By Sarah Sukardi
We begin the first poem of Yanyi’s second poetry collection, Dream of the Divided Field, in a museum. A very particular set of associations accompany a museum: it is a cathedral to the past, an archive whose purpose it is to display a curated selection of relics. The objects in a museum are behind glass, in temperature controlled environments, guarded by security—in short, inert, untouchable, and inviolable.
And yet, Yanyi’s museum upends all such notions of the prototypical museum. It considers that “bodies may be monuments, side by side / enacting what is already a memory,” and that the monument lives both “inside the body” and “outside.” The poet intones the reader to “Move through the halls—you are styled with wings– / and pass on, constantly, while you are living.” He expands the definition of the museum to include the museum-goer—the wings of the museum become the wings of the reader, the vehicle that allows them to move about its own structure. In the body that is also the museum, past collides with present. Object and subject merge.
It is fitting that in a collection that conceives of bodies as constantly shifting, mutating, and disappearing and reappearing in unexpected places, one whose primary concerns are untangling and re-tangling notions of time, relationships, and corporeality, that it does so in a museum—the precise location in which such a thing might least likely occur. Not even the museum is immune to Yanyi’s rigorous and exhaustive approach to poetry.
For if The Year of Blue Water, Yanyi’s debut collection, constrains itself to the single form of the prose poem, if it is a book that Carl Phillips calls “a record of time, a kind of daybook” that proceeds sequentially, then Dream of the Divided Field is a wholesale refutation of linearity. Its poems meander across prose and more structured poetic forms. They rearrange timelines, birth the same person over and over again in different years, consider different lineages for a single person.
It’s an unusual mode for someone such as Yanyi, who is transmasculine and writes about gender transition. For time is the currency of transition, and the careful passage of time is what makes bodily transition possible. (Such is reflected even in the language of “records” and “daybooks” used to refer to his previous poetry, which associates his formal choice with the language of monetary accounting).
This collection, however, is not a transition collection, though the specter of transition haunts the poet, and though the poems chafe against the simple appellation of “trans poetry.” For rather than linearity, this collection is fascinated by symmetry. In the poem “Making Double”, the poem considers that “every ritual is a form. If the form is successful, it becomes a mirror.”
This mirror, in particular, is a remarkably charged recurring object. I recognize Yanyi’s mirror as a specific one from early-2010’s trans Tumblr: in it, a pre-transition person looks at their reflection and sees someone of the other gender—sometimes despairingly, sometimes hopefully. Either way, this mirror is a difficult object, for it both clarifies the “true” gender of the person who looks into it and muddles the symmetry between the reflection and its owner.
The direct corollary to this image, then, is that when the person has transitioned, the mirror becomes a clarifying object, in which “I see who I am, my thoughts and hopes, my desires and unremarkable pleasures.” The mirror is just a mirror; the symmetry, resolved.
This collection is interested in the stakes of an object being perfectly symmetric because of the coherence symmetry lends to an object. For relationships, it allows a person to “revea[l] someone to themself.” For couplings, it allows two people to have the same, symmetric visions for their futures. And for time, it reflects as continuity, in which a person is recognizable as their former self, and thus recognizable to the world. Dream of the Divided Field is fittingly abundant with mirrors and reflections, bodies positioned “side by side,” superimpositions, eyes “double-exposing” one another.
Inherent in a symmetric object, however, is the threat of its rupture. To transition, or to estrange from one’s family, or to break up with a partner, becomes not a linear event but a violent disturbance in the symmetry. An ex-lover moving out of a shared home removes objects in the home “needlessly doubled.” A person leaving another results in “the dream becom[ing] divided.”
Back, then, to Yanyi’s difficult mirror. For within that same poem, “Making Double”, Yanyi introduces even more complexity to the trans person looking into the mirror when he considers that the person, too, might become the mirror: “I was a mirror and unremarkable, too, to those I loved… [I felt] the need to hide behind the thoughts and wishes of another person.” Here, symmetry transforms from consolation to peril, for the poet is in danger of being absorbed into another person if they reflect them too well. Virtuosic moves like these are typical to the collection, wherein objects mutate at the level of the line, the word.
This muddled space between symmetry and its failure is one that Dream of the Divided Field fruitfully inhabits. It hopes for multiple chances at birth, for reversals of time in which “my low voice and short hair return to drawers and dark corners.” Transition harbors both the threat of symmetric rupture and the promise of a skewed symmetry when the poet notes that the scars from top surgery result in “two sets of eyes now, four eyes, my scars enabling me to be doubly alive.”
In another poem entitled “Translation”, the poet notes “There was one among / the rooms remaining, / recognizing me. Wanting / me to stay. And to admit / I was the original.” Who remains—is it the poet or the lover? Or both? It’s a deeply ambiguous conception of translation, one which leaves unclear whether the transitioned poet is the original, or an altered version of the poet roams the halls. It considers all movement—spatial, verbal—to be a kind of translation.
And all translation, the poem suggests, is failed symmetry: all translation results in a dichotomy of “original” and “altered,” and no translation sufficiently conveys the sentiment of the language it comes from. Even when done faithfully, translation often fails to capture the complexity, social relevance, and cultural background of the original text. And like transition, to translate a text—or a body—inevitably alters it. But translation can also function as what the poet Anne Carson might consider an “an act of retrieval,” summoning emotion that poetry ex nihilo might not.
Translation is one of the tools Yanyi uses at large to examine ruptures in symmetry. Consider his “Catullus 85,” a slant translation of the original Catullus poem. In the original Latin, the poem is famed for its two-line muscularity, the way it composes nearly entirely of verbs, eliding subject and object, which are implied only via verb conjugation:
Odi et amo. Quārē id faciam fortasse requiris Nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior.
Catullus 85 is dangerous to translate. It is a poem with a long and fruitful history of translation into English, each of which might emphasize the effect of a particular line, a particular verb. A poet’s translation of Odi et Amo might serve as a brief encapsulation of their ars poetica.
Take Frank Bidart’s translation, which focuses its attention onto the passive verb “excrucior”, exploring both the word’s linguistic similarity to ”crucify” as well as considering questions of subject and object for the verb:
I hate and—love. The sleepless body hammering a nail nails itself, hanging crucified.
Whereas Anne Carson’s translation both expands and pares down the original: it distills its vocabulary to only four unique words, but replicates them such that each individual word occupies lines and lines of text. In this, the effect of the translation is much like shivering, the florid verbs of the original Catullus reduced to something almost biological in its simplicity and effect:
Hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate. Hate hate hate hate hate hate hate love hate. Love love love love love love love love love. Love hate love love love love love love love. Why why why why why why why why why. Why why why why why I why why why why. I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I. I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I why I I I I I I I I I I I I I.
Yanyi’s version, however, rejects any such notions of brevity wholesale—it is neither short, nor does it use a reduced vocabulary. Rather, his translation is punishingly mutable:
And I can make it more complicated. I can make it more about how I loved you, you hated that I loved you, I loved you so I hated that I loved with you, I never hated you hated that I loved you, but I hated that I loved you because you hated
The poem is intent not upon the forceful existence of emotion, but on the constantly-shifting relationships that emotion engenders. Yanyi foregrounds, rather than elides, his messy and merged subjects and objects, noting how such dependencies might turn the initial governing emotion into something unrecognizable. Just as translation must inevitably distort, the poet commits to translation as distortion, distortion being the very point of this translation.
Dream of the Divided Field hearkens back to poetic and cultural forebears as varied as Sappho, Catullus (Catullus himself being a translator of Sappho), Shakespeare, Milton, Jorie Graham, Teresa Teng, “Surviving R. Kelly.” In conversing with his cultural ancestors, Yanyi uses translation as both division and connection, and through engagement with other artists, he finds continuity in traditions beyond those of his own making.
The resultant collection is not an argument for the joys of transition, though there is some of that smuggled within; nor is it a straightforward recounting of the grief that accompanies change. Rather, it is that other kind of book: an examination of what it means to grapple with a body discontinuous with itself, how it feels to leave one’s body and home (un)willingly, and what it means to desire both discontinuity and symmetry. It seeks a future in which the poet “no longer wants to live another life but to inhabit at least two lives in one,”a future that is not just a future, “not backwards or forwards, / but the past and the present / overcoming one another.”
Dream of the Divided Field does not have the digestible structure of Yanyi’s earlier work. It quotes less easily, sometimes reads awkwardly, directs attention to its seams rather than smooths them out. The resultant poems are elusive wisps—abstract, ineffable, and sometimes edged with mysticism, like the tattered lining of a dress discarded.
But the collection possesses a glittering sense of vision in its project, a coherence that reveals itself precisely from its unceasing examination of symmetry. Ultimately, Dream of the Divided Field succeeds in doing what the best poetry aims to do: it communicates a vision of the world that can only be conveyed using the form it assumes. It leaves the reader to do the work of explication, to merge our vision with its own—perhaps imprecisely, perhaps errantly. But it is within the act of reconciling that imprecision, the collection suggests, that a reader might step into the monument that the poet enacts. It is there that a poet might meet their reader, might become their reader, and in doing so, inhabit even more than two lives in one.
Dream of the Divided Field is available from Alexander Book Company, Barnes & Noble, Books Inc., City Lights Bookstore, Eastwind Books, Green Apple Books, Mrs. Dalloway’s Bookstore, The Last Bookstore, and Powell’s City of Books.
Sarah Sukardi is an essayist and occasional critic who lives in Brooklyn. Sukardi is the co-founder and co-editor of Soapberry Review.