What Yang Lian mentions after the translation of Du Fu's poem, "Climbing a Terrace" by Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang-that the poem itself "inspires all Chinese poets of the future," exemplifying the "special nature of the Chinese Language [--since] Time has been transformed into the poetic space of the poem…it become a portable universe," much like Pythagorean transmigration or Kabbalahistic klepoth, a highly Gnostic shard of infinite being and non-being, a being to be retrieved like the Miltonic Satan from the darknesses beneath-and to be made into ethos. A perpetually subjective privatizing of time, as Coleridge mentions of Hell (calling it a "positive negation", brings nothing but an excess of fear, distance, separation in the wake of, as tradition re-asserts, a bowing want of reconciliation; Satan declares the sunlit day his son, perpetuating, traditionalizing his radically individual anti-tradition, and recognizes being subject to an objective rule of exile-to always want the highest mount, but aim at that which constitutes the fringes, and choosing to take a "new delight" in mankind, making human time his own-conducted by Sin and Death. As much as Lian recognizes the vast inspiration of this poem, Harold Bloom declares the American lyrical tradition ideally to be Emersonian (as well implies it to be psueado-kabbalahistic)--deriving from and most (trans)figured by Milton's Satan, a figure who recognizes attachment and an essential human exile, propagating a tradition-anti-tradition that (as Lian's Chinese Language) poeticizes time (in making infinitely sufferable, though self-movable, self-contained and self-confined subjectivity) and commits space to the exploits of its dialectic. My southern Californian, American spaces have committed me to a language so virtually founded in such an subjective exile in action-the vast Anglican excommunication, revolution, and the distancing stress of personal interest-that this translation reflects such an individual aesthetic, anti-traditionally-planted, and growing upwards, towards a chaotically-unified past.
by Tommy Soden