Thirteen of my poems, including five pairs originally composed in Chinese and later translated into English (for most with a very long gap of time in between), are featured in Peripheral Surveys' beautiful autumn anniversary edition: Disbelief, Women, Minority, Periphery. Some of my readers (any of you out there...? ;p) might have already come across these poems in my little blog here, but the set is presented in such a visually aesthetic manner and the journal itself is a rich literary and artistic gem to delve into; hence I am linking it here to my poetic-oneiric (barely awake) space. My poetry is here. I have also written some notes on the inspirations behind the poetry and process of my translations, which for me is very much like re-creating again, for a few of the Chinese poems featured in the journal. The notes can be found in my blog post here.
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| Kenro Izu, Blue series, Still Life 1119b, 2004 (via) |
My dear poet-philosopher-musician friend Alain Minod shared this exquisite, musical beauty with me the other day. For me, music is salvation, it is paradise. As Schopenhauer once said, what distinguishes our aesthetic consciousness from the ordinary one is that it lifts, however temporarily, the veil of perception, or maya, and blesses us with glimpses of what is transcendent, what is eternal, what is real and true, the ultimate beauty and truth. In this sense, our aesthetic experience/consciousness is similar in its essence to meditation. How is life possible without music, when life is music...?
“Yet how strange a thing is the beauty of music! The brief beauty that the player brings into being transforms a given period of time into pure continuance; it is certain never to be repeated; like the existence of dayflies and other such short-lived creatures, beauty is a perfect abstraction and creation of life itself. Nothing is so similar to life as music.”
~Mishima Yukio
*See also Peripheral Surveys' archive of past issues.
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