The Best American Poetry

The Politics of "Don't Speak" [by Eleanor Goodman］

As everyone has heard by now, this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to the Chinese novelist Mo Yan. Nearly any selection would create controversy—from sour grapes to complaints about literary quality to accusations of political maneuvering on the part of the Nobel committee. This year, what strikes me is the substantial difference between what is being said in the US about the choice, and what is being said in China.

Outside of Chinese literature specialists, the major reaction in the US seems to be: “Huh?” Few have heard of, let alone read, Mo Yan’s work, even though six of his novels have been translated into English, with two more forthcoming. For a Chinese writer, that is a remarkably high rate of translation. And therein lies part of the trouble.

In China, Mo Yan is a prominent literary figure, largely because of Zhang Yimou’s adaptation of his novel Red Sorghum Clan into a movie (renamed Red Sorghum), but partly because he is so widely translated. Access to the rest of the world, and in particular, the English-speaking world, means potential fame and money and a shot at international prizes like the Nobel. That alone can lead to bitterness among other authors whose work has not received the same attention from the West. Mo Yan is also well known for his ability to toe the official line, and this creates resentment in a political climate that necessitates a delicate balancing act between expression and self-censorship. Mo Yan is a member of the official Writer’s Association, from which he draws a salary. For Chinese writers, and for China specialists in the West, ‘official’ is a fraught term. It smacks of obeisance to the Communist regime, and a kowtowing to government strictures on what is allowed and what is not. For those who risk everything to speak out against the political system—writers like Liu Xiaobo, Ma Jian, and Liao Yiwu, or the artist Ai Weiwei—this shows a lack of moral courage. Since the awarding of the Nobel, the Chinese internet has exploded with complaints of this type. Mo Yan the stooge, Mo Yan the coward, Mo Yan the inferior self-limited writer.

Yet the Chinese press as well as many critics and readers are behind him. And Mo Yan does address a range of controversial issues. His novels are by no means simple peons to the greatness of the Communist party, or, like the worst of ‘official’ literature, Brave-Communist-Party-Member-Saves-Village tales. What tends to protect Mo Yan from Party censure (although his work at various times has, in fact, been censored or criticized by the government) is that he sets his work in the past—i.e., he says nothing about the current political regime—and he uses a style of ‘hallucinatory realism’ to address issues that if tackled head-on might lead to Party condemnation. Having a tadpole as a narrator provides a certain amount of protection. The Communist Party will often ignore allegory and extended metaphor, so long as it doesn’t cross a certain, constantly changing, line. Liu Xiaobo, the other recent Chinese Nobel laureate (the one never mentioned in the Chinese press), wasn’t jailed for his potentially incendiary poetry; the government just cared about his directly political writings. 

And now the Chinese government has a laureate it can promote. But with such recognition comes a degree of dangerous power. Mo Yan has just said at a news conference that he hopes Liu Xiaobo will win his freedom soon (although he also said he ‘doesn’t understand’ Liu’s political essays), which is an embarrassment for a government greatly concerned with keeping face. Perhaps Mo Yan will continue to make cautious political statements, perhaps not. Either way, he is now, whether he likes it or not, a political figure, in China even more than in the West.

----Eleanor Goodman 顾爱玲

(Ed note:  Eleanor Goodman is  a Research Associate at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University, where she is working on a book-length translation project. Eleanor  writes fiction, poetry, and essays, and translates contemporary Chinese literature. Her work has appeared widely in publications such as PN Review, Fiction, Pathlight, The Guardian, Pleiades, Acumen, Perihelion, New Delta Review, The Los Angeles Review, and on this blog. Find out more about Eleanor Goodman here.)

ON TRANSLATING FROM THE CHINESE by Martin Stannard

Before you ask the obvious question, here’s the answer: yes, it’s really [insert expletive] difficult.

But a while  ago, having at that point been living and working in China three years, I sort of instinctively felt that part of what I should be doing (as if I ever know what I’m doing) had to be to tackle some of the classical Chinese poetry. Not reading it, because I’d done a bunch of that and it’s easy enough to do (in translation), but involving oneself at a different level, by which I mean trying my hand at translation. And it’s a poet kind of thing to do (isn’t it?) because it fills the gaps when you aren’t writing poems of your own.

I was learning Chinese  – I still am, in a limited way, and it’s not at all easy. But at that point I knew enough of how the language worked, and had at least a decent amount of experience in China and of the culture, to feel that having a crack at the poems in the original wouldn’t be a total waste of time. I’d always figured (and this is in no way an original insight) the big and obvious problem with translation was the inability of the translator to convey the cultural aspect of the poem: that is, the associations and allusions that are almost always going to be beyond the foreigner at the deepest, most significant level. From the ancient Chinese that comes with bells on, to coin a phrase. Even the Chinese teachers and students I spoke to acknowledged that they don’t get some of the stuff in those old poems: the allusions and associations are lost except to a few scholars, and the smartest of readers often has simply to shrug and say they know the poem is great but that line, no, sorry, I don’t have a clue what it means, and even when it's explained they still don’t really get it because the deeper meanings simply don’t mean or resonate now in the way they once did. Add to all this the inevitable loss of the sound and tone and music of the poem – and Chinese is a tonal language – and it may seem like a lost cause. But it isn't.

The first poems I translated were by Li Bai, (right) and I had the assistance of one of my Chinese student friends, and a couple of Chinese websites that explicated some of the more abstruse points of the poetry for us. Then, for reasons that don’t matter here, I kind of let things drift, and did no translations for quite a long time. But in late 2010 I got back into it, armed with a knowledge of the language somewhat better than before. I still needed help with some of the more obscure parts of the poems, and the finer points of language in the originals are often beyond dictionaries, but one can only hope that the results would at least be acceptable to the guys who wrote the things in the first place. I know one should probably get very academic and technical about all this, but it occurred to me that in layman's terms it was also very important that one should come up with a poem that, if it were possible, the bloke who wrote the original would think was okay – that you could, for example, sit down with Li Bai over a glass of wine and talk it through and you'd both understand what you were about as poets, and that you'd come close. And those guys liked their wine, too, which might help…..

My version of the much translated Li Bai poem, 
Drinking Alone Under the Moon

Alone among the flowers drinking wine
I raise my cup and invite the bright moon
come drink with me;
                        my shadow would make three.
But the moon's no drinker, and my shadow,
it just follows me like a shadow does.
Though we are only together like this
for a while, it should be enjoyed, like youth.
The moonlight moves along in time with me;
we dance
            and it gets a little crazy.                                           
Sober we're happy; drunk I have lost you.
If only our friendships were as constant
as the River of Stars is unchanging.

doesn't do much that's different from many earlier versions other than use an English I feel comfortable with, which is slightly different from the English of, for example, an American poet translating the poem 60 or more years ago.

One of my favourite little poems is Red Beans (sometimes called "One Hearted", which sounds un-English to my ear) by Wáng Wéi (right). My version is very different from some I've seen:  

The red bean grows in the south country.
In Autumn its branches are filled with pods.
Gather as many as you can and think of me
thinking of you reaping the red bean harvest.

In the Chinese, it's    

紅豆生南国

春来发幾枝

原君多采擷

此物最相思

and those last two characters – the word 相思 (xiāng sī) – have (or has) two meanings: it's a colloquial name for red beans, but literally it means "to be thinking of each other". I think that's so cool.

 * A selection of my translations of the poems of Li Bai, together with an earlier version of this essay, will be published in Staple 74.

Not Exactly E.R. by Martin Stannard

I'm sure you're not interested in my health, but I've been troubled for the past couple of months by the remnants of a cold, remnants that consist of what I took to be a minor infection on my chest. My nights have been troubled by a cough, and my days by the unpleasantness of slightly congested sinuses. I don't like to use the word "phlegm" because it's disgusting. Anyway, a few days ago I eventually got fed up with it, and decided to go see a doctor. We have a clinic on campus, which is good for minor ailments, but my friend Zhang Yan told me she thought they weren't up to potentially life-threatening pulmonary diseases unless I wanted to get one (she has a sense of humour) and offered to accompany me to the big hospital downtown where, she said, a friend of hers is a doctor. Friends are very important here: they're often another way of saying "shortcut". 

   Zhong Da Wu Yuan, (No.5 Hospital), Zhuhai I should mention, in case you're wondering, that while Chinese hospitals and dentists can look more life-threatening than any disease or problem you might actually have, the opposite is the case, although I also have to say that the only photograph I've been able to find of this particular hospital does make it look pretty unappetizing.  But I've had minor medical treatment in China and it's been fine, and I've also had extensive and highly effective (and painless) dental work at a fraction of the cost of similar treatment in England. I have no complaints at all, only praise. The dental adventures also came with the added amusement of people wandering in off the street to have a look around. One old guy came in and after taking a look inside my mouth sat down next to me and read his newspaper. He gave me the impression he thought I was in his chair. I don't have a photo of that particular dentist's, but the picture here gives you some idea: it's on the street, and very open to anyone who fancies wandering in. There's none of that hygiene nonsense…..
But back to the hospital. This being China, and the doctor being Zhang Yan's friend, there was no question of going to out-patients' and waiting around for hours. Oh no. We went straight into in-patients', up to the doctors' room where a dozen or so doctors were sat around chatting – it was their lounge, I think – and I was examined in there. From behind his surgical mask the doctor said I had no serious problem, but he sent me for an x-ray anyway, presumably to check everything was where it should be.

We  were told we'd need to wait for an hour while the photos were developed. Waiting at the same time were three policemen keeping company with someone who I think it'd accurate to describe as a criminal prisoner. One could tell he was that because he was shackled hand and foot like those guys you see in the movies shuffling towards somewhere dismal. He was wearing just a t-shirt, shorts and sandals, this being August in the tropics, and the  "quaint" part was that he had newspaper stuffed down inside the shackles that were around his ankles to stop them from chafing his bare skin. I was tempted to take a photo, but I reminded myself of where I was (China) and thought better of it. Thinking about it later, it occurred to me that this being China also meant that there was probably a quite good chance that if I'd asked to take a photo they'd have let me. We'd have probably had a group picture with everyone too, me and convict guy included,  all smiling happily. But I think playing it safe was the best option; I don't like to push my luck too far.

The x-rays were delayed beyond the promised hour, and so we went back to doctor friend and told him we had somewhere we needed to be and it wasn't a hospital; he dropped everything and went to the radiology department in person and got the pictures. China mostly works on this system: unfairness, and cutting corners if you've got the power to do so. It turned out everything in my chest was where it should be, and we proceeded to jump another couple of queues to get my medication quickly and, thank you for asking, I seem to be a lot better. The photographs of my lungs are on public display in my bathroom. I suppose that's not that public, but you're welcome to drop in and inspect them, should you  be passing by. if you're not in the area I'm including them here, and claim to be the only poet on this site to show you some of their inner workings.

Looking at China, from China (by Martin Stannard)

My university, above, but I don’t think you can see me.

 I live in China. I came here in 2005, and except for the 2007/8 academic year when I returned to England to take up a Writing Fellowship that had been held open for me I've worked at the same university  all that time. I came here as an ESL teacher, but now teach a variety of subjects, including literature courses. One day back at the beginning of 2005 I received two emails: one was from my youngest son, who was then in Costa Rica having a good time, and another was from a friend who was in China teaching English and also having a good time. I was in England, comfortable enough, but suddenly I felt like I was missing out on something that had to do with it's a big world out there; six months later I was here. What I knew about China at that point you could've comfortably etched on to a fingernail.

I'm not going to try and explain what it's like here. The first time I returned to England and everyone was asking me to describe what China was like I realized I couldn't do it. You can show the photos, tell the anecdotes, but something is always missing: the words "it's a different culture" don’t go anywhere near it. No matter how many times I say the people are wonderful, friendly and open, that the students are a delight to teach, that invitations to their homes to see their town and meet the family are endless, and how not everyone eats rice all the time …. to be honest, after six years I'm kind of bored even mentioning those things, because this is where I live now and it's all normal.

 What is pretty true, though, is that most "foreigners" (by which I mean Westerners) living here for any substantial length of time probably should own up to a certain sense that they're escaping something, albeit in differing degrees. Many, particularly younger people, come here for "the experience", for sure, but even then it can easily become more than that. Foreign teachers especially enjoy a fairly privileged existence. Usually paid quite well by Chinese standards, and therefore having more than enough disposable income, they also benefit from the reverence the Chinese have for "the teacher".

But it's a bubble, and an escapist bubble at that. Some measure of guilt comes from living comfortably in a place where there are very serious issues, but we're 99.9 per cent unaffected by them, and we're also half a world away, literally, from problems at home, wherever home may be. We're privileged: you can't really claim that not being able to use Youtube and Facebook constitute major incursions into the quality of life, even though you know there's an important principle involved. And anyway, you can get those things if you really want them. The technology exists. When I read in the English papers that phrase "internet censorship in China" I can't help but almost smile: I'm not denying curbs on freedom exist here, nor the horrors that undoubtedly go along with that; all I'm saying is that the general everyday reality is somewhat different from what that hackneyed journalist phrase suggests. When the furore over the Nobel Peace Prize and Liu Xiaobo erupted, it didn’t make the Chinese TV news, or the newspapers, but in class one day I saw a student reading a photocopy of the story in The Economist.

All this is far from simple, and I've probably already upset a whole bunch of people who live a long way away and know more about human rights and being liberal than I do.

On a slightly different tack, one of the most disturbing issues I've come across is one that affects lots of young people here: China is a country where Confucian philosophy and "tradition" is still very strong and influential – it's "part of the culture" –  and one aspect of that is of course the importance of family. So many young people here are faced with a problem largely beyond the western experience: brought up to respect family values and obligations, they find themselves studying and sitting endless exams to get a good job (that probably isn’t there) to earn money so they can one day both repay (literally, in some cases: with money) their parents for what they've been given but also care for them in their old age in a way that certainly doesn’t happen in my country. If you're thinking "Well, we care about our parents too….." believe me, this is a whole different ball-game.

It's perfectly normal here for young people to be faced with a future that involves a marriage more or less arranged by their parents, having children, and then eventually living with aged parents, and pretty much putting them first in ways that would have been and still are frankly impossible for me, as a Westerner, someone who left home at 19, to comprehend. For many young people here that poses no major issues, because this is what happens, it's what life is. But for many others it tears them apart, because while they've been raised with those expectations all their lives and will continue to live with them, they've also learned "western" independence and the desire to move away and do not what their parents and "society" expect, but what they need as free-thinking people. Western culture is a big part of their lives, and this is "modern China". But in very significant ways it's still old China. One girl I know – I say girl, but she's a woman of 24, a graduate, and very smart, with excellent English  – seriously feels like she's living a life and is destined to for ever have a life she doesn’t want, a Chinese life lived for other people, not for herself. She's told me she feels doomed. Her parents wheel out prospective husbands on a regular basis, and  I know her well enough to know she wasn't exaggerating how she feels. And I know other bright and intelligent young Chinese who are desperate (and when I say desperate, I mean desperate:) at having to make a choice that in reality is no choice at all: the parents always win.

Boston's Chinatown: Not Just Red Lanterns [by Eleanor Goodman]

If you’ve spent any time in China, it’s easy to slam the Chinatowns of America. They’re just a lot of red lanterns and restaurants with Americanized Chinese food. Yeah, there are Chinese people around, but people don’t really live there. It’s all for tourists and people who want to pretend to be somewhere exotic.

I admit that this was my attitude toward Boston’s Chinatown, the third largest in the country, at least until this past Saturday, when I spent half a day just walking around the neighborhood. As someone involved in translation and the Chinese community in general, I thought I knew the area pretty well. I mean, I’ve eaten hundreds of meals there, hung out in the square by the gate where the old men gather to gossip and play chess, bought DVDs in the sketchy basement stores, even gone to the travel agency where the agents only speak Chinese and can get you surprising discounts on plane tickets to Shanghai.

But this was different. I was there to participate in a charity event for the Boston Chinatown Neighborhood Center, a very valuable organization that helps recent immigrants adjust to life in the States. They teach English language skills, how to apply for government programs, and how to deal with that strange beast called American culture. The event involved a scavenger hunt through the neighborhood, and it took me to places I’d never before thought to go, like through the surprising housing developments that are hidden entirely by mangy office buildings. And dirty alleyways that reminded me vividly of the sort that used to be everywhere in Beijing and have mostly disappeared. And the grocery stores in hidden storefronts that you mostly find by the peculiar smell of fish that floats out from the doors, where you can buy fresh fruit for seventy-five cents a pound. Here was (and how Chinese!) a hidden city, layered behind the storefronts that, yes, are meant for tourists.

Most of all, I was fascinated by all the associations of uncertain purpose (The Chinese Progressive Association, The Wong Family Association, The Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association), each of which sports a plaque over its door that springs into view only once you know to look for it. On a Saturday morning, the steps to many of these buildings were busy with parents and children, groups of men smoking their first cigarettes of the day, and venders peddling fresh fruit or water. This is where the life of the neighborhood happens, yet even for someone with a curious eye, it’s easy to walk past without noticing.

And then there was this, one of the nicest surprises of the morning, a little concrete park between buildings with a mural taking center stage:

It imitates a traditional shanshui painting, in this case in Qing dynasty style, with its pointed peaks, arched bridges, and wispy pine trees. I’ve walked down that block more times than I can count and never noticed it. It turns out that even in touristy Chinatown, as everywhere, there are treasures to discover if you just pay attention.

A Painter's Life by Yu Xiang

1.

I have to make the decision to paint some landscapes.
Like going to work everyday, .
I have to pass those overstuffed strawberries and chickens, .
pass banned books, STDs, myths, .
the beggar husband and wife who sing “Going Back Home,” .
distorted history, criminals on the run like dust.
or tailpipe exhaust, pass those things that have been dug up.
and filled in again and again so that they can’t be leveled, .
Culture Street, Peace Street, immediate quotations, .
unreasonable anger. .
.
2. .
.
I want to paint expressions and gestures, .
not stopping even during my period, .
lest sirens disturb the curve and flow of my brush. .
No matter how the law and justice oppose each other, .
a beautiful woman is still a living miracle, .
she makes life fade the way dye does. .
My good comrade, .
if I could paint you from memory, .
I would always have something to do. .
.
3. .
.
I want to paint a few still lifes, .
sell them cheap so as to survive. .
I took from the wall a few metals of the older generation, .
the backs covered with bright rust stains, .
from the bottom of a chest, I rummage through a pile of red leather certificates, I unscrew the living room’s beacons, .
for the sake of emotion, I arrange them again and again, .
these still lifes of aristocratic decline. .
.
4. .
.
No light, no light, .
colors seem like conversations in sleep. .
At night, I squeeze black and white directly on the canvas. .
White, spread blood, .
black, an explosion, .
the gray tune in the middle like abstract government. .
.
5. .
.
Sometimes, I paint naked voices. .
When the news report sends out signals, .
on the double bed I still hear venders hawking their wares, .
and recognize “Amsterdam’s River” .
in a flash—“the ocean’s great ebb and flow.” .
Some say: painting debauches people. .
I’ll just keep on being debauched. .
.
6. .
.
If I still have the strength, still have the strength.
I will send one to you. The painting .
has no title and no signature, .
like yet another exile. .

trans. Eleanor Goodman and Wang Ao.

《绘画生涯》

宇向

一
我得下决心去画一些户外景色。
就像每天上班，
必须经过那些臃肿的草莓和鸡，
经过禁书、性病、传说、
唱“回家看看”的乞丐夫妻、
篡改的历史、尘土或尾气般的
流窜犯，经过那些被一次一次挖开、
填平，结果再也添不平的
文化路、和平路、即时语录、
无端的愤怒……

二

我要去画表情和姿态,
在经期也不能停止，
以免警笛干扰笔尖的弯度和走向。
无论律法和公正如何背道而弛,
美女仍是一个活生生的奇迹，
她让生活像颜料一样消耗殆尽。
我的好同志，
只要我能在记忆中将你画出来，
那么我就永远有事可做。

三

我要画一些静物，
廉价卖掉，用以糊口。
我从墙上取下前辈的奖牌和勋章，
上面布满辉煌的锈迹,
从箱底翻出一摞红皮证书,
再将客厅的指路明灯拧下,
为了抒情，我一遍一遍摆放它们，
这些没落贵族般的静物。

四

没有光线，没有光线，
色彩像睡眠里的对话。
夜里，我直接将黑与白挤到画布上。
白，涂抹鲜血，
黑，爆炸，
中间的灰调子近似于抽象的政府。

五

有时，我画赤裸裸的声音。
当新闻联播里传出风声，
我仍听到双人床上的叫卖，
并在《阿姆斯特丹的河流》里
瞬间认出——“大海的巨大徘徊”
有人说：绘画使人堕落。
我就继续堕落

六

如果我还有力气，还有力气，
我会寄一幅给你。画面上
没有标题也没有签名，
像一个又一个流亡者。

(Read Eleanor Goodman's interview with Yu Xiang here.) 

Eleanor Goodman interviews Yu Xiang

(Ed note:  David and I met Yu Xian and Eleanor Goodman while traveling in China in the spring of 2008.  Yu Xian lives in Jinan, Shandong Province. In 2004 she was named "one of the top ten women poets" in China. Yu Xiang's two books are 哈气  (Exhale),  and 女巫师  (Sorceress), both published in China. Read two of her poems here and here and return tomorrow and Saturday for more. sdh)

EG:  You started writing poetry in your twenties, which is rather late for a poet. What was your attitude toward literature when you were a child? Why did you wait so long to start writing?

YX: I grew up in the countryside with my grandmother, and moved to my parents’ house in the city when it was time to go to school. It was an alien environment with very little interaction; I only had myself to talk to. In school, I liked languages and fine art, and I was good at writing essays, but there was so little available to read (at that time in China, the home environment and the surrounding environment pulled in opposite directions; for example, only if you weren’t a good student would you get to test to get into an arts school, and so on). When I was a little older, a few romance novels were passed back and forth at my school. They were very beautiful and very false, completely irrelevant to real life. I thought literature was a kind of hoax, and I didn’t like it anymore; I gave up my nascent literary dreams. After all, when you’re young, you don’t know that there is a larger universe. In private, I would keep a diary and frantically write down my feelings. Then after a time, I would rip them up or burn them.

After about third grade, there were no more art classes, and painting became a kind of lasting dream, which for all sorts of reasons was never realized. To express what I needed to say without relying on shapes, I started to write poem after poem. After that, I threw myself into poetry, but even more of my energy had to be spent just on subsisting. Of course, the provocations and power of the spirit that arise from the pressures of living one’s life and of experience and so on, will slowly and naturally be reflected in one’s poetry.

I’m certain that some people have a kind of deeply rooted instinct, which even great waves of fate can’t drown. It’s the power of “oppression” seeking “freedom” and the power of “freedom” rescuing “oppression.” It’s the mysterious power of a kind of mutual seeking. I think poetry and I are this way, at those wonderful moments....For me, poetry is very sudden, and inevitable.

EG:  Your husband is also a poet and artist. Do you think it’s hard for two people in the arts to live together, or are they better able to support and understand each other?

YX: I don’t know how other artistic couples are, but we’re actually very supportive and understanding of each other. I’m not very social; sometimes I’m not very good at interacting with others, and I don’t enjoy some aspects of ordinary life. But he’s more outspoken. Together, we’re pretty complementary. 

EG: Some complain that in contemporary China, people are increasingly concerned with money. What place do you think literature has in China today? Does poetry need a particular kind of environment in order to flourish? Or in difficult times, is poetry more unique and lively?

YX: There is this sort of phenomenon, a widespread lack of a spiritual life, and the most fundamental reason for this is because China is still using an antiquated system. I personally don’t like much of the contemporary literature that is officially published in China. But today, among ordinary people and on the internet, literature has a lot of relevance, which is to say that in an exceedingly absurd situation of resistance and oppression, there still exists a true literariness.

Poetry can flourish in any environment, but in “difficult times” the responsibility of poets and pressure put on poets will both be heavy. Not every serious poet is suited to writing critical poetry. If one writes an inferior poem criticizing reality, that isn’t as a good as using a different method to express one’s point of view. After all, “poet” and “hero” is not the same concept. But at the very least, a poet must posses an essentially critical spirit, and be a person who makes independent judgments.

EG: Chinese literary critics sometimes discuss ‘poets’ and ‘women poets’ separately. Does this way of analyzing have any real usefulness, or is it a holdover from a historical bias against women?

YX: Sometimes the expression is convenient. We also say ‘male poets.’ This is a simple question, and also a very complicated question. It’s hard to explain, and it doesn’t really fall in my field of expertise.

EG:  But in the current climate, is there any difference between men and women poets, for example in terms of opportunities to publish, teach, or give readings?

YX: This isn’t an easy question, and the debate about it can get too heated. I see myself as a poet who speaks through her poetry, and I haven’t put any energy into researching issues around “Poetry.” I trust my own way of dealing with poetry. I just write poems, good poems. At the same time, I’m interested in this particular moment in history, and in understanding the depths of human nature.

EG:  You’re originally from Shandong Province, in northeastern China. How has place and climate influenced your work?

YX:  My sense of regionalism is fairly weak. To write is to choose the standpoint of an individual. It can’t represent a given landscape, and my work even less so. But climate does have an influence—I used to like the things that grow in the north. But now there’s global climate change, and as I get older, my physical requirements have been changing too.

EG:  How do you view American readers? Do you hope your work will be translated into English?

YX:  There is always a potential readership there, since art doesn’t obey national boundaries. I believe that translation is a good thing, provided that the translator is worth trusting.

EG:  What do you mean by ‘worth trusting’? Should a translator prioritize maintaining the meaning of the original poem, or the feeling of it? Or should the translator create the most powerful poem she can in her own language?

YX: Of course it’s great if the translator tries her best to maintain the original meaning and feeling of the poem. That’s just the normal introduction of a poem into a new linguistic environment, although I know even this is difficult. As for the latter suggestion that the translator produce the most powerful poem she can, who could object to that? It’s just that in that case, the translator also becomes an author, and this should be made clear to the reader.

EG:  In terms of your own poetry, some of your work is very short and the language is fairly simple (as, for example, in “Low Key”). How do you see the difference between complex and plain language? Is there a difference?

YX: The Chinese in “Low Key” has a particular linguistic feel to it, and the feel of language is definitely very hard to translate. The difficulty or simplicity of language is decided by what a person prefers. Individual poets seek different things in their writing, and their writing will also go through phases. All along, I’ve loved freedom and sudden breakthroughs. I also have long poems, and other forms of poetry, and the language is relatively simple in all of them.

EG:  Have you gone through stages as a writer? What sorts of changes have you seen in your own work?

YX:  I’ve gone through countless little phases. At the moment, I might be facing a more significant phase, which isn’t limited to my writing; a lot of it has come about because of my personal history, environment, life experiences—for example, in practical terms, my life is very strenuous right now, and that leads to changes.
                                                                        

Eleanor Goodman writes fiction, poetry, and essays, and translates from Chinese. Her work has appeared widely in journals such asPN Review, Los Angeles Review, Fiction, Pleiades, New Delta Review, Perihelion, The Pedestal Magazine, and The Guardian. She is currently working on a novel. Follow this link to read more of Eleanor's blog posts. 

A More Whimsical Note [by Eleanor Goodman]

My first summer in Shanghai, I horrified my female Shanghainese coworkers by daring to walk around outside. It wasn’t that they were worried that I would suffer from heatstroke in the humid 95-degree weather, or get run over by a bus or motorized rickshaw on the chaotic streets, or even that I would get lost in the labyrinthine back alleys where I liked to wander. No, they were worried about my face.

“Your skin was so pretty, but now you’re getting so dark!” they would cry, in a tone usually reserved for national disasters.

Coming from the States, where those odd cancer-causing machines called tanning beds are still popular and people think it’s a good idea to go to the beach to lie out in the sun until they turn as pink as undercooked pork, I was flummoxed by my coworkers’ attitude. I have to admit I reacted in typical foreigner fashion: I ignored them. Finally, one of the receptionists moved decisively to save me from my own ignorance. She bought me an umbrella.

Parasols have a long history in China, along with an appreciation of pale skin, and neither shows signs of fading. In Shanghai, you will find many more umbrellas deployed on a sunny day than on a rainy one. I stubbornly resisted until one brutally hot day when a friend insisted that I step under her umbrella. I discovered something amazing: it felt at least ten degrees cooler under that glorious round shadow. Instead of scurrying from leafy tree to leafy tree (which tend to be few and far between in Chinese cities), I could carry around my own personal shade! Feeling sheepish, I started using the umbrella the receptionist gave me, and it made a huge difference in how sweat-soaked and cranky I was when I arrived at the office. I learned to love my protective nylon friend.

But then I came back to the States, and I had to give up my habit out of shame. Using an umbrella just invited too much gawking and unwanted attention. (This from a guy in a landscaping truck: “It must be raining baby, ‘cause you just dropped from heaven.”) But I really miss it on those hot days when you can feel the sun burning your shoulders, turning your nose an unsightly red and incrementally inching up your chances of melanoma.

So I plead with you, gentle reader: let’s bring the parasol back. Not only does it protect from the heat of the sun and offer better SPF than any lotion, it can be a fashion statement. In China, there are ruffled parasols, polka dot parasols, silk parasols, painted parasols, even personalized ones. We could start our own American parasol industry to replace chemical sunscreen manufacturing. Once the idea takes off and carrying a parasol becomes common, all sideways glances and comments will disappear. And a lot of skin cancer with it. Remember: Power in numbers!

You Can't Go Home Again by John Lane

I’ve traveled a good deal—Europe, Latin America, the Caribbean, Canada—but until China I’d never had the experience of measuring a place entirely against what I imagined about it from books. I don’t know why, but I expected things there would be caught in amber. 

The frontal lobes of my brain had prepared me for China’s modernity, but somewhere in the lower recesses I half-expected to see flickering shadows of a 3,000-year-old agrarian culture with intact village life, rice paddies, and peasants in pajamas toiling in the fields with oxen.

I hoped in China I would get a chance to at least see some countryside and make contact with something that would offer a hint of Pearl Buck’s rural landscape in The Good Earth.

About a week into the trip we went by bus to Hangzhou, a city of seven million south of Shanghai. Hangzhou is the hometown of a young assistant professor of Chinese at our college we call TZ.

It’s TZ’s first year on the faculty, and the trip was quite a perk. He got to visit China and introduce a group of eager new colleagues to his home.

As the first week of the trip unfolded I realized I had a great deal in common with TZ. Though we are of different generations and diverse cultures, TZ is a writer too. He has a PHD from Berkeley, but what he really wants, he told me as we left Fudan University, was to be “the most famous writer from Hangzhou.”

Forty miles out of Shanghai we finally began to see more of what TZ called “the rural side,” the equivalent of the countryside in the US. We passed a large country market set up under a highway overpass. It stretched on for a long distance under the raised highway. I was disappointed. So far the countryside looked more like a light industrial zone. There was nothing quaint or agrarian about a farmer’s market set up in the shadow of an overpass.

TZ sensed my disappointment, said, “No, the rural side drive is not like drive from Spartanburg to Atlanta.”

We rolled on further and finally what we passed became a more diverse agricultural landscape, a vineyard here, a small chicken farm there, four or five shallow ponds to farm fish, a five-acre fallow winter field, another two acres of small hot houses.

The agriculture is dense and public. The farmers’ houses are all packed together, all two or three story moderns. More like mini-apartment complexes and they still didn’t match my Romantic view of the countryside. I tried to articulate my disappointment. TZ explained the old villages like I wanted to see have been gone for 40 years. “This is a very rich area now with all the industry, so even the farmers live in nice houses.”

TZ has great love of his place of birth, particularly in its literary tradition. “Four of six best writers of the 20^th Century come from my province,” TZ said with pride as we approached the city. He said that he writes mostly about Hangzhou and has published a few stories in US Chinese language magazines, but that what he really wants is to put together a book of short stories about contemporary Hangzhou “like Joyce, you know, Dubliners.’’  He said his favorite American writer of the 20^th Century is Thomas Wolfe. “You can’t go home again,” he said. “This I know, this day.”

This return home was a big moment for TZ, his first visit back as a professional, not a student anymore. I asked him if his parents read what he writes. “Oh no, I would be afraid for my father to read my stories.”

As we approached Hangzhou we crossed a fairly large river. TZ said, “When I was a kid I always swam in that river.” He smiled a little as if to tell me that maybe it’s not the same now. “I was very liberal when I was young. But now I’m pretty conservative. I hate it that so many people come to my hometown. I can’t even speak my own dialect in my own town now.”

TZ stepped off the bus when we approached downtown. He would go see his parents like a good son. He disappeared down a crowded city street.

As we rolled on into Hangzhou I thought about how different two writers can be. I grew up in a Southern American town in the middle of what many called “the American Century.”

Iwas Thomas Wolf’s doppelganger. Go home? I couldn’t even successfully leave. I tried the Pacific Northwest, New England, the coast of Georgia, and I always came home. I’ve now been “home” for 23 years, teaching at a college that’s a stone’s throw away from where my great-grandparents were married at a textile village church almost a century ago.

TZ teaches half-way around the world from Hangzhou, writing stories about his hometown at the beginning of what some are already calling “the Chinese Century.” Maybe he will write about the great "economic take-off" as seen through the eyes of his own Sino version of Stephen Dedalus. Maybe he will capture the epiphany of swimming in that river in the brief moment just before the soul of China collides with the future.

“Oh lost!” Thomas Wolfe said, dreaming of the past, and longing for literary relief from the present and the future. 

One Hundred Poems from the Chinese [by Ben Mirov]

One Hundred Poems from the Chinese

He who sleeps all night beneath the snow
is a chrysanthemum
whispers One Hundred Poems from the Chinese
one rainy day in October
when you can no longer think of the soldiers
in Afghanistan who spend their nights
shooting at the same five guys.
The camels are spooked and can't catch a wink,
not to mention the kids in the mud hut
who hope One Hundred Poems from the Chinese
is something you can eat, or sell for something to eat.
Is there anything One Hundred Poems from the Chinese
can do for the broken toilet?
Probably, but neither you nor it can figure out what.
Still it's there for you somehow there
for all of us like a moonbeam
lighting a little piece of the house.
Months pass with no mention of Wandering Ghost Bridge
or snow-capped mountains
until the moment you need one
and One Hundred Poems from the Chinese is there
with its little bald man waving
from beneath his thatched roof with an armful of roots.

-- Ben Mirov

Simmons College Chinese Poetry Conference (part 2) -- 顾爱玲 [by Eleanor Goodman]

This afternoon, the Simmons College Contemporary Chinese Poetry Conference came to an end, dispersing two dozen Chinese-language poets out into the world.  (Watch out, world!)  Some are headed back to the mainland or Taiwan or Hong Kong, some are traveling to New York or California, and a golden few are taking the opportunity to swing by Mexico while in the hemisphere.  One of those going on to the land of Corona happens to be our oldest participant, Qi Weiguo 齊衛國, who, at a spry 82, insisted on holding the door open for his fellow poets.

A short report from the Simmons Chinese Poetry Conference -顾爱玲 [by Eleanor Goodman]

I’m grabbing a few seconds away from the conference to post some photos from the past two days of translation and dialogue.

 

First, the man who managed to bring together over thirty scholars and poets from the PRC, throughout the Chinese diaspora, and here in the States, for a weekend of work and fun – a happy Professor Afaa Michael Weaver.

On Friday, we arranged tables that included a Chinese poet, an American poet, and a translator to work together on translating a poem together. Here, Richard Howard, the Taiwanese poet and translator Leung Ping-Kwan 梁秉均, and Professor Michelle Yeh 奚密教授from UC Davis are discussing on Richard’s poem “Refugee”.  Witness Richard using his usual charm on Michelle.

This Just In

Our friend and sometime guest blogger Eleanor Goodman writes to tell us about the Simmons College International Contemporary Chinese Poetry Festival, which will take place on the campus of Simmons College in Boston on October 4th and 5th:

The conference will feature an exciting mix of over twenty poets from the mainland, Taiwan, and throughout the Chinese diaspora. Look forward to a mingling of perspectives and poetic styles that will no doubt make for a weekend of illuminating discussion and exchange.

Conference topics range from translation and how it is practiced and mis-practiced to how creative writing is being taught and not taught here and in China. Special focus will also be given to the situation of women poets, historically a neglected group, a bias which some would (and probably will) argue continues today. Anyone with an interest in China, Chinese literature, translation, poetry, or the human condition will find ample reason to attend. In short, everyone is invited to join the already rich pot of participating poets, translators, and scholars. All events are free and open to the public.

At the risk of namedropping, let me drop a few names for you: Illustrious poets Zhou

Olympics - Shenyang Report [by Joe Kruzich]

As I noted last night, there are two sports that the Chinese care most passionately about, and those are soccer and basketball. Tonight, I will give you an update on those two important sports at the Olympics.

First, yesterday China played Spain in a very close basketball game. Remember, just a few days ago the U.S. "Dream Team" knocked off the China team by 31 points, 101-70, deflating Chinese hopes that there team might make it to the upper echelon of the basketball world in these Olympics. Well, the top teams by my estimate and those of the taxi drivers in Shenyang, is that there are 3-4 teams to watch in this year's Olympics, and those are the U.S., Spain, Greece and Lithuania. But yesterday, the Chinese basketball team almost pulled off a major upset, sending their game with Spain into overtime, though finally losing to the Spaniards. I remember yesterday as I was rushing home in a taxi to get ready for going out to the soccer matches in Shenyang, my taxi driver and I pulled off to the side of the road to listen to the final minutes of the China-Spain game on the radio, as China had an opportunity to win the game in the last few seconds of regulation play. Of course, when Yao Ming, the great Chinese center and Houston Rocket, fouled out early in the overtime, everyone knew the game was over for the Chinese. Nevertheless, the Chinese performance showed they are still a rising basketball power to be reckoned with and probably only one or two Olympics away from being a serious contender for the gold.

Tonight, I headed off to the soccer matches again in Shenyang and this time it was The Netherlands vs. Japan. Now, I am sure many of you are familiar with the national and historical enmity between China and Japan, much of it emanating from Japan's treatment of China during the second world war. Well, when I arrived tonight for the game, I had never known about this secret alliance in soccer between the Chinese and the Dutch. It seemed liked every fan, and there were many tonight, was supporting the Dutch in their battle with the Japanese team. While both teams played well, though the Japanese team seemed to move the ball a bit better during most of the game, the Netherlands squeeked out a narrow 1-0 win, with the winning goal on a penalty kick in the second half. As the Dutch scored the go-ahead goal, the stadium erupted in applause and Dutch-Chinese relations never seemed better. Of course, I think the Chinese support for the Dutch had more to do with the other team. For the Chinese, especially in the Northeast, the next best thing to a Chinese victory is a Japanese loss. And that was the take away from tonight's game; old enmities, even in sports die hard.

On a more positive side tonight, the Chinese men's soccer team played the Brazilians to a close 3-0 match. Well into the second half, the Chinese team was only down 1-0 to a much more talented Brazilian team. Again, it has to be said, besides the fantastic performances of Phelps in swimming and the U.S. basketball team, the Brazilian men's soccer team is a sight to behold; they are simply amazing in how they move the ball, attack the goal, and play with such skill and style. That the Chinese soccer team could stay in the game with them, was quite an accomplishment, and most of my Chinese friends went away proud that their team was able to make it an interesting game. Like I said before, China really wants to develop a great soccer and basketball team, and their performances in basketball against Spain and in soccer against Brazil, show they certainly have the potential in the future to realize this goal.

That's it for tonight. It has to be said that so far these Olympics are coming off very well and the athletic performances are absolutely stunning, especially Phelps. In fact, judging by the Shenyang taxi drivers, the real hero of this Olympic is Phelps, or, as the Chinese say Fee-er-pu-se. Talk to you tomorrow. Zai Jian.

Report from the Olympics - Shenyang [by Joe Kruzich]

This week we're pleased to welcome back Joseph Kruzich, Public Affairs Officer, US Consulate Shenyang Province, China.  Joe previously entertaned us with blog posts about Chinese food and drink.  He has agreed to take time out from his busy schedule to write about the goings on in China during the Olympics.    Thanks Joe! --sdh

Well, the Olympics are now well on their way in China and I thought I would provide some color to what all of you are watching on television and reading about in the papers back home. My observations are mainly from a satellite city, Shenyang, which is hosting many of the soccer games for the Olympics, at least the quarter and semi-finals. The finals will be in Beijing. Shenyang is an old, industrial city in China's Northeast, commonly referred to as China's Rustbelt. I often describe it to friends as a combination of Detroit, Cleveland and Buffalo in the early 1980's, but when some American friends recently came up this way they thought that analogy was off the mark, and they thought Shenyang, with all its neon signs, was "Splashy". Anyway, Shenyang was given the privilege of hosting some of the Olympic soccer games and they have taken their responsibilities seriously, building a brand new athletic stadium that is probably one of the nicest soccer stadiums in China now, touching up the city and sending thousands of volunteers throughout the city to make sure foreign visitors are given a warm welcome.

But before I delve into the soccer games, let me just say a few words about the opening ceremony in Beijing last Friday, which was probably witnessed by most of China. I watched it with a group of Chinese friends and though they cracked jokes about their leaders and their expressions and all of the countries, one could tell they were deeply proud of the grand choreography of Zhang Yimou and the "chinese history and culture in one hour" theme. To watch it on TV in China and with Chinese was quite special. I also have to add, there are a lot of dumb and stupid things said in the American media about China, but today's column in the Washington Post by George Will raises willful ignorance to a new art form with his comparison of the opening ceremony to some Leni Riefenstahl propaganda documentary. What an insult to the memory of the Holocaust.

If there are two sports that the Chinese care passionately about, it is soccer and basketball, and both sports have attracted the nation's attention these past couple of days. I mentioned earlier Shenyang is the host to many of the Olympic soccer quarter and semi-final matches, and the Chinese men's team opened up their Olympic appearance in Shenyang last Sunday. Now it is, of course, true that soccer is a Chinese national sport, much like the NFL is in the U.S., but the Northeast is the real soccer loving region of the country and the region with the undisputed best team - that beautiful coastal city of Dalian. Northeasterners love their soccer teams, much like Pittsburgh fans love their Steelers or Green Bay fans love the Packers. So, when the Chinese national team came to Shenyang last Sunday, it was quite a spectacle to watch; the enthusiasm was high and the expectations higher. Now, before I get to the China vs. Belgium game, let me take a little historical detour on China and soccer. The Chinese men's team has been disappointing their fans for most of the last 100 years, and certainly of late; its the same sort of love-hate relationship Chicago has with its beloved Cubs. In fact, the frustration is so palpable a newspaper in Changchun (the Detroit of China), a couple of months ago carried a headline on the front page: "China men's team loses again; We have nothing more to say". There was no story that followed.

And, alas, the 45,000 enthusiastic Shenyang soccer fans who came out to cheer their team on were again disappointed as China dropped the match to the better Belgium team 2-0. But, this time they could blame the refs.

Foreigners Have Blue Eyes and Write Like Robert Frost (Eleanor Goodman)

On my first date with a very nice Chinese banker, he took me out to an expensive restaurant that specialized in Shangainese cuisine (think sweet red sauces, alcohol used as flavoring, and seafood, especially the famed ‘hairy crab’, which, I’m sorry to say, really does have hair on its claws). After dinner, we took a stroll along the Huangpu River in the moonlight, and as he turned to stare soulfully into my eyes, he suddenly recoiled and told me, “You...your eyes are...brown!”

Well, the relationship didn’t last, but I’ll never forget that moment. Just as Americans tend to have stereotypes about the Chinese – you know, clannish but hard-working and good at math – the Chinese have ideas about who Westerners are: they all have blue eyes, the women behave like Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct if given half the chance, and the poets all write like Robert Frost.

Those who ascribe wholesale to these stereotypes, of course, account for a tiny percentage of the population. Most people, especially in the major cities, have a much more sophisticated perception.  The frame of reference, however, is necessarily limited. This is a country, after all, that thirty years ago allowed very few foreigners beyond its borders. (After the bloody Opium Wars, the brutal Japanese occupation, and the humiliating Foreign Concessions, would you?)  Today, however, Beijing is rapidly becoming an international city. Walking around, you discover signs written in Cyrillic, Korean, French, German – and the populations to go along. This exposure to other cultures is relatively recent, however, and compounding this is the fact that censorship is still alive and well in the PRC.

It’s amusing to go into the bookstores and look at the foreign novels that have been translated from English. Harry Potter, check. The Godfather, check. Jane Austen novels, check. But then try looking for expatriate authors. Ha Jin, nope. Bei Dao, nope. Ma Jian, heck no. Gao Xingjian (you know, the guy who won the Nobel in 2000), nowhere to be found. This censorship has meant that while the Chinese readership is exposed to a fair amount of foreign literature, what might be most interesting and useful (i.e., books by exiles and work that approaches Chinese society or culture in ways different from the CPC line) is scrupulously kept out of the country. And work by American authors tends not to be translated according to a standard of literary value, but of marketability. As a result, not a whole lot of contemporary American poetry gets into the hands of Chinese readers.

It’s unfair to say that literary types in China expect American poets to all write like Frost. They expect all American poets to write like Frost, or like Ashbery. So when I was invited to give a lecture at Beijing University on the state of contemporary American poetry, I leapt at the chance to introduce some poets who I think are writing in a unique voice and with a unique vision. I chose work from poets as disparate as Jared Smith, Peter Campion, Maxine Kumin, and Natasha Trethewey, all masters at what they do, and all bearing little resemblance to Frost or Ashbery. (As an aside, I certainly don’t mean to diminish the tremendous influence these two great poets have had on American poetry. I’m just saying...let’s move on a bit, shall we?)

The work that garnered the greatest reaction from my audience of grad students, professors, and a smattering of undergrads was a poem by Thomas Sayers Ellis. If you haven’t read his work, you must. Ellis’s poetry is explosive and angry and borders on offensive. In this, he is unlike so many of us who tiptoe around anything that might conceivably offend anybody ever. To do all this with a confident, tight, intelligent, lyrical voice is a rare feat indeed.

The poem I discussed is called “All Their Stanzas Look Alike”. Here’s the beginning:

All their fences

 All their prisons

All their exercises

 All their agendas

All their stanzas look alike

 All their metaphors

All their bookstores

 All their plantations

All their assassinations

 All their stanzas look alike

All their rejection letters

 All their letters to the editor

All their arts and letters

 All their letters of recommendation

All their stanzas look alike

And from there it really gets going. This poem is a fantastic entrance into a host of historical and cultural issues in America. Slavery and its influence on current race relations, the hegemony of the ruling literary elite (with its ties to academia and profit-driven publishing conglomerates), the struggle of a young black writer to deal with the overwhelmingly white canon – it’s all in there, and how.

Nevertheless, I have to admit that I was surprised by the response I got. In general, Chinese audiences in an academic setting are preternaturally quiet. (This is in stark contrast to audiences at poetry readings, which tend to verge on participatory or, less charitably, disruptively cacophonous.) But this poem got a reaction. The students argued with my interpretation of Ellis’s lines, they wondered about his use of racially tinged words, they were either thrilled or bothered by the angry tone of the poem. All in all, it was clear that this poem had struck a chord.

And I believe the chord it struck was the ever-present, perhaps even genetic, reality of in-group/out-group politics. Ellis addresses racial and class divisions with delicious asperity and without fear. The Chinese face these same problems, but are not allowed to write about them. Here, we all know about Tibet, but not as many Westerners have heard about the oppression of the Uyghur peoples in Xinjiang, the co-opting and destruction of the indigenous Dai culture in Yunnan, and the strict government control over the mosques of the Muslim minority Hui. Difference is dangerous in China, a country that has historically struggled to keep together an enormous geographical area and peoples of different languages, cultures, religions, and ethnic groups. Oppression naturally results from the attempt to make everybody get along.  Ellis wrote a poem whose analogue would be impossible to write in the PRC today, and my audience knew it.

Conclusion: please, please America, let’s guard our freedoms carefully.

And tomorrow, no one says goodbye better than Wang Wei 王维.  -–EG (顾爱玲)

Baijiu and the Poet’s Ego (Eleanor Goodman)

Spring is the time for poetry conferences in the PRC. Throughout April and May as fields of yellow mustard flowers are blooming and even in the city you can find walls lined with lilacs and roses, there is a profusion of poetry festivals and academic conferences and social gatherings for the literary bigwigs. I attended a lot of these events this year, and man, were they a revelation.

I admit, I had some preconceived notions about what a poetry conference is and isn’t. I expected a bunch of people sitting around in casual wear discussing poetic diction and the latest trends in form. Perhaps, once a day, there would be a polite titter at a sober pun someone might make during a presentation. What I did not anticipate was evenings (and occasional afternoons) spent around the banquet table, drinking baijiu and belting out old Beatles tunes.

A word about Chinese banquets. Picture this: a twelve- to twenty-person table with an enormous lazy-Susan covered by so much food that plates must be balanced on top of each other. Often a roast duck is involved, and nearly always a steamed fish (complete with head and eyeballs, a delicacy), along with myriad stir-fried and beautifully arranged color-coordinated vegetables. Add to that an infinite supply of Qingdao beer and baijiu 白酒 (literally ‘white alcohol’, a strong, I mean rubbing alcohol strong, spirit), obligatory toasts at five minute intervals, and six hour long (really) meals. Now add a collection of old friends and old enemies in the form of forty or fifty hotshot literary egos.

Let’s put it this way. There were some heated moments. Take from that what you will.

But these conferences are also an opportunity to learn who is writing what, and how the factional lines in contemporary poetry break down. I mean ‘break down’ both in the sense of ‘are defined’ and ‘dissolve’. Although there are and have been serious divisions in the contemporary poetry scene in China – most importantly between the so-called ‘intellectual’ or ‘library’ poets, and those poets who write more from experience than book learning (and whom some claim are less skilled for that) – many of these divisions are permeable. Friendships turn into enmities on the basis of perceived slights. Alliances are formed and fall apart.

The precedence for these literary alliances goes way back. In the Tang dynasty, many poems were inspired by friendships between poets, and were written in letters or in messages inscribed on the walls of public buildings. Often these poets belonged to the same school (or faction) 派, or to literary societies 文社 of likeminded writers. Poets’ names have became linked together forever through these correspondences, and new connections are still being discovered. Wang Ao, my translating partner, has done fascinating new scholarship on these relationships, and has written his dissertation on the wide-reaching literary consequences. This tendency, which of course isn’t limited to Chinese poetry – witness Coleridge and Wordsworth tromping the woods (along with Dorothy Wordsworth, who always gets short shrift) – continues today, producing many fruitful literary friendships, and, I dare say, fruitful disagreements. Literature, of course, is a conversation. I happen to think the more pointed and full of conviction the voices are, the better.

The conversation about contemporary Chinese literature and its translation has been unfortunately lacking in the States, which is one reason I’m assisting Afaa Michael Weaver, a poet, Sinophile, and translator himself, to organize a poetry conference at Simmons College in Boston this coming October. Many poets will be in attendance (not just from the mainland, but from Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore as well), along with critics, scholars, and translators from both sides of the ocean. The conference is open to the public (you can find details at http://poetryconference.com), and will be an opportunity for communication and cooperation across linguistic barriers. It will also be a chance to have fun. Particularly if there’s some baijiu involved.

Tomorrow: yeah, but what do Chinese literary types think of us? --EG (顾爱玲)

The Inimitable Wang Ao, 王敖的诗 (Eleanor Goodman)

Let’s say you’re working on a book of translations of contemporary Chinese poetry. And because you must’ve behaved like an angel in your last life, you find a collaborator in the form of a remarkable intellect who has translated poets from Auden to Charles Wright into Chinese. A collaborator who wrote a dissertation at Yale in fluent English, yet whose mother tongue is Chinese. And say this collaborator also happens to be a tremendous poet who is quite (and quite reasonably) protective of his work, one who believes that his poetry is so steeped in its original language that it can’t be made to function in another tongue. Now imagine translating his poetry into English.

Wang Ao 王敖is a phenomenally accomplished young poet, translator, critic, and essayist. Barely into his thirties, he has already published three books of poetry and won all sorts of awards and accolades. His poetry is widely considered to be some of the best (if not flat-out the best) of his generation. His work is so fascinating because it is not exactly new.  I say ‘not exactly’ because much of it is new, and thrillingly so. Yet Wang Ao’s poetry is grounded in the traditions of ancient Chinese poetry in ways that are rare today.  His work is musically intense and tightly constructed, often inspired by forms that were practiced and perfected in the Tang dynasty, and while his voice harkens back to the late Tang masters – Li Bai, Wang Wei, Du Fu – it remains entirely his own.

And there’s the rub. In English, Wang Ao’s poetry is stripped of its unique voice and historical tethers. It loses some of its precision, the tightness of expression and expansiveness of connotation that is the hallmark of great poetry. How to convey that bedrock of more than a millennium of ancestors? How to capture the intelligence and authority of the poetic voice capable of building on that tradition without being crushed by it? How to keep Wang Ao from being furious at me for mangling his poems?

Our friend Schopenhauer says (through Peter Mollenhauer): “Rarely can a characteristic, terse, and significant sentence be transplanted from one language into another so that it will produce exactly the same effect in the new language.” I think this is terribly pollyannaish of Mr. Schopenhauer. Never can a sentence in one language be reproduced to exactly the same effect in a new language. Within these bounds of inevitable frustration, however, some attempts are better than others.

Let’s get on to the poem. Wang Ao has been working on a series of poems all titled ‘Quatrain’ 绝句. Traditionally, this form (jueju) involved four lines of five or seven characters each. The lines adhered to a set of strict rhyme schemes and tonal patterns. But we needn’t worry about all that, because Wang Ao’s quatrains don’t conform to these stringent requirements. Rather, his quatrains are jueju in the sense that Gerald Stern’s poems in American Sonnets are sonnets. The intent here is not to replicate the old form, but to renew it in the context of a changed culture, changed artistic expectations, and a changed conception of what poetry is. ‘Make it new’ is always the dictum, but as Frost urges, one should find an “old-fashioned way to be new.”

Enough of me. The poem:

绝句

王敖

为什么，星象大师，你看着我的

眼珠，仿佛那是世界的轮中轮，为什么

人生有缺憾，绝句有生命，而伟大的木匠

属于伟大的钉子；为什么，给我一个残忍的答案？

Quatrain

              Wang Ao

Why, astrologer, when you gaze into my eyes

does it seem there are the wheels of the world’s wheels, why

does life have regret, and quatrains have life, yet the mighty carpenter

belongs to the mighty nail; why give me a cruel answer?

               trans. Eleanor Goodman and Wang Ao

If you are a true poetry aficionado, as you probably are if you’re reading this, I don’t need to recommend that you reread the poem. A short shapely poem like this invites, no, insists upon, a second, third, even fourth reading. This is the essence of the traditional jueju (which means ‘truncated verse’) as well – the feeling of an entire world encompassed in a scant four lines. Wang Ao captures this enormity and circularity here. Not only is the poem literally centered on wheels, but his language also embodies this circular return. There are three repetitions of 为什么 (why), along with a question and answer that fold back on each other like a Möbius strip. We get the word ‘answer’ 答案, but no actual answer. We get a question that – like all parents of children between the ages of two and eighteen know – is impossible to respond to with any satisfaction. In the English version, there is the lovely (if I do say so myself) parallelism of ‘does’ and ‘does’ at the beginning of lines 2 and 3, along with the slant-rhymes of ‘eyes’ and ‘why’, and ‘carpenter’ and ‘answer’, all of which in some small way mimic the patterns of jueju. Sweet, sweet success!

Oh, but the sacrifices that come along with these fleeting satisfactions! But one example is 轮中轮, whose gorgeous visual symmetry is lost in English. Literally ‘wheel center wheel’ or ‘wheel inside wheel’, English can’t capture the brevity and directness and pictographic gracefulness of the Chinese formulation. Nor can English easily keep 眼珠, ‘eyeballs’ (or, more beautifully, ‘eye-pearls’), which of course again emphasizes circularity – the Daoist astrologer sees in the circular eye the circles of the world’s circles. The poem is a whirlpool in whose revolutions we are caught, just as we cannot escape the earth’s spin or the circulation of blood.

All this, and we haven’t discussed the influence of Daoism, which underpins the entire poem, nor mentioned the significance of the carpenter and the nail (with its Christian overtones), nor explored the insight that the most powerful is inevitably at the mercy of the most insignificant. And I’ve already strained your patience.

So all I can say is: reread the poem, and it will tell you itself. Even the English version.

Tomorrow: literary festivals and conferences, or, what happens when you get a bunch of Chinese poets in the same room.   --EG (顾爱玲)

A Question of Vegetables 臧棣与菠菜 (Eleanor Goodman)

Zang Di 臧棣is a formidable intellect as well a leading contemporary poet. He teaches literature at Beijing University (the Harvard of the PRC), has published critical essays, edited a ‘best of’ poetry series (modeled after The Best American Poetry series), and put out numerous collections of his own poetry. His voice is as distinct and forceful as that of anyone writing in Chinese today.

It is exactly this sort of distinct, forceful voice that presents the greatest challenge to a translator, bringing the most fundamental issues to the forefront. How much is a translator a direct conduit, transferring as closely as possible the voice of the original author into a new language, and how much is the translator a creative partner, essentially writing a new poem in the target language? The 18^th century German thinker Friedrich Schleiermacher advocates a method of translation in which the resulting poem is “bent toward an alien likeness.” This is my instinct as well. But to do this “skillfully and with moderation,” as he goes on to say (in Peter Mollenhauer’s translation, anyway), is the translator’s greatest challenge.

In English, some of Zang Di’s power is necessarily lost. Much, however, is gained – in illuminating strangeness, in cultural insight, in the stretching of the English language to accommodate a different way of thinking. Zang Di’s “Spinach”  菠菜, for example, illustrates the pain and pleasure of the impossible, which every translation embodies. Yet the translation Wang Ao and I have done achieves (I hope!) something of this alien likeness.

菠菜

   臧棣

美丽的菠菜不曾把你

藏在它们的绿衬衣里。

你甚至没有穿过

任何一种绿颜色的衬衣，

你回避了这样的形象；

而我能更清楚地记得

你沉默的肉体就像

一粒极端的种子。

为什么菠菜看起来

是美丽的？为什么

我知道你会想到

但不会提出这样的问题？

我冲洗菠菜时感到 

它们碧绿的质量摸上去

就像是我和植物的孩子。

如此，菠菜回答了

我们怎样才能在我们的生活中

看见对他们来说

似乎并不存在的天使的问题。

菠菜的美丽是脆弱的 

当我们面对一个只有五十平方米的

标准的空间时，鲜明的菠菜

是最脆弱的政治。表面上，

它们有些零乱，不易清理；

它们的美丽也可以说

是由繁琐的力量来维持的；

而它们的营养纠正了 

它们的价格，不左也不右。

Spinach

      Zang Di

This beautiful spinach hasn’t once
hidden you in its green shirt.
You have never worn
any green shirts at all.
You avoid this kind of image –
yet I can clearly remember
your silent flesh resembled
a seed at its apex.
Why does spinach look
beautiful? Why
do I know you will think
this question, but won’t ask it?
Washing spinach, I feel
its deep green quality
seems like a child I had with the plant.
So spinach answers the question
of how we can see in our lives
angels that others say don’t exist.
The beauty of spinach is weak –
when we face the mere fifty square meters
of standard living space, this vivid spinach
is the weakest politics. On the surface
a bit wild, difficult to clean –
its beauty one might say
is sustained by the power of little irritations.
Yet its nourishment determines
its value, not to the left nor to the right.

        trans. Eleanor Goodman and Wang Ao

There are so many intractable problems in “Spinach” that it’s hard to know where to begin. Let’s start with, well, spinach. The typical American, I would posit, eats spinach rarely and then only under severe duress. In the PRC, in contrast, spinach is an affordable, easily prepared vegetable for the masses, eaten at home several times a week. This sense of ordinariness is the basis for the tenor of the poem. In this light, calling spinach ‘beautiful’ is surprising. We all know it’s nutritious, and I actually like eating it, but...come on! This surprise is Zang Di’s entrance into the mind of the reader, forcing us to pay attention. Of course, if the cultural assumptions aren’t the same, the line doesn’t have the same effect. Necessary failure number one.

There is a linguistic problem here as well. In Chinese, ‘spinach’ is easily plural, whereas ‘spinaches’, while not exactly wrong, sounds weird. This is significant because in the second line of the poem, Zang Di uses the pronoun 它们 or ‘they’ (the plural referent to an inanimate object, a distinction English doesn’t make) to refer to the spinach. This ‘they’ comes to serve as a kind of bridge between the ‘you’ and the ‘I’ of the poem, an oblique means of commenting on the romantic relationship. This subtlety is entirely lost in the English, but it’s a necessary choice because ‘spinaches’ would add more awkwardness than it would meaning. Necessary failure number two.

Our spinach troubles pop up again in the thirteenth line. “Washing spinach, I feel / its deep green quality / seems like a child I had with the plant.” ‘Feel’ is the main problem here. In the original, Zang Di uses two verbs gan 感 and mo 摸, both of which are translated most directly as ‘feel’. 感 connotes emotion, and 摸 connotes physical sensation. So literally, the lines translate to: “When I wash spinach, feel [emotion] / its deep green quality felt [physical] out / seems as though it’s my and the plant’s child.” Not particularly elegant, to say the least. In the Chinese, these lines are sensual and rich, imbued with tactile and emotional resonance. This is, after all, a kind of love poem, and this ‘child’ is a product of the relationship. References to touch, a meal being made, the hints at a sexual encounter to come – this is all captured with the gorgeous compression Chinese offers. English seems bulky and brutish in comparison, a gorilla trying to one-up a baby lamb in a beauty pageant. Necessary failure number three.

And yet, the translator must make the attempt. My hope is that by using enjambment, this double sense of ‘feel’ can be simulated. Initially, “I feel / its deep green quality” reads as physical sensation. The grammatical turn in next line with “seems like” pushes the reader to reinterpret ‘feel’ in an emotional sense. All this goes by in a blur, however, and what the reader is left with is probably the surrealistic concept of a plant-human hybrid, and hopefully the emotional resonances that come along with it. That washing vegetables bring us to all this is an indication of Zang Di’s skill.

Finally, one more failure. (Why not, right?) Against all my instincts and principles, I added a word to the translation in the interest of explication. The word ‘living’ in the line “when we face the mere fifty square meters / of standard living space...” is nowhere in the original poem. Without it, however, readers unfamiliar with Chinese system of government and company allocation of apartments will probably not understand the reference to ‘fifty square meters’. Let me say that I have great enmity for the kind of translation that adds words and references willy-nilly into the text of the poem until it becomes an academic exercise rather than a work of art. So please excuse ‘living’ – it is a rare case in which the sense of the lines would be entirely lost without an unauthorized addition. Necessary failure...oh, I’ve lost count.

I point out all these failures to emphasize a greater truth. Translation is painful and touchy and contentious. Yet in the end, you all out there, who are probably not Chinese speakers, are reading Zang Di’s work. And, if Wang Ao and I have accomplished anything at all, you’re able to enjoy some of the poem’s power and intelligence and grace. That’s why a translator keeps doing what she does.

Tomorrow, a poem by Wang Ao 王敖, and the delicacy of translating your own collaborator’s work.  --EG (顾爱玲)

Pound and Process: an Introduction (Eleanor Goodman)

When I first started translating Chinese poetry, I began where many translators begin and end: Tang dynasty poetry. The challenges of translating poetry from the seventh and eighth centuries are daunting, but to a large degree manageable. Much research has been done into the lives, language, and cultural background of these poets. There are entire dictionaries dedicated to the ideograms, recurrent tropes, and chengyu 成语 (four-character aphorisms based on history or folklore) that appear in the poems. Thanks to all this scholarship, Tang poems can for the most part be interpreted, albeit sometimes with the ease that accompanies a root canal.

Contemporary poetry presents a different range of difficulties for the translator. No dictionary can keep up with current slang, and there are few biographies of living poets. The political and historical context of our own age can be understood in depth only in hindsight. Given these stumbling blocks, many references in contemporary poetry remain obscure to those outside of the culture, the language is mystifying, and the structure is frustratingly opaque. What’s a translator to do?

In translating poetry in particular, it helps to have a native speaker as a partner (in crime, some would argue), as I am honored to have in the accomplished poet, academic, and critic Wang Ao. Here’s an outline of how our cooperation works: Wang Ao does a preliminary literal translation from the original into English (a trot), and I try to transform that trot into a poem. Then we discuss the result (this consists of Wang Ao enthusiastically pointing out all the places I’ve gotten completely wrong), and I do another round of revisions with the goal of getting rid of errors and bringing in more of the original poem’s beauty. Rest a day or two. Repeat.

With each step of the process, we inch another toe-length along a tightrope. At any moment, we might fall into the abyss of abominable translation. Off to one side is the chasm of hyper-literal academic pedantry of the sort found in books filled with so many footnotes and commentary that the poem disappears on the page like a little brother trying to compete with his bigger, flashier, but in the end much less interesting sibling. To the other side is the deep dark pit of exoticism, in which the original poem is rendered in imagistic, breathy lines that perhaps convey the superficial brevity of ideograms, but can’t begin to capture the semantic and emotional content of the poem, let alone the structure as it operates in the original Chinese.

So what to do? Well, two choices: give up before you begin, or keep your eye fixed on the goal and just keep taking little wobbly steps forward.

Let me say before some readers get their dander up, I don’t mean to dismiss ‘translations’ like Pound’s famous “The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter”. One finds a lot of this sort of work floating around bookstore poetry sections. These poems are often beautiful in English, and can have a powerful effect on the reader, which is all a poet can hope for. But a serious translator can and must hope for more. Pound’s poem verges on being an original itself: it bears his authorial mark heavily, and departs often from the Li Bai 李白 poem on which it’s based. My intention isn’t to scold Pound (well, not for this, anyway), but rather to point out that all translations exist on an axis. Indeed, they exist in a manifold of many axes intersecting. One axis is that of foreignness and familiarity. One axis is that of structural mimicry, another of melodic mimicry. And one axis is that of semantic fidelity. In this last, arguably most important aspect, Pound pushes pretty far into the unfaithful range.  Cathay is a book of ‘poems inspired by’, not a book of ‘translations of’. And perhaps this claim wouldn’t have bothered Pound. (Although after reading his essay on translating Cavalcanti – which, by way of giving you a sense of the tone, includes this brilliant line: “It is stupid to overlook the lingual inventions of precurrent authors, even when they are fools or flapdoodles or Tennysons.” – I conclude it would have offended him greatly. But it shouldn’t.)

Simply put, Pound and his literary ilk undertook a different endeavor from the one Wang Ao and I have embarked on. We are looking to keep as close as possible to the original poem in voice, tone, meaning, structure, and emotional import, while simultaneously producing something readable in English. In fact, our ultimate goal is much more ambitious: an accurate translation that still functions as an original poem. As my dad always used to tell me as a kid (an idea he no doubt got from someone else, but I heard it first from him), only the impossible is worth doing.

Tomorrow, we’ll get on to the interesting stuff: a poem by the preeminent poet, Zang Di 臧棣.    –EG (顾爱玲)