香蕉面包 Banana Bread
Mandarin Pandemic Diary
In March of 2020, when the Covid pandemic struck the U.S., J.D. Scrimgeour began writing diary poems in Mandarin to help him learn the language. He then translated them into English. As he writes in the first poem, “It is difficult to use Chinese/ I only have a few words. I have many feelings.”
“I seldom see American poets write in Chinese. J.D. Scrimgeour is a special case. It's amazing for an American to write such wonderful poems in idiomatic Chinese. I particularly appreciate the methods of word-play and humor used in these beautiful poems.”
—Zhang Ziqing, Poet, Translator, Scholar, author of A History of 20th Century American Poetry
“Among the important ingredients for studying Mandarin, there is the practice of play, as language study across as many chasms as exist between English and Mandarin requires many leaps of faith. What better theme than baking banana bread. The poems here are as much a display of the process of language acquisition as the generous sharing of what helped bring one poet through the havoc wreaked by COVID-19. The world survives, and so does the propensity of Scrimgeour to not only play, but to give.”
—Afaa Michael Weaver
