Of Words and Poetry

[Advent Childhe]

Greetings:

It is late... why is it always late?

Now I step into Corrusader's footsteps and I begin my siege upon the written works of CP.

Perhapes siege is too harsh a word.

First of all I would like to congratulate and applaud all of the authors out there that produced these stories and poetry for the issue. I've various comments about the stories and the poetry and the poetry beside the pictures. I will go through them in turn.

Sherman Kong

Sherman Kong's photographs reflect one of the many modern strain of expressive phtography. I am no master at such a medium, but judging from the works that I have seen, Sherman Kong's work seem to be reflective and moody. Sherman Kong's lenses captured for readers various aspects of his world and used poetic captions to express himself. A picture is worth a thousand words, the adage goes. An apt medium photography is.

Now about the words... Perhapes it is Sherman Kong's personal style, but the sentences in the poetic captions do not read so well. By extrapolation, I , as a reader, am able to figure out the semblance of the original idea. However, looking at this from a wordsmith's point of view... grammar could be a point of improvement.

Style may over-rule such a useless crutch that is grammar, however, I believe with better grammar and sentence structure, the ideas that Sherman Kong tries to convey can be expressed that much better.

It is late.... I will comment more on this later.

Yours,
Wayward Wayne

[Advent Childhe]

Greetings:

Its late... I'm always late.

This is a sequel to the first commentary of words and poetry.

Amy Jiang's "I wasn't expecting it."

Firstly, I will admit that I am a biased individual; my love of poetry rests mostly with the works of Romanticists. In poetry, I tend to look for more than just the main idea. Liquistic devices such as metaphores, diction are all important, not only to generate the feeling, but also to make the poem a more interesting read.

But I digress.

Firstly, I greatly admired the title. It framed the poem very well. The subtle change from "it" to "you" is intricate and very meaningful. It had made me think about what "it" could mean... or more precisely, whom "it" might be. Great effect in framing!!

Parallelism between the lines of "narrow casement of my soul/ my heart" is great. I believe it sets a great frame for the two sections the poem has been divided in. However, the lines are not in identical forms. "My soul" is in its own line, emphasizing it. Compared to "My cell" in the second part. This draws its own parallelism, where, in my doubtful belief, the author was trying to tie the two together. "Narrow Casement" and "Thin curtain" match each other pretty well... but that leave the Casement comment on the end of the second part feeling kind of tacked on.

I apologize if the above sounded strange, but it is just a critique on the form... Parallelism gives poetry a profound sense of inarticulate form... but form nontheless. What seems to match would do well to match, or altered so they do not match at all.

Another point: "you took me by storm" true. Yet, in the lines afterwards, with words such as crept, and Stealth and creeping, I as the reader sense the motions of a slow abuduction... nothing by storm.

Redundancy exits in the line "i was helpless all defenses down." The author has already shown how the defenses were pried apart, and shown that the narrator was in a restless slumber... This line does not seem necessary in retrospect.

Conflict seem to exist in the existance of a "cold Hard Moon" in the "midst of my darkest night." Perhapes the moon was meant to be a metaphore for something. If it were, it may require a bit of elaboration.


Overall the idea of an unexpected abduction, and I mean so in the most metaphoric of terms, is quite clear. As a reader, I can see how a person that has built such a fortress around her soul, her heart, could be so unexpectedly "taken" by another. The helplessness of the narrator is clear and genunine. A great piece of work!


This could be a clash between styles; other readers may not have the above comments. This was only meant to be a suggestion to the author!

Yours, always,

Wayward Wayne

[Advent Childhe]

Greetings,

Once again... it is very late.

I must be brief then.

Justin Chan's "The Calligraphy Brushmaker."

Firstly, a clarification: I do critique upon any order, except for the random chance that i should flip to that page.

About the tale:

Justin, I applaud you. You have chosen to translate this work from chinese. Let other critics say what they will, translation between languages is most difficult.

However, since Justin did not write the story, I will not comment on the story structure.

About the translation, overall, I must say that it is a job well done. Few aisan people that I know of can complete the task of translating the words, without losing the translation of the feelings and emotions behind the words. From the Narrator's point of view, one can clearly see the unspoken respect between himself and Master Young. This part was most admirably demonstrated at the parting of the two characters.

There are a few grammatical mistakes in the tale.

on the 6th paragraph "the form refers to the look of the look of the fond or the character" does not make sense.

Conversation realism needs to be adressed. The rude rebuttle when Master Young mentions the 'magical brush" did not fit into the situation very well. It had seemed that unskilled artists commision for a brush without a plan in mind. They did not ask wether if the brush could help them achieve their goals to warrant this comment. However, this point may be best spoken to the original author. Other conversations, though few there were, share the similar problem. "the long speech is flying at my face" Perhapes this may be a literal translation from Chinese to english, but lines like these may use revision in the future.

Otherwise, the setting is really believable. The change of the island through the various decades were clearly mentioned, and can be seen through the narrator's retrospective standpoint. Descriptions of Master Wang's eccentricities in the common elements of life was simple yet meaningful. As a translator, Justin had carried the profound complexity in the simple actions of the old man's life through very well; these simple contestations exemplified his constant struggle against the new world, and the demise of the old traditions.

Word repetition is inevitable. However, in a short story such as this, constant repetition of a word, no matter how vital the word may be, gets a bit stagnant for the passage. Mind, examples like "rich" or the phrase "from dirt poor to rich" were only used twice in the story, but they were close enough to eachother to generate that feeling of invariablitiy. Figurative descriptions of something, though perhapes not a direct translation of chinese, may be used to smooth out the reading.

Perhapes I am picking on too fine of a point there. Please forgive me.

Overall, I enjoyed this piece. Justin, I cannot wait until the conclusion of this tale. Be waiting!!

Yours, always

Wayward Wayne

[Cindy]

haha, Justin should be the one replying to this, but this "translation" issue is just way too funny.