Review of ownself say ownself by Joshua Ip (Singapore: Landmark Books, 2024)
by Shaik Aqeel
Joshua Ip’s latest poetry collection, ownself say ownself, reads like an evolution, condensed into one collection and laid out in satisfying chronology for us.
The book is split into Old Work and New Work. The former consists of excerpts from his older collections, while the latter includes new translations, performance pieces, and experimental poetry. There are 44 poems in each section, together making up a total of 88 poems. Old Work comprises selected poems from sonnets from the singlish, making love with scrabble tiles, footnotes on falling, farquhar and translations to the tanglish. Written over nearly a decade, they are now accompanied by 44 new ‘tildes’—a four-line rhyming poem meant to be a response, summary or a riff off of the collected poems. Not only do they function that way, but they also serve as a way for Ip to reflect on the poet he used to be, where he’s been and possibly, where he might take us with New Work. Growth is the underlying impulse behind this collection.
In Old Work, it is apparent how much Ip draws from what’s around him. There are tissue packets, paper cranes, movies—Twilight, Chungking Express, Lost in Translation—and the Chinese character for forgiveness. As I read the book, a centrepiece of Old Work was yuan liang, Ip’s poem on memory and the layered nature of translation. ‘I struggle with the first character/ the most’, writes Ip. I found myself coming back to yuan liang more and more as I read through the frustrated origami of explaining a thousand cranes (‘sleep-deprived/ and bleeding from a dozen paper cuts’) and the hazy colours of watercolours (‘yawning into negative space,/ not fully in focus’). Ip finds himself searching for the Chinese character for forgiveness; he is looking for something to fill a blank he cannot. He looks ‘at the moon’ time and again for answers, but cannot find anything other than himself in a rut. He wonders, in the final stanza, if an inversion of his proficiencies in English and Chinese would have allowed for ‘forgiveness’ in place of ‘forgetfulness’. That, I believe, is at the heart of Old Work: A search through the haystack to find the needle of originality. I do not believe that Ip finds the needle; I do not believe Ip is ever fully satisfied with the languages he studies, history he revisits and ancient poems he translates in Old Work. He is in search of something original. Moving in this direction, there is always a suggestion of what could be—whether it’s a song he wishes could be heard (in farquhar) or a poem he wishes could be spoken (in the appropriately titled spoken word poems that opens New Work).
Starting with spoken word poems and nonce forms, New Work’s opening sections impress with their length and diversity. The poems here are both consistently well-written and fiercely original throughout. Beginning with the nipples, a poem close to three pages in length, the subject matter varies from sex, to politics, to nostalgia. Both their rhyme schemes, meter and subject matter are riveting, particularly in nonce forms’ focus on structure. Its twin cinema poems, twin cinema for a father’s day and twin cinema for a hdb block, were standouts, particularly for how Ip is able to use the limitations of the form to uniquely explore the ideas of compliance, love and the status quo. ‘my children sing like birds’, from the former, and ‘a native/ a daughter/ i protect’, from the latter, are both key lines that explore the intense tenderness of love through the intentional constraints of twin cinema form—a juxtaposition that illustrates the paradoxical nature of attempting to put something as inexplicably beautiful as love into words.
In translation as thesis, Ip channels the works of different poets to explore his voice once again. He begins by translating le confinement du monde, a collection of sonnets written by Pierre Vinclair in response to the pandemic. I was lucky enough to understand both the original sonnet and Ip’s, and in that I felt a little disappointment. While Ip’s translations weren’t bad, their juxtaposition with the preceding works’ originality and style left them a little flat upon my reading. There was a certain wistfulness and specificity to Vinclair’s sonnets that Ip’s translations lacked. Perhaps it was lost to the syllables he omits, intentionally writing with fewer syllables per line than Vinclair does. Take, for example, Vinclair’s ‘londoniens fuyants’ to Ip’s ‘fleeing British’, where whole cities had been erased through the syllable cut out. I was impressed, nonetheless, by the later translated works. extracts from pan shou, loose translations and homophonic translations were all thoroughly enjoyable. In extracts from pan shou, his form-to-form transcreations—carefully mirroring the original poem’s rhyme scheme and use of iambic tetrameter and pentameter—are beautiful to read, enhanced moreover by the natural beauty of the subject matter. I find the technical skill and respect for rhyme scheme, meter and form in the original text ever-present in the other two sections.
repeated/crowd translations concludes with the mammoth dante digestif singapura. A collection of 100 Singaporean writers’ contributions of an eleven-syllable line to either Inferno, Purgatorio or Paradiso sections, the poem reads nearly six pages. I believe that Ip finds his needle here: he is able to finally get at what makes a poem original. In a translation’s premise of being a ‘copy’ of an original text, Ip finds unique ways to make space for his originality—ways that would otherwise keep him in a rut. Fighting, with intent, to establish his voice over a text already ‘voiced’ by an author has allowed for Ip’s originality to take centre stage with a newfound vigour. ‘translation in all its flavours has helped me to find new ways of finding myself’, writes Ip.
Such is the closing experimental translations, which reads like a curtain call. From translating poems into twin cinema form to translating an ancient script into English through drawings, Ip revels in the possibilities translation has offered him. He has grown so much into his newfound voice that he is confident enough in his originality, to borrow lines directly from Radiohead’s Fake Plastic Trees in phantasmagoria / chiaroscuro— ‘gravity always wins’. This boldness informs this final section, possibly hinting at where Ip intends to go.
Throughout ownself say ownself, Ip has pursued both the revisitation and reinvention of self to seek out a way to grow into something more authentic and complex, in search of what makes one’s voice truly original. Through the lens of many possible voices, I believe Ip has presented a worthwhile case. The title itself suggests this pursuit to be the independent, inward process of translation and the act of self-paraphrasing to create something new. Joshua Ip is evolving, and he’s letting us know that.
Leave a Reply