Welcome to Chinese poetry - February 2006

April 13, 2006 The plainness of her language can be a little dispiriting at first, but it is a feature she has in common with other Mainland poets whose work has appeared on Poetry International Web (poets such as Yu Jian, Shuijing Zhulian and Song Xiaoxian). The model is nearer to colloquial speech rather than the language of books, and is a direct response to the degradation of language inflicted by decades of political double-speak, as well as the excesses of Romantic poetry, with its tendencies towards a seductive, vapid intricacy. Nevertheless, there is perhaps a subtle classicism at work in this gesture: a return to direct statement and austere, forthright values.

As it happens, you will find references to classical Chinese poetry scattered throughout Jun Er’s poetry. Just to give you one example, her poem ‘References’ opens with a catalogue of plainly stated commonplace images:

opposite me: roads, buildings, housing estates, people
opposite me: grass plots, trees, passers-by

I may be wrong, but I can hear a faint echo here of a poem entitled Qiu si (Autumn Thoughts) by the Yuan-dynasty poet Ma Zhiyuan which begins:

Withered vines, old trees, crows at dusk
A small bridge, flowing water, a few houses.

The link between the two poems hinges on the two characters ren jia. In Ma Zhiyuan’s poem, they mean “people’s houses” and so prompt the interpretation “a few houses” in the above translation. In contemporary Chinese, the same combination of characters generally means “others, everybody else”. I don’t have to tell you that this raises some beguiling difficulties for the translation process. At first, I was tempted to dismiss the “echo” as an idiotic figment of my imagination. However, I was disturbed by the nagging incongruity posed by Jun Er’s use of “passers-by” in the second line of her poem. Given the deliberate spareness of her opening, why would she refer to both “others” and “passers-by”, nouns that are virtually synonymous? It seemed downright thoughtless.

For this reason, I decided to follow my hunch and go with the echo. Of course, it is impossible to unravel the implications of this fully in translation, but I did amend my first line to read:

opposite me: roads, buildings, housing estates, a few houses

As you read ‘References’, then, you may find it fruitful to bear in mind Ma Zhiyuan’s classical intertext while you sift through Jun Er’s images and the feelings they evoke. The full text of Ma’s brief lyric is as follows:

Withered vines, old trees, crows at dusk
A small bridge, flowing water, a few houses.
An ancient road, a lean horse in the west wind.
The evening sun sinking in the west —
A heartbroken traveller still at the world’s end.

The autumn desolation expressed in this poem is not so far away from the fitful melancholy you will find in Jun Er as she goes on writing poetry “here in the land of the living”.

A Happy Chinese New Year to you all!