The tree, on its feetejects ghosts.The tree corpse.I have arrived once again in salt form.Chewed up fossils,weight of dead loves(God looks askew at me through the blinds.God would live again if he felt my faith.) ReencarnaciónEl árbol, de pieexpulsa fantasmas.El árbol cadáver.He venido otra vez en forma de sal.Fósiles carcomidos,peso de amores muertos(Dios me mira de reojo por las persianas.Dios volvería a vivir si sintiera mi fe).
Reincarnation
Julia Wong Kcomt
Translated from the Spanish
Feature Date
- September 8, 2022
Series
- Translation
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“Reincarnation” from VICE-ROYAL-TIES: by Julia Wong Kcomt.
Published by Ugly Duckling Presse in December 2021.
English Copyright © 2021 by Jennifer Shyue.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Photo:
Carlos Chong
Carlos Chong
Julia Wong Kcomt was born into a tusán (Chinese Peruvian) family in Chepén, Peru, in 1965. She is the author of 17 volumes of poetry, including Oro muerto and Un salmón ciego; seven books of fiction, including the novel Aquello que perdimos en la arena; and two collections of hybrid prose. She currently lives between Lima and Lisbon.
Photo:
Ricardo Barros
Ricardo Barros
Jennifer Shyue is a translator from Spanish and an assistant editor at New Vessel Press. Her work has appeared most recently in AGNI, Astra Magazine, and Guernica. Her translations include Julia Wong Kcomt’s chapbook Vice-royal-ties (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2021) and Augusto Higa Oshiro’s novel The Enlightenment of Katzuo Nakamatsu (Archipelago Books, 2023). She can be found at shyue.co.
"Julia Wong Kcomt’s poems are taut and pulsing, each word as incisive as evocative. Jennifer Shyue’s keen ear in translating these poems makes us feel Wong Kcomt breathing along the lines."
— Aron Aji
"Julia Wong Kcomt's poems sweep you into the tender points of the diasporic soul—that ache of always being a little bit elsewhere, the yearning for homes and languages that might have been. Her decadent bravado and impish humor flit between Chinese and Japanese Peruvians, Brazilian and Argentine poetry, visions of Macau, Baudelaire, and the conquistadors who linger across Latin America. Jennifer Shyue's translation undulates with a delicate, playful attunement. I can't wait to read more."
— Katrina Dodson, translator of The Complete Stories by Clarice Lispector
"I feel so refreshed reading Julia Wong Kcomt’s poems/Jennifer Shyue’s translations, like a lifetime of rain has lifted and I’ve been given a new prescription. And yet the feeling is not entirely free of a little foreboding, as the poems—lucid, lactic, slyly sensuous invitations into hypervigilance (attention in the face of a shapeshifting power)—are practically animistic, shading everything, making everything glow. Now I want to read everything Wong Kcomt has written (is writing) and everything Shyue is bringing, so ingeniously, into English."
— Brandon Shimoda
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