Interview with Tracy K. Smith

By Catherine Graham

Catherine Graham: Congratulations on being shortlisted for the 2021 International Griffin Poetry Prize along with Yi Lei and Changtai Bi for My Name Will Grow Wide Like a Tree (Graywolf Press). You worked closely with Changtai Bi (David) and Yi Lei to translate Lei’s work from the Chinese into American English. Sadly, Lei died before the completion of this book. Thanks to this bilingual translation, her name “will grow wide like a tree.” Can you tell us about your initial connection to Lei’s poetry? Do you remember your first reading of “A Single Woman’s Bedroom”? If so, what was that moment like for you?

Tracy K. Smith: I remember sitting down to read that poem during a moment in the day when my twins who were then infants were napping. Motherhood pulls you in so many new territories. There are disruptions, upheavals, new depths of exhaustion. I still remember feeling very much like a stranger to myself. And then Yi Lei’s voice on the page called to me. It almost felt like my known self was calling to the stranger I then felt myself to be. It was profound, and I knew I wanted to dwell in that space, and with that voice, for a lot longer.

CG: Before beginning the translations, you asked Lei: “Would it be okay, if in certain of my translations, instead of being faithful to the literal features of the poem, I sought to build a similar spirit or feeling for the readers of American English?” I imagine trust between you deepened when you received her consent. Was there something specific in Lei’s work that brought you to ask this question? Was receiving her permission a way of adding authenticity through the lens of another language?

TS: I think I was worried about trying to make things familiar to readers of American English that would inevitably be new or even “exotic” to them. I didn’t want to disrupt the feeling of intimacy the poems maintain. They remain intimate even at their moments of heightened collective urgency.

CG: Lei was writing about female sexual desire from a single woman’s perspective during a time when cohabitation was still illegal in China. The thread of desire and its many manifestations runs through her work along with the intimate and the infinite. Can you talk about these forces?

TS: The courage of that impulse in her work cannot be overstated. She insisted upon attesting to the realness and the profound validity of capacities the state sought to quell, to discredit. There are regions in every life that are subject to this kind of attack. What I love is that it is not anger, not blunt defiance that runs through these poems, but love, the desire to connect, the urge to be alive in one’s human fullness. Whoever you are, it’s enlarging and humanizing to be spoken to by a voice like that.

CG: Walt Whitman was a pivotal poet for Lei. We witness the celebration of self throughout the book—from “A Single Woman’s Bedroom” to “With Whitman.” As an American poet, did Whitman serve as a bridge or a source of connection during the translation process?

TS: I have studied Whitman and taught his poems. I harbour a sense of awe for the scale of his imagination, for the ways he is so instantly able to invest the rough and the real with the holy. But I’ll be honest and say that Yi Lei’s poems pulled him off of the public pedestal he had occupied in my mind and makes him feel intimate, familiar, human for me. I think part of that has to do with the ways she claimed him as a confidant in concerns that were private, and with the ways she made him useful to her experience not just as a human or a citizen, but as a woman.

CG: It seems to me that deep listening is an important part of the translation process. It helps the translator discover an underlying image base to carry the words forward into another language, as well as the sound and meaning. While working with David’s translations did your confidence grow? Your intuition? What was the journey like for you?

TS: I trusted David to take me through the literal narrative terrain of the poems, and to orient me to questions of tone and to referents beyond the scope of my own experience. I think he did such a good job at keeping me from feeling lost that I could allow something as subjective and willful as intuition to enter into the process. That was when I felt myself to be conversing with Yi Lei—not just with her words but with the feelings and wishes animating those words.

CG: What was it like working with David as the work went through its multistep translation process—from Chinese to literal English to American English and back to Chinese for Lei’s approval?

TS: David was patient, lightning-fast, and always so encouraging. Insecurity being the beast that it is, his encouragement—his way of always finding a way to tell me “you nailed something”— kept me from letting my own sense of inexperience and conspicuous difference hinder me. Mostly what I love about the process we shared are the meals, the talks, the long meandering ways I got to know the two of them across two languages and various other seeming borders.

CG: When the poems moved from Chinese to American English, a new space was created, a portal where three minds met. I wondered if you could talk about this space. If I recall correctly from our telephone conversation, you mentioned how Lei, even in death, continued to speak to you and helped guide you to complete this book. Can you tell us more about this ongoing connection?

TS: I am a credulous person. I rarely try to talk myself out of believing in the numinous, the uncanny, especially when it seems to come for the purpose of guidance or consolation. And so when I was trying to finish this book, I asked Yi Lei to help me. I asked her to show me how best to honor her and her poems. I asked her to give me a suggestion for the book’s title, and to let the poems I hadn’t yet translated but ought to include somehow call to me. I remember having this conversation with her out loud while sitting in a hotel room in Cleveland. And I don’t really know how to convince anyone disinclined to believe me that I felt her there with me, and I felt her agree to help.

CG: How has working on this book impacted your own poetics?

TS: I think Yi Lei’s rhythmic insistence got inside me. I feel that as an engine in the newer poems I’ve written. I also think that sense of wanting to serve as a medium—both in the literal terms I just described, but also in the figurative way that translation works—have lingered to shape some of my own process. And there are poems in Wade in the Water that feel like direct homages to Yi Lei—poems like “Eternity” and “The Everlasting Soul.”

CG: What’s next for Tracy K. Smith?

TS: I’m working on a book of essays about the collective American imagination. I wonder—will my experience of trying to tap into another person’s imagination and worldview come to the aid of that project?