WORDS AS GRAIN: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS by Duo Duo, Translated from the Chinese and Edited by Lucas Klein (Yale Margelos)

GHOSTS CITY SEA by Wang Yin, Translated by Andrea Lingenfelter (Seaweed Salad Editions)

Here are two new translations of important and wonderful Chinese poets, by two of the finest contemporary translators of Chinese literature. A northerner and a southerner. One was already adolescent during the Cultural Revolution, the other a primary school student. The whole poem can never be translated, of course; the musicality of Chinese does not translate, while English’s tension between Latinate and demotic, between written and spoken, is entirely different from Chinese’s interplay of phrasing between written and spoken, imported and revived terminology. These two poets speak to the reader, without the formality of direct address in classical poetry, but without losing the paratactic and indeterminate potential of the classical tradition. That acknowledged, both Lucas Klein and Andrea Lingenfelter, consistently achieve the impossible and bring the poetry into English. They recreate voices for the poets themselves, which do not resemble their invisible interpreters. Both books have useful introductions, with biographic, anecdotal and critical context.

Duo Duo (the pen-name of Li Shizheng), the elder of the two, was already a prominent “Misty” poet when he boarded a plane to London to participate in a poetry reading. An accident of itinerary: it was June 4, 1989, and he didn’t return to China until 2004. WORDS AS GRAIN covers the entirety of his writing life, pre-, during, and post-exile. Exile is a common state for poets, in any tradition (Ovid in Romania, but equally Su Dongpo in China’s far south) but that doesn’t make it welcome:

But his poetry is more than the exile’s lament, and beyond either the hopes of the early reform era or their subsequent crushing first by armed force and then by raging capital. Surrealist poetry, loosely speaking, seeks to produce or transmit an emotional message that resists paraphrase or explanation, jumping over logical connections. Duo Duo, especially in his more recent poems, is situated in:

So, he is something of a surrealist.

This might be illuminated by the final line – “tonight is the night of our divorce” but is it really clear? There are three persons here – the piano, the goldfish and the obtuse sea. What’s going on?

Like poets anywhere, Duo Duo rails against language:

And he writes beautifully of love and marriage, directly addressing the other in the sequence “The Desire of the Rose Now the Same as the Desire of Swords” (pp. 112-122).

Wang Yin, eleven years younger than Duo Duo, is Shanghainese, with a day job as art critic and journalist at Southern Weekly, a leading liberal newspaper. He has traveled internationally, but not as an exile. (One of the added delights of GHOSTS CITY SEA is a portfolio of Wang’s photography, with images from around the world, Chicago as well as Thailand). As Ms. Lingenfelter notes in her introduction, he is as much at home in Paris as in Shanghai. His journeys have a place in his poems:

In China, no less than the rest of the world, the poet cannot avoid politics. Back in 2008, Wang Yin, in a teahouse with other poets and his translator, responded to the question: “to say [my poetry] is political is wrong, but to say it isn’t political is also wrong.” Words are always carrying extra weight: the storm is more than just meteorology:

Shanghai (literally, “above the sea”), that marvelous city, is alive in Wang’s poetry:

Beyond this lovely selection, next July NYRB Poets will issue A SUMMER DAY IN THE COMPANY OF GHOSTS, a full-scale selected poems – so think of this as a preview of Wang Yin’s coming attractions.