moment, Rekdal writes, “And if you have looked, you cannot help but feel it all press up and through you, this work designed to destroy the body, destroy the mind, to make you senseless … A crush of time. The whole earth bisected by it. And you, free over it all, never free from it all, walk the line.”
Just as Rekdal writes, “We never stop building the railroad,” her masterpiece haunts and rushes forth. West: A Translation was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2023.
