what i am looking at just now are the angel island poems. in the early 1900s, the passing of chinese-targeted immigration laws led to the prolonged internment of many asian immigrants in a camp on angel island (off the bay of san francisco.) they were detained from anywhere between a few weeks and a few months (and in some unfortunate cases, up to three years) for interviews with immigration officers before being admitted to the us. discomforts of camp life, curtailment of rights, (e.g. they were not allowed to communicate with family in china, husbands and wives had to occupy separate compounds etc) isolation, humiliation and the distressing long wait: all of these led quite understandably to misery and also great resentment which can all the better be understood today, i think, in light of the post-9/11 changes in immigration procedures, under which our submission to interrogation is always tinged with resentment.

in the 1970s, when the detention centre was up for demolition, it was discovered that the walls of these detention barracks were covered in chinese poetry written by the detainees. if you scroll down on this article you can see a photograph of one of these walls - look at that! if you didn't know it was wood you would have thought it was stone tablets, wouldn't you? if i were to type the same thing out and set it to wei4 bei1 font you would see the similiarity immediately. the immigration station has been preserved and made into a museum, and the poems have been translated and anthologised in a bilingual volume that is currently checked out from widener, so i'm still waiting to get a look. but obviously, just from the two poem included in the multilingual anthology of american lit, there are questions of translation that have arisen already. and i would probably like to look at some of these discrepancies between different translations, as well as the perennial problem of translating chinese poetry into english.