Sincerity and Resistance to the Suffering at Our Backs
Song Xiaoxian is serious. I don’t mean by this that his use of language echoes a manner initiated by some Great Master of a recent epoch and now regarded as a classic; no, I refer to his spirit and his emotions. This seriousness is something Song Xiaoxian has in the marrow of his bones, something with its origins in an unpretentious village culture. When Song Xiaoxian writes, village objects and village experience form a backdrop that is indispensable to his work. The grain stalks and straw, asters, clumps of grass, reed-flowers, birds, jujube-red horses, stars . . . and the succession of the seasons he writes about—all these images—images that bear the birthmark of the village—bring about a precipitation of the poet’s feelings and dreams.
Because the poet adopts the viewpoint of a child in his treatment of these experiences and personal life-lessons, these man-made features in close proximity to nature . . . do not merely possess a warm, moist humidity and temperature; they are also meant to confront, in some sense, the current state of the world. The poet’s roots are in the village, and his emotions are directed at simplicity and straightforwardness, even though the reality of the village is also something that he strives at all costs to escape. This complex emotion allows him to be unusually attentive to the happiness and the suffering of those on the bottom rungs of society. His poems “When the Common People Are Sad”, {id="1121" title="“Child of Sorrow”"} and “Song of the Casual Labourer” are works written in this vein. In “Riding Home in a Boxcar”, the poet writes with a powerful feeling of grief: “men and women are crowded together / just as if / there was a czar in everybody’s hearts / as if they were all being taken away to the hinterland of Siberia . . .”.
A poet is a mass of contradictions: these people rushing about for the sake of existence are not that same—it goes without saying—as those Soviet revolutionaries and intellectuals who were sent into exile back in the old days; their level of forbearance, however, is comparable. Those revolutionaries actively devoted their lives to an ideal, while these people are beasts of burden. Having had their thinking worn down by the hardships of existence, they know only labour: “on chilly days / in my homeland / the people are more kind-hearted / remaining silent like a herd of cattle / even when they weep there is no sound.” The poem {id="1111" title="“A Life”"} goes even further, recounting events to spell out the lifelong humiliations and destiny of people on the lowest rungs of society.
Pain is part and parcel of this sobriety. Pain, in its turn, is held back deep inside to become a kind of force, a force which impels the poet to give expression to these entangling, complicated feelings and experiences. Generally speaking, pain produces three different reactions in people: the first is an endless pouring out of one’s troubles, the second is silence, and the third is resistance. Song Xiaoxian‘s reaction belongs to the third type, but the resistance he opts for is not that of the defiant, tragic hero with fiercely staring eyes—he is well aware that he does not possess that kind of force. No, what he has inherited is “that painful legacy” (“My Dad’s Legacy”) of his native place, and so he opts for another form of response, a response that—even as he grimaces with agony—enables him to utter a venomous, truth-revealing howl at that alien force.
However, this prolonged pain and the poison that comes with it has not at all captured the poet’s basic emotions, his solicitude, and that childlike love of life; nor has it deflected him from his serious attitude towards human existence. He feels compassion for the weak, loving concern for life, fond remembrance of the place he grew up in, for his relatives, as well as pure emotions and happiness. In the poems “Sound of Reading at Dawn”, “Trivial Household Chores” and “Ants”, the poet senses the warmth and brightness of living just as an innocent child does. The poet seems to have feelings for all creatures such as ants, squirrels and horses. Such feelings have their source in the poet’s deep realization of, and respect for, all forms of existence.
I get an intense, two-fold experience when reading Song Xiaoxian’s poetry. The first of these is a pleasure in his poetic language; the other is the sharp spiritual edges of those words and expressions which, from time to time, stab through our experience and pity, despite the fact that they have been gradually hardened in the hustle and bustle of the city. This has something to do perhaps with the poet’s values and his aspirations in terms of poetics. The poet takes writing seriously, but there is nothing deadly earnest about him. His use of language tends towards a type of spontaneous flow. As the poet himself puts it: “My original intention was to do serious work, but funny lines kept showing up on the scene all the time so that I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.” Needless to say, Song Xiaoxian’s spontaneity has a deep grounding in poetry. Perhaps it is precisely because he avoids the unthinking flow of “worked” words that his poetry is so neat and orderly, going straight to the heart of the matter, easy to read and able to stand the test of repeated readings. As well, Song Xiaoxian’s poems are distinctive. Perhaps I could put it this way: the absence of difficulty in Song Xiaoxian’s poetry is exactly what makes him impossible to imitate or to repeat. As Zeng Meng said: “Inimitability determines that the individuality of a poet is independent of the meaning of the text, and is the final breakthrough for a mode of life becoming independent of ways of living.” In this sense, Song Xiaoxian is fortunate indeed.
Translated by Simon Patton
First published on the Chinese site eLong.com
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