A review of Diana Khoi Nguyen's 'Ghost Of'
Part archive, part elegy, Diana Khoi Nguyen’s debut collection of poetry, Ghost Of, presents the haunting portrait of a grieving family set against a backdrop of intergenerational trauma. Written four years after the poet’s brother took his own life, Nguyen’s poems register this loss as it is refracted through the story of her parents’ immigration to the US as refugees in the wake of the Vietnam War.
Dancing on ropes with fetter’d legs
The Ka Mate Ka Ora translation issue
I went to an interesting paper at the Literature and Translation conference in Melbourne last year. The presenter was attempting to contrast two English versions of Rilke’s Sonnete an Orpheus, by (respectively) Don Paterson and Stephen Cohn, in terms of Dryden’s famous triad of metaphrase, paraphrase and imitation.