Di Brandt Launches New Poetry Collection

Di Brandt launches her new collection of poetry, Glitter & fall: Laozi's Dao De Jing, Transinhalations (Turnstone Press 2018).

We asked Prof. Brandt to comment on her new poetry collection, and the process of writing it. Here is what she said:

Glitter & fall is a transinhalation. What does that mean? 

It’s part creative re-translation and part poetic meditation and response to the ancient sacred text of Daoism, Laozi's Dao De Jing. I have borrowed the term transinhalations from Montreal writer and translator Robert Mazjels, who has done a similar thing with other ancient Chinese texts, though with quite different stylistic, social and aesthetic-spiritual interests.

What is the Dao De Jing?

The Dao De Jing is said to be the second most translated text in the world, and has exerted great influence on scholars and artists around the world, including Carl Jung, William Carlos Williams and the Beatles. The Dao De Jing was a popular text during the counter culture movement of the 60s, and it remains the cosmological and social guidance system for the venerable Daoist religion now, as practiced around the world, and for cultural practices such as Tai Chi and Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM).

Did your research involve travel to China?

I haven't gone to China, but China came to me! I was quite involved, for some years, in a cultural exchange program involving Chinese professors visiting Canadian universities, so I got to know English literature professors from Nanjing, Harbin, Beijing, Dalian and elsewhere. One of the professors gave me a copy of a recent English translation of the Dao De Jing, and that started me off on the grand poetic meditation that became Glitter & fall.

What was it like working with an ancient, spiritual text?

Writing poetically about the Dao De Jing required deep, precise, reverent attention, and in my case, led quickly into visionary experiences and expressions, of a sort that were new and breathtaking and sometimes spiritually daunting for me. I found out there was a powerful tradition of Daoist mystics and poets, many of them women, dating back to the medieval centuries, which incidentally is when there was a powerful tradition of Christian mysticism involving many women in Europe as well. It is interesting that these things were happening at the same time in two very different traditions and continents. The Chinese poet best known to us in the West from that time is Li Bo (Li Bai), who spent time in the Daoist monasteries and wrote poems of homage to the women mystics living there.

What was it like to engage with the Dao De Jing as a woman?

The two aspects of the Dao De Jing that struck me most forcefully in this process were the numerous oblique glimpses of the Divine Feminine in Her many guises, and the presence of local ancient Chinese landscapes and figures. I tried to cherish and preserve traditional details of landscape and sensibility, but translate them into the contemporary Canadian prairie context.

Traditional Daoism emphasizes the balance of yin and yang, female and male energies in all things; in my version the yin energies are foregrounded as a corrective, perhaps, to the overly masculinist heritage of patriarchal Christianity, my own upbringing in the West, where divine goddess figures became taboo.

What did you learn about translation, writing this book?

I tried to do something new here, which has certainly enlivened and deepened my understanding of the Dao De Jing and the Daoist understanding of the world, though I am very humble about the process and the results - I am not claiming expertise on any level of this venerable and powerful tradition. I’m only an admiring and interested visitor.

Last words?

I thank all the people who inspired and supported me in the process of writing Glitter & fall, including my Turnstone editor, Joanne Arnott, a very fine poet and reader, who offered laughter, levity, wise encouragement and acute insights, and composer Kenneth Nichols, who set six of the poems to music, in a gorgeous 20-minute suite for soprano, clarinet and harp, Coyotes do not carry her away (the score is available through the Canadian Music Centre).

Edited by Margaret Sweatman for the English Web Committee