If you, like the rest of Taipei, were in Daan Park enjoying the beautiful weather over the weekend, you might have caught sight of protesters with signs calling for the recall of KMT legislator Lo Chih-chiang (羅智強) under the slogan “Reboot Daan” (which is a pretty clever English pun to use).
This close-up below shows more details:
大安強強滾 罷免羅智強！ 羅智強 烙跑路上？ 強強滾 連署路上！
Daan’s strongman has to go Recall Lo Chih-chiang! Lo Chih-chiang running wild in the streets? The strongman should go, recall petition on the streets!
The Other’s Other (Extract) Forgetting seems to take over again, I raise my eyes with a desolate foreboding Faced with this ancient other, I gently move my lips My vocal cords grate together
「Suppose the soul had language. Remember their straying from the path But please forget that every instant of speech is loss…
「他者」 or “the other” is one of those overused pseudo-intellectual terms in Taiwan (readers are welcome to leave a comment if they have any other nominations) that tend to infect poetry and fiction written by students forced to read too much Derrida or psychoanalytic texts. This normally results in painful attempts at profoundity masking rather empty writing, but for some reason, this extract of a poem captured my imagination one day in the MRT. Perhaps because of the vagueness of language in the original, leaving it up to the reader to piece together (for example, in the English translation, I used the first person, whereas the Chinese doesn’t need to specify). The sentences can also be parsed differently to what I interpreted above.
You can also hear it recited aloud in the video above!
The poet, Kuo Tien-yu, was born in Kaohsiung and studied anthropology at National Taiwan University.
