Z H A N G E R
__________________________________________PREFACE: A SHIMMERING WINDOW
from the forthcoming
Talisman Anthology of Contemporary Chinese Poetry
A shimmering window might be an unusual metaphor for a book of contemporary Chinese poetry in translation. The work gathered here was collected from 24 authors born in the 60s and 70s whose work began to appear in publication and gain attention mainly in the 90s and after. “Shimmering” is a star, a state of charged energy, of movement and instability, of self-reflection and self examination as if between a window and a mirror. “Shimmering” evokes tears welled in rapture and in despair. A window in such a state is best admired or gazed at as an object of examination rather than a transparency through which to look for something else, be it political, social or even cultural. Yet, from time to time if one stares long enough with patience and careful gauging, a landscape with scenery and characters emerges from such a window as it changes and transforms itself, as if seen from a boat on the river of the long tradition of Chinese poetry. The occurrence of these scenes and characters, like the unique tense of Chinese verbs, is at once past, present and perhaps future. We call it “contemporary” only in consideration of the fact that the poets in this anthology are very much alive and are in their early to mid-career of writing and publishing.
The scenery they portray is no longer the natural or bucolic landscape of mountains and rivers, moons and clouds, flowers and birds, vast fields and lonely horses in classical Chinese poetry, as represented in the English language by poets like Wang Wei (701-761), Li Po (Li Bai, 701-762), Tu Fu (Du Fu, 712-770), and Su Tung-p'o (Su Dongpo, 1036-1101), to name only a few. The stage may be similar yet the scenes are replaced by contemporary phenomena, urban streets and crowds. Let's look at a few lines from poets in the anthology: “a girl's dorm and the cheap red lamp,” “Carbohydrate surplus. Calcium deficiency.../the smiling candy devours her.” “their pile of clay of offspring/their pile of clay Ph.Ds.”, of Cao Shuying; “ She fell for a foul-mouthed employee-of-the-month. / After he gets off work, he hides his bonus in a sock.” “Snow began to fall, the train entered the station / the director agreed it should begin this way,” of Han Bo; “but the layout of the suburb was that of a labyrinth, puzzling the nearsighted magpie / whereupon, he ran even more slowly, and almost crept / for fear that he would tread upon the newly-shed shells (from those schoolward kids moments ago)” by Jiang Tao; “I see the photoflash flash and flash, perfectly round, slightly sour / autumn pears copiously occupy the free market, their butts / slapped by long poles…” described Tang Danhong; “ Mr. Zhang San rides through town on a minibus” of Zhou Zan clearly illustrates a world different before the encounter of Chinese culture with the West. It brought in the dramatic and irreversible modern language / new literature movement at the turn of the last century in the Chinese language world, which bore the fruit of Modern Chinese poetry. Hong Kong poet Huang Canran vividly captures this on-going encounter on a micro-level in his poem, Translation. The encounter is the translation. What to add, what to delete, how to modify, how to convey and how to maintain the vitality of each are all part of the process. This of course is the situation of our time, when cultures developed relatively independently over thousand of years, each with its unique history, now crowd into the same global village, face to face, shoulder to shoulder. Yet, as Lü De-an puts it, “kids in threes and fives / Skate toward the infinite night of inertia, and when coming back / Already grownups bring more kids with them / More light,” “The world never changes much at all.” Or has it? And the poetics?
Modern Chinese poetry has over the past hundred years broken away from the forms of classical Chinese poetry, in a feverish search for a media that is more versatile to handle the swarm of new information, technology, and changed conceptions of the world after the encounter with the West. The experimentation of the 20s and 30s with “free verse” and writing in vernacular was truncated by the anti-Japanese war and the civil war, then the communist movement in the mainland and anticommunist campaign in Taiwan, which lasted from the late 30s to the 60s. During the long haul, poetry and all forms of literature and art were subordinated to the demand of the national crisis as vehicles of propaganda messages (with the exception of Hong Kong, which was under British rule and was paradoxically exempt from such political pressure). Renewed experimentation with poetic language in the 60s in Taiwan was in marked contrast to the unfortunate fiasco of the “cultural revolution” on the mainland, during which all traces of culture, be it Western or Eastern, were literally stripped and marred with red paint. Yet, poetry is as resilient as exquisite flowers. Disasters of fire, flood, trampling, draught and deep freeze somehow provide nutrients in its slumber, which furnish dream and imagination, deepen its root, strengthening yet sensitizing its nerves, and finally when the spring comes enrich its displays.
For readers who are interested in a closer examination of the contemporary Chinese poetry scene in mainland China since 1966, from the eve of the turmoil of the “cultural revolution” till now, the introduction in Chinese to the book written by Chen Dongdong, a prolific poet from Shanghai, my co-editor, would be a good place to start.
As there have been two recent anthologies by Michelle Yeh devoted to Taiwan poets, this anthology focuses on Chinese poets elsewhere in the world. Although these poets were born and grew up in China, several poets in the anthology live outside China, or at least have spent a substantial amount of time abroad. L ü De-an is bi-coastal, traveling between Fujian on the coast of South China Sea and New York City on the Atlantic coast. After years of correspondence, I first met Chen Dongdong in New York City when he was a resident at the Yaddo poetry colony. Ma Lan lives in New Haven, CT. Yang Xiaobin completed his Ph.D. at Yale and now teaches at University of Mississippi. Zhang Zhen lived in Europe and Japan after she left China and now teaches film at New York University. Zhang Zao earned his Ph.D. from Tü bingen University in Germany. Hu Xudong taught in Brazil for three years. Zang Di is a professor at Beijing University but he taught for a while in UC, Davis, edited the Chinese translation of Rilke and travels widely. Huang Canran, a professional translator of English for a newspaper, makes his home in Hong Kong, as does Cao Shuying. Shu Cai was a diplomat of the Chinese embassy in Senegal and has translated several French authors into Chinese, including Pierre Reverdy, Rene Char, and Yves Bonnefoy. Zhao Xia has translated work of Paul Celan and Gunter Grass into Chinese, writes an English language column for a Chinese newspaper and lives in Stuttgart, Germany and Nanjing. The list goes on. Does this exposure to other cultures and languages contribute to their poetry and alter their poetics? Does it make them somehow different from poets of the past like Qu Yuan, the first known Chinese poet (around 330 BC in Chu State), Li Po, Tu Fu and Su Tung-p'o, who among their contemporaries traveled widely either by choice or by forced exile, to cultures other than that of the Han Chinese?
One thing is certain though: the poets here should not be looked upon as exotic others living in remote corners or from isolated cults. They are very much a part of the contemporary world with a decentralized cultural landscape, linked by Internet, cables and air/land traffic routes, under the shadow of looming globalization. By looking at them, we look at ourselves and our own world.
I recall comments by the American poets the individual styles of the poets whom they were translating: Ashbery-like in one case, Mallarmé and Rebour in another, Robert Frost in a third. I can also see Stevens, Dickinson, Eliot, Yeats in others—as well as Qu Yuan and the Book of Songs style (600 BC). The Yue Fu style (Ballad-Songs of the Bureau of Music in the Han Dynasty, 200 BC-200 AD) and its mimics from Wei and Jin Dynasty and Six Dynasties (around 300-500 AD) are especially relevant here, perhaps in terms of the narrative nature of certain poems and the abstract lyric quality of others.
Buddhism, Taoism, Christianity and a lingering communism found their vocabularies and ideology in these poets' work. Yang Jian, a Buddhist monk, wrote about the lost way, “a vivid light— / only few recognize / and walk out on it”. In his floating world , a duck with a “calm face” cries out our inside omen and “vague stress.” After the wishful declaration, “Life consists of letting days pass…/ It's over, over, over… / Yes, everything will pass,” Shu Cai continues, “But there is a little boy wedged between two iron bars. / He is crying. He is struggling. His future.” In fisherman Sun Tai's world, “angels”, “Cross”, “Heaven” and “Hell” entangle, yet “after descending to the sea”, Lü De-An tells us in his long poem Mankato, “without the sermonic air, we / breathe freely, surrounded by the light of sea stars, deadly quiet for thousand years.” Song Ke quotes Hsiang Hsiu's Lamentations for Bygone Days and Eugene Pottier's The Internationale in the same breath, and then remembers his meeting with a Taoist priest when hiking up the Qian-Mountain at sunrise. Zhang Zhen's Revolution (1989) is a far cry from things that the US news media would be interested in, “Revolution and I have parted company / Pour my sangfroid into the refrigerator / God places His hand on my heart, / His face upon the tip of my hair / Says, You made a mistake / Little girl, for you yourself are the Revolution.” Zhao Xia's Stuttgart Christmas shaped like a Christmas tree, features presents at foot of the evergreen tree: “a brand new portable radio / that perhaps rebuilds us earthlings”, together with her contemplation on life, “Everyone would be born a plastic shelled boat in / perpetual motion, sinking and / floating with cool fashion.”
Yes, these poets are sponges—lakes and sea absorbing what the world offers from their personal life and experiences, from poetic traditions of their own culture and of cultures through encounter with others. Their work is complicated, filled with conflicted thoughts and emotions, which demand various writing strategies, as well as a wide range vocabularies and forms. Their aesthetic stand, if I can speak for them, is in stark contrast with the conventional Western view of Chinese poetry's “pure, natural, clean, concise imagism.” For sure, they use plenty of images, but they use them in their messy and maximum way, along with many other strategies. Their view of the Chinese language, as reflected by these writings in Chinese characters, is holistic: the images of things themselves, the human perception and understanding of things, and the human voices that name them. At the root of the Chinese writing system (the characters) live things themselves, not just the images kept as records but the acceptance of things themselves, things that do not need explanation or even to have a fixed articulated name. Human perspective, reasoning and voice are somehow treated in the Chinese language as secondary or even arbitrary. Yet, as we shall see below, this “thing” is not that “thing”—the objective natural world—so often mistaken by Western poets when reading Chinese poetry.
The poetics represented here fundamentally embrace that system of understanding underlined by the Chinese metaphysical concept of “Heaven and Human are one”— which denies separation of the subject and the object. This knowledge does not involve exclusively human's perspectives dissecting / understanding / observing / experimenting / categorizing / contemplating nature. True knowledge, in this respect, can't be determined, given that mind and matter are the same, and observer and observed are one. Such knowledge is fluid and multi-directional in time and space. The human is not the only the active participant in the game of knowledge. “Heaven” is more powerful, more knowing and more ubiquitous. Yet “Heaven” does not equal “God/gods” in the Western sense. “Heaven” entails the universe and the reasoning that embraces us all— and is part of things.
The apparent lack of syntactical structure, the non-directional collages of image and action in the work collected derives not merely from pure aesthetic considerations for “noninterference with Nature's flow” as the poet and scholar Wai-Lim Yip put it, but more fundamentally from the requirement of such metaphysical understanding. Eza Pound instinctively picked up on this feature of the classical Chinese poetry, and brought it to the West as a new technique to enrich its poetic artillery without realizing the philosophical significance or the distinct difference of the Chinese definition on “things.” He was ingenious in attributing the feature to the Chinese writing system and its pictographic aspect—which lead him to invent imagism. Yet he still missed the metaphysical point at the bottom of it all… “No ideas but in things” demonstrates just how narrowly William Carlos Williams and some imagists missed the essence of the Eastern thinking. The philosophical discussion of this fundamental Eastern ideology and its profound influence on the Eastern culture lies beyond the scope of this preface. Matin Heidegger, for one, among the western thinkers, had a serious dialogue with the East… But here, let me merely focus on how the poetics of these texts manifest these broader issues.
In Chinese, it is perfectly natural for “flowers to share tears” when the poet experiences an emotional moment (Tu Fu), as when the “heaven”/nature/things rule or sense human. It is equally apt when “equipped with the spring's clockwork, the winter moves in the snowfield” (Mo Fei), or when “Some water is unable to stir, / because of its good conscience, or because / the third person tells the second person / that the heart of the first person is dead. / Some water dehydrates them. (Zang Di); After asking “Are you dangling from my eyelashes?” Hu Xudong finds the answer, “Only then do I see it: /the waterfall upstream shines bright, flows clear, / just the way you look when you rush out, shimmering, / from inside this body of mine”; Ye Hui understands “ with every tree there is / a life of someone living, a tree cut down / but its life still extends / it turns into board, is made into a wedding bed / on which people bear sons and raise daughters, so on / and so forth, circling without end”; Ma Lan chooses her seat carefully, “ I sit on a block of ice, / Water beneath me. / I sit in his house. / To the left and right are years carried by the wind like confetti. / I touch some books that are crawling across the floor./ They grow thinner as they trek,…/ I sit outside his house,…/ I sit in my own mind, / Remain there so long / I become a package, a bundle of herbs…/ then return to sit on the block of ice, / The current flowing beneath me.” These tenseless lines move in a non-linear, illogical or irrational fashion, vibrating and changing.
The difficulty in translation created by such writing is significant. Translators, who are poets not unfamiliar with imagism or other post-Poundian multi-perspective writing strategies, are nevertheless perplexed by the seemingly arbitrary usage of the personal pronouns in many poets' work, as well as the fluid shifting of perspectives, the animation of thing without any pre-warning, the tenseless transition of events defying linear time line even when the poem is telling a story or following an obvious plot. If nature and human are one, the subjective and objective are one, mind is matter, the conception of the world is not a human-centered activity, then the lack of “I” in many Chinese poets' work becomes perfectly understandable. The absence of “I” is the manifestation of a presence every where, by every thing. Things have mind, rather things ARE mind, or in Williams' term, ideas are things. Animation is therefore unnecessary. The lake is the cherished girl, whose presence/absence still affects “you” (See Zang Di's Weiming Lake). We don't know whose presence or absence are being discussed here, be it the girl or the lake. Walking around the lake offers sweetness, then saltiness, or is it the lovers' relationship that is hinted at here? Is “you” the poet or the girl or the lake? Who are “they,” appearing unexplained and starting to play roles in the passage of the work?
These writers' poems sometimes have the quality of dialogues between interchangeable partners. Everything in a poem, I mean everything, is fluid: there is no fixed reference frame. Everything is open to everything else. “I” turns into you, he, she, it, we, they etc. Time and space are “things”, as well as other abstract thoughts and concepts. Things tend to know themselves better than humans, who are simply other “things.” The prepositional words to position them and pin them down in turn become meaningless or even misleading in such a flow. Is pan-perspectival the best word to convey this lack of a human-centered epistemological view?
On the other hand, like other Indo-European languages, English is a phonetic language (i.e. it records the human voice to name things), and therefore it assumes a human perspective and human-centered knowledge. The foundation for such a knowledge is the philosophical separation of mind and matter, of subjective and objective. Readers of the English translations of the Chinese poetry in this anthology need to keep in mind that the translators have to make some brave adjustments in English, in order to re-create the energetic fluidity of the internal and external world where these Chinese poets dwell. My postface for the book outlines the work process of this complicated and challenging endeavor.
To say the poets selected for the anthology embrace this Chinese poetic tradition and aesthetics does not mean that these poets do not have other strategies or poetics at their disposal in their work, nor that the editors intend to define therefore restrict what these Chinese poetics and aesthetics represent. In the Chinese sense, these poetics are constantly changing—they do not “develop” with a linear direction but more like a wave tracing a cyclic movement over time. The work collected here by these poets whom we believe share a similar conception of the world are the best statement of these poetics.
Many poets whose work the editors admire greatly are not included in the anthology. Works of many of the poets born before 1960 have been previously translated into English, and anthologized or published as individual collections. Most poets in this anthology have been translated into English for the first time. Poets we feel do not share the poetics delineated above, or poets who have just started their writing career and begun to publish interesting work are left for future anthologies.
In a sense, the translation stages the translator more than anything else. The consistent fascination of the American experimental poetry wing with Chinese poetry from Pound on is a phenomenon in itself that needs to be examined in light of what the Chinese can offer here (Eliot Weinberger has written an informative introduction to The New Directions Anthology of Classical Chinese Poetry on the topic). Many American poets involved in the translation have communicated to me that they enjoyed the translation process and learned a great deal as a result.
It is our hope that readers will find that this shimmering window, created by the collective efforts of Chinese and American poets with the linguistic translators, opens on something beautiful and innovative. Beautiful and innovative, not because it presents an exotic scenery on the other side, but because it illuminates a different way to look at ordinary things around us and the way things look back at us.
Zhang Er
Olympia and Taipei
11/7-25/05
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