you want to eat the sun

Notes

For this workshop, guest translator, Dave Haysom, was joined by Xiao An’s friend the poet Yu Yoyo (whose collection My Tenantless Body has been translated by Dave and AK Blakemore). We struggled with the tone of the poem, whether there was judgement implied in the greed of the consumer eating up the sun. Yoyo suggested that this wasn’t the case and so we tempered some of the more judgemental options that had been proposed (‘on a diet of suns / you’ll live forever’).

In translating the lines ‘gold rings, silver rings’ we wanted to capture the sense of light hallowing the sun and one of the participants suggested ‘corona’ the name for an eclipse that produces this feature.