Passageways Between Cultures
Review of Trees Grow Lively on Snowy Fields: Poems from Contemporary China, translated by Stephen Haven, Jin Zhong, Li Yongyi, and Wang Shouyi (Twelve Winters Press, 2021).
By Brad Crenshaw
Trees Grow Lively on Snowy Fields is a generous collection of poems in translation selected from twelve major contemporary Chinese poets representing those voices that the Chinese literary world has considered influential over the last several decades. To read this anthology, therefore, is to circulate through the heart of current Chinese poetic styles and expression that have captured the attention of the reading public these days. The poets in this volume have been chosen from different generations of writers, and accordingly they represent the different social and political contexts they have lived through. Further, the writers also reflect the varying degrees of state interest and censorship they have received regarding their poetry—which is a danger most English-speaking poets have not had to face. American poets have their own worries, of course, but government suppression of their work is not among them.
Three of the poets in this volume, Mang Ke, Duo Duo, and Gu Cheng were born in the 1950’s, and were children during the Cultural Revolution when they were relocated with their families to the countryside in order to be re-educated. Mang Ke, for example, was compelled to learn early on how to couch his concerns and criticism obliquely with elliptical language, which we find displayed to such wonderful effect in his poem “Vineyard,” (translated by Stephen Haven and Wang Shouyi):
A small plot, a vineyard,
My own luscious land.
When the autumn wind walks through the door,
Bam, Bam, my whole home
Nothing but grapes heavy with tears.
The yard is darkened by one wall
From which a few pigeons take fright.
The children secret their dirty faces
Behind the house.
The dog that used to hang around here
Runs away somewhere.
A flock of red chickens fluttering
Clucking endlessly.
With my own eyes I see
Grapes falling to the ground,
Blood running in the fallen leaves.
This is the day of no peace.
Who can help desiring it?
This is the day of darkness.
That wind knocking powerfully on the front door demands admission to the private spaces within and, once inside, disrupts the various inhabitants, some of whom hide and take fright, while others—unnamed, unidentified—are caught and suffer for it, whose blood is running on the fallen leaves.
There is no explicit allusion to military intervention, to the arrival of the paramilitary gangs of the Red Guards. The poem is in code, which apparently fooled no one since Mang Ke, we are told, essentially spent his career underground. His poems appeared primarily as photocopies, not in officially published (and sanctioned) books. He was one of the two founders of an influential, underground journal, Jintian (Today), that published irregularly for two years between 1978 and 1980, before the government shut its operations down.
To an American audience used to the open declarations of emotional life, to the frank descriptions of intimate relations, and to the candid political manifestos of contemporary poetry, the indirections of the older poets such as Mang Ke, Duo Duo and Gu Cheng, offer a workbook of alternative poetic styles and techniques, a revelation of subtlety, craft, and insight not required of English-speaking poets, who write without the government looking over their shoulders—though their publication often requires a similar obedience to academic and critical authorities. Nonetheless, the stakes remain quite different. Open challenges to state-sanctioned conventions risked authoritarian punishments; Duo Duo and Gu Cheng both lived for many years in exile outside of China.
The younger poets collected in Trees Grow Lively on Snowy Fields appear freer to offer their appraisals directly, and seem less constrained by the long tradition of Chinese poetics. For instance, we commonly find in their poems a longer, looser verse line unconfined by formal syllabic strictures. Among these writers we also enjoy the routine use—at least as represented by the four translators—of the spoken vernacular, rather than a distinctly literary form of language. Further, we have as well a greater emphasis of personal, individual points of view. In those instances when a persona is chosen to represent the poet’s thoughts and feelings, the choice of representative is itself individual, as we will see below. In sum, these writers have chosen to enter a world-wide community of poets with whom aesthetics might be shared at large among writers publishing largely on the internet.
Tong Wei, one of the several female poets in this collection, is a case in point. She is carefully lyrical in her declarations and appears aware of Western influences in her rhetorical strategies in this excerpt from her poem “Little Puppet” (translated by Stephen Haven and Li Yongyi):
Whose penetrating fingers
Manipulated her little heart?
She speaks of an orphaned
Homunculus perched
On the tip of a flower.
Trees stretching into the sky
Race past, crowned with antlers
The blue mirror breaks
Hands like caterpillars from trees
Dangling down to the grass
She pulls at the string of light,
The little black heart craving for the moon,
Rattling in the silver box
Her use of a puppet to represent her subjective experience is an imaginative strategy that allows her to emphasize the degree of external control over behavior and attitudes—the ‘strings’ that are attached to and govern her actions. The metaphor is not meant to avoid a candid statement of her feminist values, in the way that Mang Ke needed to disguise his political commentary, but instead to characterize them, and thereby highlight the intrusive, material control. She makes explicit what once needed to be hidden, or approached indirectly. Times have changed, at least to a degree, and at least for the present.
In Wang Jiaxin’s poem “Staircase” (translated by Stephen Haven and Jin Zhong),we find the poet offering specific, concrete autobiographical details that literally house the workings of his own mental life. In these lines the poet is interested in subjective, interior spaces, and makes no mention at all about the external forms of governance that direct thought and constrain behaviors—which has been the routine subject of the poetry elsewhere in this anthology.
STAIRCASE
written in my old home at the Gate of Peace
Every time I spiral up
The dangerous stairs,
With slow steps
I reach the door
Turn on the light
Like some worn ceremony
I come back to these stairs
Again they lead me up
Through darkness
I do not take out my key
Instead, I raise my hand to knock
As if somebody were waiting for me
Maybe, inside the apartment
My old self many years ago
Will open the darkness
By informing the reader that this staircase is precisely the one to be found in his home—and then by specifying where that home is to be found, Wang Jiaxin embeds his thoughts deeply within a public, identifiable time and place. Such identifications are made routinely in American poetry, but are rare even among contemporary Chinese poets. His strategy is daring. He might almost be giving out his telephone number, his GPS coordinates. He wants to be found, precisely the subject of the poem itself. “Staircase” is the poet’s meditation on his own personal “darkness,” which is an emblem at once of his subdued emotional tone, and also the opacity of his psychic life. Who is he? He wants to know. His present self is indebted to his lived past, but that recognition does not provide insight into the sources of his moods and ideas. The poem ends with that “Maybe,” which is to say he has hopes for future enlightenment, although he is momentarily frustrated.
I have offered in this review only one poem each of three poets out of the twelve writers that are collected in Trees Grow Lively on Snowy Fields. This is necessarily a small sampling. The other poets are Lan Lan, Li Yongyi, Mo Fei, Tang Danhong, Yang Jian, Yu Nu, Zheng Min, and the aforementioned Duo Duo and Gu Cheng. My intention has been to offer glimpses of the rich field of poetry offered by the four translators Stephen Haven, Wang Shouyi, Li Yongyi, and Jin Zhong. The first of these four, Stephen Haven is an American poet based currently at Lesley University, who has spent two Fulbright Fellowships teaching in China (1990-91; 1997-1998) and a third half-year (spring 2011) by invitation as a visiting professor in China teaching at Chongqing University. During his teaching and study in China, he encountered his fellow translators and developed relationships that by now extend to thirty years. Together they have given us a concise anthology of influential poets practicing in China today, and have introduced a breadth of poetic styles and subject matter to an English-speaking audience. The book also represents a remarkable partnership among four poets and translators originating from differing parts of the world, and native to different languages. Over the course of a thirty-year collaboration, they have created lovely translations that offer passageways between distinctly different cultures.
Brad Crenshaw has authored five poetry collections, including My Gargantuan Desire and Genealogies. His fifth book, Memphis Shoals, is due to be published in February, 2022. His poems have appeared in magazines (Shenandoah, Chicago Review, Massachusetts Review, Faultline, and others), and in anthologies (Bear Flag Republic, California Fire and Water). He has recently published literary essays on Aracelis Girmay and Ross Gay. He can be found at Blue Islands, Blue as Ink.
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