By Crispin Rodrigues

ownself say ownself
Joshua Ip
Landmark Books (2024) / 204 pages / SGD 28

Joshua Ip, without any doubt, is Singapore's current unspoken poet laureate. A master poet, literary event organiser and advocate, Singapore Literature Prize recipient, as well as one of the founders of Sing Lit Station, Ip has become a cornerstone of the literary scene in Singapore. And yet, with such an extensive oeuvre, he continues to change the game in a style that only he can with ownself say ownself.

ownself say ownself is, in a way, both an evolution and a soft reset for Ip's writing. With a majority of his collections unavailable in the wake of the closure of Math Paper Press, the collection's first half comprises of a distillation of the 'best of' his first few collections. There are modern-day classics – sonnets 'chope' and 'homebuilding', 'explaining a thousand cranes' and 'yuan liang' are often taught in schools. These older poems capture what readers mostly know about Ip – tongue-in-cheek humour, sentimentality, as well as a consistent focus on form that not many poets employ these days. In this way, Ip re-imagines his own work over the past decade, (re-)selecting and (re-)anthologising poems to constitute what he thinks is his best hits and now finding new resonances between pre-existing poems.

This can be further seen in what he adds to these pre-existing poems in the little add-on poems in the footnotes, what he calls the tilde, a phonetic pronunciation of the 'tl:dr' (too long, didn't read), in which he reflects on these poems from an older, more wizened perspective. Take for example his tilde in response to 'explaining a thousand cranes':

doing anything a thousand times is not
normal. love is, though. christianity
as metaphor: salvation is not bought
or earned, yet given (arbitrarily?)

Though every tilde is four lines long, Ip imbues a sense of wry humour at the task of folding a thousand cranes as an expression of love and further sinks his teeth into the intent of the original poem that an older self might see through: suffering is an act of love, which is why there he makes the reference to Christianity and the act of bargaining that seems very juvenile in conceptualising the purpose of suffering. Thus, while the old material may present itself as simply an anthology, it is anything but, and Ip masterfully (or with the cynicism of having to look back at past work) weaves it into something novel, reframing craft as the central tenet of the collection.

And newness is further engaged in the 'new' portion of Ip's work, collating random bibs-and-bobs from a variety of projects that he has delved into, such as the score for one of the numbers from his musical on William Farquar in which readers will recognise the same tongue-in-cheek humour of a colonial master founding a nation with all the sleaze of a smarmy venture capitalist, or a poem on nipples that expresses social commentary of isolation of the average Singaporean.

What I found most interesting were his moves into 'translations' (I am putting it in quotation marks just in case translators question my use of the term) of that can be seen in his selections from his last collection, translations to the tanglish, and some of his newer works featured in ownself say ownself. Ip translates everything from sonnets by the French poet Pierre Vinclair to Tang and Malay poetry as a means of questioning the very nature of translation itself. The act of translation as a national movement has been taken very seriously, with several national initiatives created to support the development of translation skills. However, Ip takes his usual tongue-in-cheek approach to the act of translation, often playing around with the three fundamental tenets of translation – faithfulness, expressiveness and elegance. He maintains a deep respect for form, often keeping to the sonnet or Tang quatrain, and yet adds a layer of wordplay that is his own. Take for example, in one of Vinclair's sonnets (which was written as a way to capture his experience with Covid-19), Vinclair originally writes:

Nous sommes confines dans un lieu plus petit
que ce que l'on croyait: bloqués à l'intérieur
de douze pouces de l'écran d'ordinateur
à preparer des cours, corriger des copies

(Sonnet 16)

Ip's translation of the quatrain is as follows:

We are confined to more finite confines
than we opined: serving a quarantine
within 12" of a laptop screen
composing lessons and correcting lines,

Here, Ip creates a more claustrophobic space with his use of rhymes – "confined", "finite', "confines", "opined" – and a stronger sense of tightness and restriction than the Vinclair original (further restricting the way one might pronounce the word "quarantine" given the immediate succession of rhymes). The translation of "douze pouces" to '12"' visually confines the translation further, almost evoking Singaporean pragmatism in reducing spelling to just writing it in numbers. Hence, Ip's translation of Vinclair's poem not only ticks the categories of faithfulness, expressiveness and elegance, he heightens the intensity further towards a universal experience of the Covid-19 pandemic, breaking down the language (and subsequent cultural) barriers.

Has Ip pushed himself to the very limit? His 'homophonic translations' of Jay Chou and JJ Lin, choosing to focus on capturing the way a Chinese song sounds rather than providing a faithful translation, almost seems like madness, and yet these translations are oddly charming and whimsical, as if Ip is trying to offer space to what the act of translation might constitute. Coupled with the QR codes attached, it feels like one is going down spiralling hyperlinkages of signs and signifiers, punctuated at the end by his poetic response to Xi Ni Er with a literal play on signs and signifiers, tying the virtues of language back to its origins – a way of community ideas and intentions. Is it mad in the Frankenstein-mad-scientist way? Yes. But is it principled and respectful to all of these translations? Yes.

Joshua Ip has already had a career as a successful poet, and ownself say ownself is more than just a second wind. It is a reimagining of the course of his oeuvre. One would say that it required him to undergo the publication of his first four books in order to arrive here, but this book itself is tabula rasa – it carries smidges of the old Ip (sonnets and wordplay abound) and yet, it presents a new slate for which Ip innovates and reinvigorates the possibility of poetry as a medium that stitches and weaves a community of practice together that someone of Ip's stature can. Do not read this with alcohol, because you just might become drunk on the virtue of his language alone.

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