Reviewed by Chris Du
For a while now I have been reflecting on the idea of translation. In recent years, my translation process with classical Chinese poetry has reached a point where I find myself questioning how to make translation more meaningful. Somehow, purely scholarly translation engages me less: the rigid lines and meaning, sometimes denied their poetic equivalence to the original, diminish my pleasure in reading the text. As a poet and translator, one of the enduring questions I face is how to strike a balance between ethical responsibility and the creative reimagining of the work. While I am a proponent of radical translation, a concept that emerges from translation practices outside the Western-dominated tradition, I still wonder what a balanced approach might look like.
Let me list a couple of examples of radical translation, each shaped by its own purpose. When Ezra Pound began translating classical Chinese poetry, he approached the text as an invention to make something “new” and profoundly influenced the revolution of modern poetry in form. To me, Pound’s experiment was an early practice of radical translation as his vehicle for creativity of thoughts; the source texts were merely the generative material. In Une Tempête, Aimé Césaire reimagines the Shakespearean story through an explicit political pursuit and adapts it into a decolonial rendering. The personal agenda and social awareness highlight the outspoken intention behind this radical translation.
M. L. Martin’s W&E is a radical translation of the mysterious Anglo-Saxon poem “Wulf and Eadwacer.” The original is a very short yet highly ambiguous Old English poem, preserved only in the Exeter Codex, a manuscript dating to around the tenth century. Its elliptical narrative and enigmatic imagery have led scholars to interpret it as a love poem rather than a straightforward story. In this sense, Martin’s W&E belongs to the same lineage as Anne Carson’s Nox, where translation is experimented radically across genres and language, blending poetry, memory, visual arts, and fragmented syntax to embody the multiplicity in sensibility and meaning. W&E redefines fidelity that foregrounds the reader in a space for creation and affective resonance.
Reading Martin’s book feels less like opening a translation than stepping into a forest where language remembers itself. The pages are porous; they breathe. Words from a thousand years ago re-emerge like bones in thawing soil: ancient, luminous, unfinished. Martin does not so much translate as unseals. Through shards of Old English, fractured syntax, and the aching hush of the white page, they restore the poem’s original capacity to resist a simple form of knowing, making mystery itself the book’s primary music.
What is more, in this refracted translation, Martin intends to push the boundaries of how we perceive language and meaning through advocating multiplicity in identity, a distinct principle carried throughout the book. As a poet, I recognize in these pages the struggle inherent to all writing that begins in loss. Each “refracted” iteration—each distortion and echo—moves closer toward the other, existing neither wholly in the past nor entirely in the present. One striking example can be found on page 51, where the architecture of the poem breaks away from a linear flow of reading.
The visual cadence and delayed meaning compel the reader to move through the white space until we see the word “need” distantly placed at the very left side of the page. The placement of “need” is stunning in the sense that we as readers realize the desire in a very unexpected but very intensifying way.
Throughout the book, Martin’s repetition of phrases, the slippage between voices, and the ampersand enact such instability of identity: lover, captive, wolf, violence, body, fluid, and the complexity of them all together. They let grammar fracture until it becomes emotion, until gender and time dissolve, and the text speaks from the wound on the page.
I had to pause a few times while reading Martin’s book as it constantly brought me back to the idea of radical translation. Since the concept is strongly tied to the visibility of a translator, the task of embodying it is a deeply challenging endeavor. When the translator’s interpretation becomes part of the equation, the intervention to the text becomes complex. What constitutes ego in translation? What is political? And what is a reading that most faithfully mediates the original text? The brilliance of this book lies in how it redefines fidelity. Instead of serving the letter of the Old English poem, Martin serves its pulse, the way grief keeps breathing after meaning collapses. Violence, longing, exile of love, secret desire: these are not subjects here on the page but conditions of speech. The sparse, isolated words drifting across the page render silence as an active element, a medium of transmission of desires. Reading becomes a kind of listening: to breath, to breakage, to the possibility that translation is itself a form of resurrection.
As a contemporary poet-translator, Martin offers a model of what radical translation can be: not an act of equivalence but of relation. A dialogue across centuries about how language holds the body, how it betrays and shelters us. Love is not a creature of myth, but it fabricates myth, carrying our fearful, tender voices through the dark. This book is not just about love, but it feels in love: to love another person sometimes is to embrace an irreducible opacity and recognize that something of each other exceeds our understanding. As we Chinese say, “not knowing is most intimate.” It is what we do not know becomes the beginning of desire.
And the boundary of knowing is part of a radical experiment in translation. During one of Martin’s public readings, I was genuinely surprised to see how they integrated sound into the translated text. At one moment in the performance, they covered their mouth with their hand, muffling the words so that the audience could only faintly catch the lines, a gesture that blurred meaning, evoked absence, and foregrounded the limits of understanding in translation. The performance was a demonstration on how this radical experiment unfolds in translation. In the chapter titled [&ERASED], certain letters and phonemes are intentionally removed at the semantic level. When I first encountered these pages, I immediately sensed an effort to dismantle or disperse meaning. Yet listening to a performance of these lines opened up a different space, where meaning was reconstructed through sound and close listening. In this performance the voice became a site of both loss and meaning making. This sonic intervention invites the reader to become a kind of co-translator, someone who mishears, reinterprets, and reconstitutes meaning through the act of close listening. In doing so, the reader enters a space of imaginative translation, one that is attuned to both the levels of form and themes of the original work.
In the “Translator’s Note” to this book, Martin writes that “it seems sensible to decide what a thing is and what kind of effect it should have on the reader before translating it” (10). This line resonates deeply with a question in the practice of radical translation: the actual role of the reader in translation. Should the reader be an active participant, shaping and negotiating meaning alongside the text? Or merely a passive recipient of the meaning we as translators create and deliver? In the history of translation, while most translation theories focus on the power dynamics between author and translator, few give sufficient attention to the reader, who, like the translator, is profoundly shaped by the translated text. Martin’s approach has led me to reconsider translation not only as a literary task, but as a mode of inquiry—one that in form radically expands the boundaries of how we perceive ourselves and the world through form and language and take the autonomy on the page.
In this light, the translator, then, becomes more than a bridge of meaning; they design how meaning should be perceived with the given text. This aligns with what Lawrence Venuti describes as the “visibility of the translator,” which resists domestication and insists on preserving cultural difference at the linguistic level. Martin’s approach to linguistic possibility expands our understanding not only of thematic depth but of meaning-making itself—rendering it less transparent, yet all the more resonant. Of course, such an approach carries risk: it may alienate readers who expect a more transparent rendering of the original. Those unfamiliar with radical translation might feel unmoored.
In the past, Martin has demonstrated their linguistic novelty and aesthetic vision in their language-based installation Journey to Shoshone Fall, the chapbook Theater of No Mistakes, and other publications. In these works, they use archival materials and create textual interventions to construct and expand their distinct poetic territories. At the heart of their creative process, they experiment with how language is both a material and uncertain space that brings possibility to meaning making. Such a pursuit of non-linear narrative structure changes the way we perceive, listen, view, and even write. Especially in Theater of No Mistakes, Martin seeks to break the boundaries of language and destabilize dominant narrative frameworks, particularly through the work’s ekphrastic nature, which invites a diversity in interpretation.
W&E is a translation collection that continues this exploration, where writing is not an act of service, but of relation and care with the nature of interactivity created with the bordering of language. If every element on the page is conceived as an “other,” how might we enter into conversation in our own way? At times, radical translation risks moving into a delivery of fixed or pre-designed meaning or political ideology. Martin’s experiment nevertheless preserves humility and ethical openness for us as readers. For us, W&E opens a new understanding of radical translation and pushes the limits of textual material and language. Martin helps us uncover a strange tenderness. From that tenderness, they build a new forest of seeing—one where cruelty and care share the same roots, and where, even now, the old poem keeps being born in my mind, as if I’ve always known its anonymous speaker from within.
Martin, M. L. W & E: A Refracted Translation of Wulf and Eadwacer. Notre Dame: Action Books, 2025.
Chris Du is an MFA candidate in Creative Writing (Poetry) at Arizona State University, where she also works as a Research Assistant at the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing. A poet-translator working in English and Chinese, she received ASU’s High Impact Award in Translation and is a finalist for the 64th Glendon and Kathryn Swarthout Awards in Writing, selected by Chen Chen. Her translation work includes ARIEL: Poems of Sylvia Plath, as well as her ongoing research and translation of Su Shi. She is also a Summer Creative Fellow with The Center for Imagination in the Borderlands and is currently collaborating with scientists and visual artists on a visual poetry project. Her poetry dwells on questions of presence, language, modern technology, environment, memory, and loss.
Works Cited
Pound, Ezra, et al. Cathay: A Critical Edition. Edited by Timothy Billings, 1st ed., Fordham University Press, 2018.
Carson, Anne, and Gaius Valerius Catullus. Nox. New Directions, 2010.
Venuti, Lawrence. The Translation Studies Reader, Fifth Edition. 2026.
Pairing W&E with Carson’s Nox is such a useful move; it frames radical translation as a lineage rather than a gimmick. I also appreciated your honesty about ethics versus creative reimagining—that tension never really resolves, does it?