The Best American Poetry

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)