The Ruined Elegance: Poems
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About this ebook
A lyrical collection that explores the interplay between poetry and history
In her new collection, Fiona Sze-Lorrain offers a nuanced yet dynamic vision of humanity marked by perils, surprises, and the transcendence of a "ruined elegance." Through an intercultural journey that traces lives, encounters, exiles, and memories from France, America, and Asia, the poet explores a rich array of historical and literary allusions to European masters, Asian sources, and American influences. With candor and humor, each lyrical foray is sensitive to silence and experience: "I want to honor / the invisible. I'll use the fog to see white peaches." There are haunting narratives from a World War II concentration camp, the Stalinist Terror, and a persecuted Tibet during the Cultural Revolution. There are also poems that take as their point of departure writings, paintings, sketches, photographs, and music by Gu Cheng, Giorgio Caproni, Bonnard, Hiroshige, Gao Xingjian, Kertész, and Debussy, among others. Grounded in the sensual, these poems probe existential questionings through inspirations from nature and the impermanent earth. Described by the Los Angeles Review of Books as "a high lyricist who refuses to resort to mere lyricism in order to articulate her experience," Sze-Lorrain renews her faith in music and poetic language by addressing the opposing aesthetics of "ruins" and "elegance," and how the experience of both defies judgment.
Fiona Sze-Lorrain
Fiona Sze-Lorrain is a fiction writer, poet, musician, translator, and editor. She writes and translates in English, French, and Chinese. She is the author of five poetry collections, most recently Rain in Plural (Princeton, 2020) and The Ruined Elegance (Princeton, 2016), and fifteen books of translation. A finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Best Translated Book Award among other honors, she was a 2019–20 Abigail R. Cohen Fellow at the Columbia Institute for Ideas and Imagination and the inaugural writer-in-residence at the Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires. She lives in Paris and has performed worldwide as a zheng harpist.
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The Ruined Elegance - Fiona Sze-Lorrain
THE RUINED ELEGANCE
PRINCETON SERIES OF CONTEMPORARY POETS
Susan Stewart, series editor
For other titles in the Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets see page 63
THE RUINED ELEGANCE
Poems
Fiona Sze-Lorrain
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Princeton & Oxford
Copyright © 2016 by Princeton University Press
Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540
In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TW
press.princeton.edu
Jacket image: Cy Twombly, Untitled VII (Bacchus), 2005 © Cy Twombly Foundation.
All Rights Reserved
The epigraph is from The Desert of Love: Selected Poems, by János Pilinszky, translated by János Csokits and Ted Hughes (Anvil Press Poetry, 1989), 26. Reprinted by permission of Anvil Press Poetry.
Lines from Pensées, by Blaise Pascal, translated with a revised introduction by A. J. Krailsheimer (Penguin Classics, 1966; rev. ed., 1995), 29. Copyright © 1966, 1995 by A. J. Krailsheimer. Reprinted by permission of Penguin Books Ltd.
ISBN 978-0-691-16750-3
ISBN (pbk.) 978-0-691-16769-5
Library of Congress Control Number: 2014959230
British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available
This book has been composed in Adobe Garamond and Scala Sans
Printed on acid-free paper. ∞
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
I WRONG EPIC
Given Silence 3
Towering 4
I Wait for the Ruined Elegance 5
Back from the Aegean Sea 6
In the Thick of It 7
Ionian Supper 9
Partita, but Nothing to Do with Bach 10
Few Days before Christmas 13
II IN A GODLESS TIME
Beginning 17
Spring Massacre 18
Mausoleum 19
Backstage 20
Day Seven 21
Center of a Journey 22
Am I What the Lake Gave Me 23