‘Decapitated Poetry’ Review: Queer History and the Conundrum of Translated Poetry

The back cover of Ko-Hua Chen’s “Decapitated Poetry,” translated into English by Wen-Chi Li and Colin Bramwell, reads: “‘Decapitated Poetry’ was the first explicitly queer book of poems published in Taiwan and remains a foundational work in Taiwanese poetry. Decades after it first appeared in 1995, this collection retains the capacity to shock, appall and jolt readers into recognizing homosexuality as its own specific category of being.”

Rarely will the opening sentences of a book summary so expertly hit the nail on the head. To “shock, appall and jolt readers” is an explicit goal of “Decapitated Poetry,” and likely a major reason why, nearly thirty years later, the collection of poems has captured a large enough share of the public imagination to warrant a new English-language translation.

As literary history, the book has much to offer. It is a gateway to a rich and vital component of the slow march towards gay visibility and, eventually, acceptance in Taiwan, a country that is widely considered to be East Asia’s most progressive in terms of LGBTQ+ rights. The proliferation of queer media found today in Taiwan can be traced back to Chen’s pioneering work in the space, and his early artistic vision of unabashed discussions and displays of queerness.

Historical significance aside, one of the more fascinating features of the work is its look into the possibilities and pitfalls of poetic translation. Li and Bramwell make a valiant effort to convey the book’s original mission through unconstrained vulgarities and unconventional sexual imagery. Poems can range from overtly explicit to romantically suggestive, often describing scenes or feelings that heterosexual audiences may not have been exposed to in other works. In the poem “The Necessity of Anal Sex,” the translators write, “observe us twitching like rats / empathize with our painful joy / our body hair so blood-soaked it looks like someone / has spilled a bottle of red hair dye over us.” Later on, “A Son of Emptiness” contains the line, “Death is tucked into the pocket of his shorts, / silently growing hard between unscrubbed nails and skin.” Though two relatively timid examples, they retain much of the vivid unconventionality and potential to disconcert that is persistent throughout the work.

Translating any text is a fraught endeavor, and translating poetry is a nearly impossible one. “Decapitated Poetry” was formulated with discomfort in mind, explicitly striving to douse the reader in unfiltered, unapologetic, unencumbered gay reality. Prioritizing that element unfortunately comes at the expense of a poetic flow and intratextual unity found in the original. Li and Bramwell strive to remedy this through carefully placed line breaks and an abundance of parallel structure, such as in “Map of a Wet Dream,” where each line begins with “when,” and “Home! Sweet Home!” which continually repeats, “There’s no place like home we….”

Aesthetically, this poses few issues. But the poetic elements of the original text serve as a critical ornamenting entry point for hesitant new readers, couching Chen’s mission in rhyme and other untranslatable wordplays. For a reader of the English translation who is unsteeped in the collection’s original language and cultural context, its naked stream of on-the-nose discomfort may lack the softening that the poetic features afford, and ironically pack less of a resounding punch.

Of course, it is entirely reasonable to claim that this book was not published for a general audience to begin with. It is possible that the English translation of “Decapitated Poetry” is primarily intended to eternalize the experience of being queer in 1990s Taiwan and honor the influence of “Decapitated Poetry” on the artistic world. Such a goal is certainly noble and respectable — it just means that this translation may be best suited to only the bravest and boldest heterosexual readers, thereby not capturing the same swath of the general population that its original form did so many years ago.

—Staff writer Carmine J. Passarella can be reached at carmine.passarella@thecrimson.com.