>> From the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.
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>> Anya Creightney: Hello, and good afternoon.  I'm Anya Creightney, program specialist at the Poetry and Literature Center at the Library of Congress, and I want to welcome you here today for our inaugural event with literary magazine "MANOA: A Pacific Journal of International Writing".  This year's event will focus on Singaporean literature.  Before we begin, let me mention a little bit about the Poetry and Literature Center.  We're the home of the poet laureate and put on literary readings, lectures, and panels of all sorts throughout the year.  If you'd like to find out more about events like this one, please add your name to our e-mail list, which is by the entrance, and you can also check out the Poetry and Literature Center at www dot loc dot gov slash poetry.  Now let me tell you a little bit about today's event.  First, MANOA editor Frank Stewart will be joined by poet Lee, Jee Leong Koh and playwright and translator Jeremy Tiang, two contributors to "Starry Island: New Writing from Singapore", published in 2014 by the University of Hawaii Press.  "Starry Island" is an anthology of poetry, fiction, and essays by thirty Singaporean writers and translators.  Mr. Stewart, Mr. Koh, and Mr. Tiang will read from the issue for thirty minutes, then both contributors will participate in discussion moderated by Mr. Stewart.  We will leave time at the end to participate in the Q, question and answer.  And before I begin the obligatory reminders, I just want to say how excited we are to continue our partnership with "MANOA".  The Poetry and Literature Center first began this series a year ago with [Inaudible], guest editor for the 2011 issue, and the much acclaimed poet Brenda Shaughnessey.  That event, coupled with the Library's international summit of the book, served to remind us of the enduring and powerful literature coming out of the Pacific.  So now, let me formally ask you to turn off your cell phones and any other electronic devices you have that might interfere with our event, and, second, please note that this program is being recorded, and by participating, you give us permission for future use of the recording.  So without further ado, please join me in welcoming Frank Stewart, Jee Leong Koh, and Jeremey Tiang.  
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>> Frank Stewart: Hello and welcome.  Welcome.  About three percent of American poetry, American publishing every year publishes translations, three percent.  Of that amount, only a small percentage of those are translations of literature.  And of that small percentage, a smaller percentage is primarily European languages.  French, German, Spanish, etc.  Now of the percentage of that small percentage, there is a small percentage of poetry, fiction, other literature from Asian countries.  That's why "MANOA" journal thirty years ago started a series that publishes primarily work from Asia and Oceania in translation.  This year, we published the collection we're going to talk about today "Starry Island" [Inaudible] literature.  It's particularly important that we do this timely because 2015 is the 50th anniversary of independence of Singapore.  Singapore, as you probably know, was a British colony for many years.  After the War in 1959, the British left Singapore, and it became a free state that is not under British rule.  It joined forces with another group of islands, and with Malaysia to form federation.  In 1965, Singapore severed its ties with Malaysia and became an independent state.  So this is fifty years after that.  And I'm very happy to introduce these poets today, and because they represent a younger generation of Singaporean writers.  Singapore's been very busy in the last fifty years, and hasn't produced as much literature maybe as other places but for good reasons, and now there is a generation of new writers, and in our anthology are represented today some of these writers.  After I speak, Jee Leong Koh will speak.  Let me just introduce him now.  Jee is a Singapore writer who's living in New York now.  He's published four books of poetry, a collection of poetic essays called "The Pillow Book", which I think he'll read from.  It's been short listed for the Singapore Literature Prize, and his work has been translated into many languages, including Japanese, Russian.  And then after Jee speaks, Jeremy Tiang will talk, and let me just tell you something about him quickly.  Jeremy's a fiction writer, playwright, and a translator.  He's translated three novels, and he has written short stories and plays.  In 2011, he represented Singapore at the University of Iowa's international writing program, and 2013, he was awarded a [Inaudible] Helm translation fund grant.  You can see their biographies on the back of your program.  I'd like to start by just reading two very short selections from writers who aren't here.  The first one is by Grace [Inaudible], and it's a poem called "Instincts".  "That winter, the animals committed suicide.  Instead of hibernating, the moles and bears employed their comrades [inaudible].  Beavers and their bundled-down beds gnawed apart their own dams.  Badgers roasted in their sets.  Fish flung themselves on ice and lay their gasping.  Frogs wrestled down in their thistled holes and refused to breathe.  Down the middle of the road, skunks and squirrels ventured to the line between north and death, bursting one by one as the cars [inaudible] past.  Red and gaping as they rolled over and over into the winter's unmade dry ditches.  We uncored [phonetic] unrepentant, squirming, not animal enough to live or go.  They say rats jump a sinking ship, but for our cowardice, snow-laden willows hung their necks in shame."  Animals and wildlife and nature appear quite a bit in Singapore writing, I found anyway.  Has partly to do, I  suppose, with the changes that have happened over the last fifty years in Singapore.  It went from a fairly swampy place in the 19th century into what we imagine now Singapore's place of wonderful architecture and high rises, and, of course, a lot of the wildlife and nature had to be put aside.  This is changing now.  So the next piece I want to read is by a poet, short-story writer [Inaudible], and I'll just read a short piece called "Tiger".  "It was common knowledge that there was a man-eating tiger prowling in the thick forest in our village.  My sister and I never saw it, but during the night as we lay under the mosquito net on our thin, straw mattress, we could hear a distant roar coming from somewhere deep in the forest.  To our ears, it sounded like the road of a famished tiger, but we might have been mistaken since there could be all kinds of animals hiding out in the forest.  Maybe as we whisper during those sleepless nights like this, just as old wives' tales meant to scare young children.  We were told to fall for it. We chuckled at our [inaudible], but our minds had already taken small tentative steps into the dark forest of our imagination.  My mother told us a story as she was preparing dinner at the soot blackened brick stove in the kitchen of this young couple who fled from their families by escaping into the forest in the middle of the night.  They wanted to take a shortcut through it to reach the jetty where there was a boat waiting to take them down river to a town hundreds of kilometers away.  They were in love, and so they were foolish in their actions, and my, said my mother.  But they never made it to the jetty.  In fact, they were never found.  Many from the village combined, combed through the forest in broad daylight searching for them, but they couldn't find their bodies.
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Everyone presumed that they were dead, eaten by the tigers.  The only thing the people could find was a cotton scarf of the woman, which she had worn the day before she fled.  A gift from the man who had eloped with her.  They had wanted to escape from the marriages arranged for them by their families.  'That's why you should always listen to your parents. They alone know what's best for you,' said my mother as she stirred the pot of sweet potato porridge.  'If you go too far in your own ways, you will get lost and get eaten alive by the tiger.'  We took in her words and let them rest heavily on our hearts.  We thought about the man-eating tiger that devoured rebellious children who strayed away from their families and broke their parents' hearts and reassured one another that the, we would never be like them.  But like the clothes we outgrew over the years, the assurances we gave and the fears we had of the forest and the tiger slowly became things of the past, things we no longer had a need for.  My sister when she turned 18 disappeared into the forest with the man she loved, but unlike the unlucky couple, they didn't fall prey to the tiger.  Shortly after her departure, she wrote back telling us of how happy she was, living with her new husband in a tiny faraway country called [Inaudible]."  Alright. I'd like to introduce now Jee Leong Koh.  
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>> Jee Leong Koh: Hi.  Good afternoon, everyone.  Thank you so much for coming.  I want to thank Frank for editing the anthology "Starry Island" and the Poetry and Literature Center for hosting this event, having us.  I'm going to read from my collection, "The Pillow Book", extracts of which were included in "Starry Island".  "The Pillow Book", as its title suggests, was inspired by the pillow book of [Inaudible], the classic of the Japanese essay genre called [Inaudible], which translated means to follow the brush, evoking a sense of spontaneity in the essayistic method.  So this is the very opening section of "The Pillow Book".  "I miss my bolster [phonetic]. I miss bolster, the long pillow held between my legs and hug to my chest.  From the time I was born to when I turned 33.  I have the impression that it was the same pillow, although this could not be true.  Perhaps it stayed the same because the slip would change.  A fresh pillow slip smelled not unpleasantly of washing powder.  After drying in the sun for hours on the bamboo pole, it was hugged to my thighs.  I also like the sensation of it cooling, and later at night, the sensation of warming it in the cleft of my body.  There was a dark brown pillow slip with overlapping white squares.  Another pillow slip was blue with white balloons.  My favorite had the pattern of palm leaves.  Darin laughed at the bolster when he visited me from England and slept in the same room.  'We must get you a woman,' he said.  Darin has straw-blond hair and a swimmer's shoulders.  At the beach, he pulled on green shorts, the same lime green that Matt Damon flashed in 'The Talented Mr. Ripley'.  The color picked him out in the crowd.  I mean Damon, but I could have been talking about Darin.  In the year I turned 33, I moved to New York City to find out if I was gay and a poet.  For the first time in my life, I bought my own mattress and bed linen.  I learned about sizes.  Full, queen, king.  Mine is twin.  I have two pillows for the head but none for the body.  I could not find one, but I admit I did not look very hard.  I gave the bolster up to get something better."  
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"Mount Favre is a misnomer.  Mount Favre is a misnomer for the hill by which I grew up.  It is not even the tallest hill in Singapore.  I don't know who Favre is, but the word has always sounded delightfully like fable.  I went to a very small school on the hill, [Inaudible] Primary School, consisted of two distinct parts.  The lower grades at the beginning of a long flight of stairs; the upper grades at the end.  It was enough to teach one about large ambition and small achievement.  About [inaudible] of Singapore poetry in the last two decades, the critic [Inaudible] is right.  It is not the result of cultural change.  Certainly not because of government programs.  It has sprung up like wildflowers on a hillside, and it may die without altering the landscape.  The best of us still aim to be major generals of a reserve army, pioneers of second-rate products, prime ministers of an island.  The dreamia [phonetic] turned to poetry.  On every visit to Singapore, I make it a point of what.  To walk up Mount Favre, going by the road that winds [inaudible] and tour buses up.  From the top, I see on one side the public housing estates.  Intricate and useful.  And on the other, the featureless sea.  Caught by the hand of a hill as if thrown there by a stone lodges a boat.  To the hungry eye, it is a seafood restaurant.  To the hungrier eye, it is an [inaudible].  I look at the sea again, and now I see the ships on the more horizon. I recite quietly a [inaudible] composed a while ago.  Because this country has no mountains, we think highly of hills.  Look, we point to the peaks where we can live."  I'll read for you a final extract from "The Pillow Book".  This is "The Old Chinese Poets".  "The old Chinese poets composed a poem after walking just a few short steps.  The closest I came to this was to write a lousy [inaudible] in my head after walking up and down the Bronzefield Park, bounded on one side by train tracks and on the other by a motorway.  Walking in the cemetery is charming when there is light.  In the summer, the headstones can still be scanned at eight or even 9:00.  In the fall, the leaves liter the graves and give them a melancholic look of being forsaken.  The bare branches in the winter bring out the grittiness of the stones.  In the spring, when the trees put on their freshest green and the birds are almost intelligible, the cemetery turns into a sculpture garden like the twilleries [phonetic].  The deepest darkness I know is the long night marches during national service.  The battalion strung out in a single file, scraping over the humpback ground, wading waist deep across a river as black as tar, pressing through impenetrable thorn.  The worst thing that could happen was to lose contact.  All that kept the line together was the blue [inaudible] straw on the back of a helmet of the man in front and of the man in front of him.   It is so comforting to walk along a familiar path.  
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The mind returns from observing, deciding, and judging to itself.  It is like wondering out and walking home at the same time.  Doing just that along the East River this morning I made up this [inaudible].  The sun casts shadows, and so why am I surprised that love makes darkness as if I am not in its way?"  Thank you.
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>> Jeremy Tiang: Hi, everyone.  Thank you for joining us today.  I'll be reading from the work of Dr. [Inaudible], which I have translated into English from the original Chinese.  Dr. [Inaudible] is a Singaporean writer whose originally from Malaysia, our larger neighbor, and is one of our foremost poets and scholars.  The book I translated was called in the Chinese [Inaudible], which means literally a collection of written, though in the English edition we gave it the somewhat racier title of "[Inaudible] Are Not the Only Fruit".  To get some context, I'll read from my introduction to this English version.  My mother was born in the same small town as [Inaudible], about fifty kilometers from [Inaudible], so unimportant today that the KTM train goes right past it without stopping.  I have been on that train, chugging along at a stately pace from the [inaudible] majestic station hotel, which looks like someone put a scale model of Singapore's [inaudible] train station and then didn't maintain it for forty years.  As we passed by my mother's hometown, I try to see as much of it as I could but only got an impression of coconut trees and faded clapboard houses.  My grandfather had a shop near the station my mother once told me, but I couldn't work out which building it might have been.  Perhaps it's no longer there.  When I told my mother I was translating the work of someone else from [Inaudible], she got quite excited and wanted to know all about Dr. [Inaudible].  In such a small place, she must have known him.  I started by saying he'd gone to [Inaudible] Secondary School, and her face fell.  "Oh," she said, "that's one of the Chinese schools.  I wouldn't have met him then.  We all went to the English schools."  This illustrates the deep fault lines that run through Singaporean and Malaysian society.  Even between two people of the same ethnicity, other markers such as education and language can present an inseparable boundary.  It's easy to imagine how many divisions there are in countries which successive waves of immigration have filled with a population diverse in any number of ways.  Harder to come up with ways of bridging those gaps.  Now to give you a flavor of the original, I'll just read a paragraph of Dr. [Inaudible] own writing.  Here, he is describing his position in literature and in academia, which he says is always on the margins.  
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Now the essay that appears in "MONOA" journal "Starry Island" is called "Cast From Paradise" and tells of a night Dr. [Inaudible] spent in the jungle of Malaysia near where he spent his childhood but as an adult finds it rather more difficult to get used to.  "We left Singapore around two in the afternoon.  A day of such strong sunlight, we could barely keep our eyes open.  In order to drive safely, I put on my sunglasses.  The car contained, apart from [inaudible] and myself, Professor [Inaudible] and their two children.  We were excited at this rate opportunity to reconnect with nature, especially since it was neither the weekend nor the holiday season.  As other people remained trapped in their busy lives, our car slipped out like a fish through a net, swimming unencumbered to the vast green sea of rubber plantations.  In less than 45 minutes, we had left Singaporean soil, [inaudible] the largest city in southern Malaysia, and we're heading directly north on the North-South trunk road.  Rubber trees crowded densely on both sides of the road, making me feel as if we were sailing down a narrow river, the lush greenery like waves beating our little boat.  The mountain ranges on either side like high distant shores as we surged own the rapids.  I [inaudible] off my dark glasses because the sun that had blazed so brightly when we set off was now nowhere to be seen.  Arriving at [Inaudible], a tiny hill town, we asked many passersby before finding the narrow road that led to the waterfall.  We held our breaths until we saw a sign assuring us our destination was no more than ten kilometers ahead.  And, yet, how long that ten-kilometer road was.  Like a grey snake winding its way through the uneven hills of the rubber plantation, its head hidden in the darkness of the jungle.  During storms, this road became a channel for floodwater, and as a result, it's littered with debris and loose soil.  Our car often paused at forks in the road with no indication as to whether to turn left or right.  There was still a large gap of time between, before sunset, but dusk was already falling like a withered rubber leaf, drifting slowly onto the road ahead.  Our cheerful voices stilled as we held our breaths.  Trying to detect the sound of the waterfall, but apart from the engine and an occasional distant dog bark, the hillside was deathly silent.  Just as a green ridge seemed to block the road ahead, we heard a mighty roar and saw to our left a white sheet of water seemingly cascading from the sky.  Not even the shadow of a person could be seen.  Just a few squirrels scavenging amidst the rubbish left behind by previous tourists.  As darkness rose like the tide and engulfed the hillside, we scurry back to our stilled huts and turned on the electric lights.  Only then did the raging jungle, so intent on its prey, stop closing in on us.  We had our own hut, separate from the [Inaudible] family.  Their hut was on the other side of the hill, out of ear shot even if we shouted.  Before getting into bed, I carefully shut all the windows, hoping to keep the terrifying jungle and fearsome night at bay, but the doors and windows were so simply designed, it seemed a hand pushing with sufficient force could simply open them all.  To a city dweller, this seemed most unsafe, and I was extremely worried."  What follows is then a night of what can only be described as sheer horror as the sounds that seemed so comforting and familiar in Dr. [Inaudible] childhood become terrifying to him, now a middle-aged city dweller, and I'll just read the ending.  "After they fled in fear come morning.  A month later, I saw in the newspaper that in the jungle near [Inaudible] a grass cutter had been killed by a tiger.  A few days later, the beast returned to feast on what remained of the corpse, only to find the police lying in wait.  They ambushed and shot him.  This article was a reminder that I should not be like that tiger and should never try to go back to the natural world and the amusements I'd enjoyed as a school boy.  I am now a civilized city dweller, and the primeval jungle will no longer allow my return."  Thank you.
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>> Frank Stewart: So we just want to ask a few questions between us, and ask you to join us in question and answer.  Of course, one of the things you notice in the readings were tigers.  Also darkness, shadows, fear, and another thing that was very provocative in which Jee read was about the gaps between people, between cultures, between languages, things like that.  There seems to be a pattern in here of a very industrialized, very hyper modern and prosperous city-state, and this dwelling upon the darkness and the jungle.  Can you folks talk about that a little bit, and is that a misperception of Singapore writers?  Preoccupations.
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>> Jeremy Tiang: Is this working?  Yeah. Cool.  Yeah, I think that is a tendency in Singapore in writing to be nostalgic for a past that never really was.  A kind of mythical [inaudible] that I don't think ever really existed in Singapore, but, yeah, we tend to fantasize it like city dwellers everywhere, you know.  The cliche of reaching a level of affluence that makes you want to go camping because you have to be pretty comfortable in your life to believe that sleeping outdoors is a nice thing to do.  But also I think as a country that's only fifty years old, it has only been independent for fifty years, that's a kind of self-mythology that happens, and one of the things we tell ourselves is that we came from nowhere.  We came from the jungle, ignoring that it was thriving port for centuries and had become this metropolis.  One of the things we were talking about before was how it seems unlikely and almost ridiculous the idea of a tiger in Singapore, forgetting that just a few decades ago there were tigers in Singapore, but if you look at the country now, it's all glass and steel towers.  Every inch of it has been built on except a tiny nature reserve, and there's no room for a tiger or really any kind of wildness anymore.  So we situate it in our writing and this idea of what we've lost or left behind.  
>> Jee Leong Koh: Yeah, I think that's very, very true.  I'm also very interested in, I guess, you know, the appearance and reappearance of the tiger in our literature.  There is an early short story by the writer, [Inaudible], who was also in [inaudible] foreign minister of Singapore, but unlike many politicians in Singapore, he was very literary, and he wrote this story about tiger that a pregnant woman met at a river when she brought  her clothing, brought the clothes to wash them at a river, and it became a fanastical and yet a very powerful encounter between her and this tiger, perhaps, you know, representing sexuality, a sexuality that, you know, after her pregnancy she may not have allowed herself to feel.  And so in order, the idea of the wild, the untamed comes up again, I think, in a recent, more recent story by the contemporary short story writer Dave [Inaudible] who imagined a tiger appearing in a block of apartments, in a block of government flats, and, of course, it's ludicrous.  It's absurd to find a tiger hunting down, you know, the inhabitants of this apartment block.  But a parallel story to that was that it was a [inaudible] relationship.  So one can draw all kinds of parallels in, between the social and the personal here, and so the tiger thing becomes in the hands of these Singaporean writers a sign of the return perhaps of the repressed.  You know, what we have destroyed or what we have invented, as Jeremy said, and then it becomes fact, and haunts our imagination still.  As if we need something more than just the glass and steel towers that characterize our landscape.  
>> Frank Stewart: Yeah.  Another fascinating thing [inaudible] or I think to anyone looking at, you know, outside is the great racial and linguistic and cultural diversity of the island.  I have met many people from Singapore, however, who identify themselves as Singaporean rather than as Chinese or Malaysia or whatever it is.  Can you talk a little bit about how a writer in such a situation is able to speak to a diversity of people who might still have a sense that they are one people across these different languages and cultures and histories?  Is that difficult for you as a writer?
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>> Jeremy Tiang: I think one of [inaudible].  Technology, I'll use this one.  I fear technology.  What was the question?  Oh, yes.  Well, one of the preoccupying motivations behind a lot of Singapore culture, not just literature, is the construction of identity.  Again, because we are such a young country and also because, as you mentioned, a very diverse country with many streams of immigration from around Asia and more recently really around the world.  And I think what comes out of that is rather than trying to speak to all these diverse groups, what Singaporean writers have tended to do is create a Singaporean identity that supposedly encompasses all of them, and it tends to, I find, often be quite shallow and [inaudible] such as speaking Singlish, which is a kind of [inaudible] mixing English, Chinese, Malayan, and Tamil, and various Chinese dialects.  Revolving around Singaporean food; revolving around Singaporean rituals and rites of passage such as schooling, which we have a unified government school system; such as national service, which all men have to do; such as the particular ways in which you celebrate particular festivals; National Day, which a lot of people have participated in; and so forth.  The peculiarities of the Singaporean landscape where I think it's 85 percent of Singaporean live in, Singaporeans live in government housing. So we seize of these things, many writers seize on these things as markers of identity and use that as a way of saying, well, we've all experienced this, and, therefore, we're all the same.  And I think that has its function in terms of saying this is who we are, but it also tends to flatten difference, and I think what will come next, now that we're a bit more secure about who we are, is to look a bit more closely at the differences between us, the differences between different groups and acknowledge that these are valid and that we're not as homogenous in all that, and we can be different and still part of the same community.
>> Jee Leong Koh: I'm going to try to fill you in perhaps a little bit of the historical background, and Jeremy can also, you know, I'm sure add in a lot more than I can, and that is, of course, you know, the four official languages of Singapore are English, Chinese, Malay, and Tamil, even though, of course, you know, we have many other, a large India population is the other Indian languages besides Tamil, but the government has decided these are the four official languages.  And when, you know, Singapore became independent very quickly, the ruling party decided to actually abolish or to try [inaudible] Chinese and Malay schools into English language teaching institutions.  The idea being, you know, because [inaudible] multi-cultural, multi-lingual society, we need a lingual [inaudible], a language that we all have in common, and English was decided to be, was chosen to be the one, and also because English has obvious economic benefits of connecting Singapore into the international economy.  And then the other languages, Chinese, Malay, and Tamil, are actually taught in schools as a second language, and the rationale for teaching them is that they carry important cultural values in, like, in the case of Chinese, for example, you know, the values of thrift and [inaudible] respect and so forth.  [Inaudible] and so forth.  And so it's a very strange dichotomy, of course.  You know, English is a kind of instrument for unification and prosperity, and we also call it mother tongue, you know, as a carrier of values is a complete and untenable dichotomy I would say.  
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But what that has enabled, I think, is a very vibrant English language literature in Singapore.  So, you know, right now, you know, the literary community in Singapore is a very lively one.  A lot of young poets, lot of young writers, you know, coming up, writing in English, and a lot of independent publishers writing, too.  To publish these works and disseminate them.  And, of course, you know, I think that has actually come about, too, you know, accompanied by great losses that I think Jeremy has alluded to.  So, personally, for example, I grew up in a household speaking both English and Cantonese, a Chinese dialect.  But right now, I think and write only in English.  I, my Cantonese is really poor, really weak, and I, there's no way I can write in a script that would represent Cantonese, and that I think is a loss really, but I'm glad, you know, I have English, but, you know, like many people of my generation, we have lost I think a kind of mastery over our dialects or even over other languages spoken in Singapore that my parents would have.  My parents could speak, you know, some Malay at least, and I cannot.  So I think, you know, progress has been made but at a cost.
>> Jeremy Tiang: What I'm trying to get North Americans to understand the different language communities in Singapore, my shorthand for this is think about the divisions but also the connections between Anglophone or Francophone writers in Canada, and that's analogous to the situations in Singapore except there are more language groups.  As a translator, I have a foot in both the English and the Chinese camps, and I have to say it often feels that, like, alongside translating the language, I'm also translating between cultures, and what is considered a typical experience in a Chinese-speaking household would be unfamiliar for an English-speaking family in Singapore for all that they might be growing up side by side as neighbors.  So that are these divisions that are perhaps rendered invisible by the need to construct a homogenous identity, but the more we translate and read each other's literatures, hopefully, the closer we'll get and come to understand each other.  
>> Frank Stewart: And, of course, Jeremy is talking about why we only did, read translations more because this enables us to get to know people that we don't.  Get to know the way they think, the way they behave, and what is common among us as well as what is extraordinary and unique and significant.  So with that, I'd just like to turn it over to you if anyone has any questions or comments they'd like to make.  Don't be shy?
>> [Inaudible] OK, there we go.  OK.  Well, I'm wondering if translation is becoming, I mean, more necessary, clearly, from, in a lot of ways, but I'm wondering if more and more writers are, like, writing in English as you do.  Then if the translation are kind of moving towards, like, keeping the other dialects alive, in a way.  Like, is that the kind of movement that you're leaning towards?  Does that question make sense?
>> Jeremy Tiang: Yeah.   I would say that's, I mean, translation I think will always have a place, even if it becomes archival, there's still a lot of older literature that hasn't been translated. So there will always be more that needs to be brought into other languages to bring us together, but also what I have started to see in Singapore is younger writers who might have gone through an English-language education but who chose to write in other languages as a political act.  And I think that's significant, that it's seen as reclaiming something.  That they might be less comfortable writing in, say, Chinese or Malay than in English, but they're going to do it anyway because it's important as a mark of their identity, and there are certain things that they can say in that language that might not come as easily in English.  So it's an exciting time linguistically in Singapore to see where we go next, but I don't feel that we're becoming more homogenous even though the language has started to move that way.  
>> Frank Stewart: Alright.  Yeah.  
>> Jee Leong Koh: That was a very interesting question.  I mean, when Jeremy talks about these younger writers, you know, who are proficient in English and writing English decide to write in other languages as an act of reclamation or some part of the identity because, personally, just speaking for myself as a writer, I have such I think of ambivalent relationship to language that I find it hard to claim anything, even when I'm writing in English.  I'm thinking of my writing, even though I write, you know, original works, as almost an act of translation in itself.  So I have written a poetic sequence called "Translations of an Unknown Mexican Poet".  They are pseudo translations. There's no such poet.  I mean, I wrote those poems in English, but I thought that writing those poems in English I was [inaudible] translating an original Mexican poet writing in Spanish that I could have known but didn't.  And right now, I'm actually working on a book of haiku that I'm subtitling "Translations of an Insignificant Japanese Poet", and, again, you know, I'm writing those haikus, you know, but I, this is with a feeling that I'm always learning between cultures and can never claim either as mine, neither culture that is based on English or a culture that's based on whatever, Japanese, you know, Spanish, what have you, or even Chinese.  And I think that it's my peculiar position, [inaudible] were so peculiar because I grew up in Singapore, and there is something that Singapore has given me, the peculiarity.  
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>> So a follow-up question [inaudible] translation.  You talked a little bit about there being a gap in a, sort of a cultural divide [inaudible] and how that's, you have to conquer that divide, and so I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit about that process for you.  Does that make sense, the process of your translation?  And then, Jee, a follow-up question for you about namelessness.  It's interesting what you were talking about just now in terms of namelessness, and I wonder if it allows you the freedom or any mobility that you're talking about [inaudible].  I wonder if it's somehow related to a freedom to then enact something that you're unable to do as a named person or as a named poet.
>> Jeremy Tiang: So it's become less pronounced now, but the further back you go in the past, the clearer it is that there are many different Singapores, depending on which cultural group you belong to, depending on which language you speak, and I have translated a novel called "Unrest" about 1950's Singapore, and it became very clear that just basic things, like the street names were different.  There was this parallel naming system for the streets in Chinese that just ignored what the official English names were, and they just picked the central point called [Inaudible] Big Hill, and they called the street Big Hill Road 1, Big Hill Road 2, Big, and in English they would call things, like, Armenian Street and Cavanaugh Road, and it's, like, all erased.  We're going to have our own system.  That's become less prevalent as the country has become more dominated by the English language ruling class, but there were these things that had to be explained, and that's, like, do I just substitute the English name, or do I try to translate the Chinese name and then explain for the English speakers where this actually is.  The names of food were different.   The Chinese language schools operated differently to the English  language schools, and then you'd have to explain, OK, so this is what this means, and this is why their exams are different, and high school is five years, not four.  So they would do this.  So it was, like, these people living in the same country but having completely different lives, and you'd have to try and negotiate that and not in, well, if the big debate in translation is do you familiarize or do you keep it unfamiliar, and you try and negotiate that.  You try and make it comprehensible, but you don't domesticate it.  You don't make it exactly the same.  You keep that little hint of this is a diff, from a different place coming into the English language.  So, yeah, it's a tricky thing to negotiate, and you would think you didn't have that in the same country, but it totally happens, and [inaudible].  
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>> Jee Leong Koh: And I think your question for me was about whether I resist being named.  Yeah, about moving between languages and cultures.  Yeah, I do find a degree of freedom, I must say, in terms of, you know, moving, you know, between languages and names and cultures.  You know, I, like many in my generation, we grew up, you know, being taught in schools the English canon was, were the keys.  Shakespeare and everything, and I actually did my undergraduate degree at Oxford, in England, and it, studied English there [inaudible].  So I would say that, you know, a lot of my writing actually rose from the same tradition, and I do try to work out my own relationship with the tradition.  But one reason why I decided not to migrate is, to England and to the US instead was because I thought I was too beholden to the tradition.  I wanted to complicate that relationship, if I may use that phase [inaudible].  Complication.  It's complicated.  I like that.  I like complications, and, therefore, I decided I had to move away from it and come to the US, you know, visiting for the first time and then remaining.  I have remained here for, you know, I've been here for 12 years.  And then in US discovering, of course, its own set of complications and discovering, you know, you know, Mexicans living here and Japanese living here and, you know, how I could actually envision and conceptualize their relationship with America [inaudible] my own.  So it's interesting for me to examine the similarities and the differences.  So, yes, I think, you know, [inaudible] I do find a lot of freedom in that, and, you know, I think there's a great deal of discussion right now in literary circles about appropriation.  What is right to appropriate and what is not is ever a right form of appropriation.  Some of us might be following the [inaudible] about, you know, this white American poet who adopted, you know, a Chinese name, pseudonym in order to send out his poems.  You know, so that it could be accepted [inaudible] more easily.  You know, for me, you know, when I write these pseudo translations, you know, "Translations of an Unknown Mexican Poet" or what I'm working on right now, "Translation of Insignificant Japanese Poet", it's important for me that, you know, I was not pretending to be Mexican or Japanese, but was kind of, well, I was basing what I was writing on some part of my own life in New York, and the strangeness that I feel towards it, which any immigrant from any other background might be able to.  So the part of the work that is actually very much based on my own life is, you know, this walk, I take the cross Central Park every morning.  So a lot of haiku were actually composed in my head during that walk, and for me, if I may, you know, walk that ground, you know, and having been doing for the last ten years, walking to school to work, I felt I have, I'm able to write about that in that form.  So that's what I mean by being based on it, but [inaudible] is finally, legally never mine, and that is the alienation that I think, I hope to convey through these pseudo translations.  Again, so there is [inaudible] title and place, but at same time, not owning a place.  [Inaudible] much of my work.
>> Frank Stewart: Thank you.  We'd like to thank the Library of Congress for hosting us, and to Anya who has been our hostess.  Thank you very much, and to you for coming, thank you.
>> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress.  Visit us at loc dot gov.