West: A Translation

The heart of Paisley Rekdal’s gorgeously designed West: A Translation is an elegy carved in Chinese on the walls of the Angel Island Immigration Station during the years of the Chinese Exclusion Act. The poem memorializes one of the many detainees who committed suicide. English translations of the original poem’s Chinese characters form the titles of poems in the first half of the book, “West,” and companion lyric essays can be found in the second half, “Notes Toward an Untranslated Century.”

“West” was originally commissioned for the 150th anniversary of the transcontinental railroad, built by a labor force formed of at least 90% Chinese workers. Rekdal centers their staggering contributions and losses:

A thousand spades to clear the cuts. A thousand ropes
to haul out redwoods. For the mountains, a thousand arms
to scale the rocks, a thousand hands to lose
in blasts. A thousand corpses frozen in the snow.

The scope of voices and vantages Rekdal adopts throughout the collection is vast, and includes historian Frederick Jackson Turner, Anthony Trollope, a newspaper correspondent, and of course, the workers: “Wrap,” shapes an epistolary poem from the letters of Irish immigrants, while “You” draws on oral histories from African American railroad workers. In a doubling of spectatorship, there is a poem in the voice of Andrew J. Russell, official photographer for the Union Pacific:

Mechanics are the flesh.
           I photograph. The men
are just for scale, frames
           to elaborate
a different immensity.

Through the dialectical transparency of “Notes”—which, in addition to its exploration of process, challenges prevailing narratives and draws on personal stories, including those of the poet’s own maternal grandparents—Rekdal forges a meaningful intersection of translation and documentary poetics. Rekdal’s essays and the companion website further contextualize and complicate, but it is the poems themselves that reveal the magnitude of this history, as when Rekdal enlivens the artifacts that are all that remains of so many lives:

[….] Bone dishes ground
into a culvert where I find, thin as a baby’s
fingernail, this metal trouser button: its edges
crimped, eyes scrubbed clean of earth so that,
when I peer through its slits, I catch a whiskered glimpse
of jackrabbit, moving so fast not even time catch him.