The impossibility of meeting

Pound’s “The River-Merchant’s Wife: a Letter” is about love and separation. It is a lamentation of lost love.

It is possible to link the theme of the inevitability of separation with the impossibility of the marriage of different language systems, the impossibility of the encounter with the elusive other. The work was adapted from Li Po’s poems and based on interpretations by Japanese scholars and notes from an American scholar. If we read the line “I desired my dust to be mingled with yours” as the speaker’s attempt to bridge the divide between cultures, the inevitable separation shows its impossibility. The chain of transmission of form raises the question, can a poet assume the identity of another? Is the assumption of another voice inevitably tied to the alienation that we see in the poem?

We are aware that the poem is an experiment in other forms. This tempers the authenticity of the voice in the poem. I remember when I was rewriting Rafiq Kashwari’s ghazal into another form for the last assignment. I felt powerful while writing it to be able to exercise the creative license to assume another identity, I also felt guilty for unconsciously imposing preconceived notions of race, gender and identity into the poem, and thoroughly distorting the original voice.