In the Same Light: 200 Poems for Our Century from the Migrants & Exiles of the Tang Dynasty, trans. Wong May (The Song Cave, 2022)

I have read poems in Chinese! Because I don’t know, for example, Korean, translations of it are simpler for me to enjoy, not shadowed by rhythms, syllables, or non-memories of a life where I returned to China like I thought I would when I lived there for a year in high school. I approach Tang poetry twisted, on top of my insecurity that I’m insufficiently wet for poetry. But I wanted this book to belong to me—I went out in the rain and bought it—to try Tang poetry again as I continue to become less of a bitch.

In the Same Light: 200 Poems for Our Century from the Migrants & Exiles of the Tang Dynasty (2022) is an offering from the translator, Wong May, who was born in China, lived in Singapore, Iowa, and now Ireland, where she writes poetry, paints, and domesticates with a physicist. The Tang dynasty (618-907) is, from what I hear, most Chinese people’s favorite dynasty. She decided to do this project from a hospital bed in Beijing when “the language was happening to [her] on a different level.” Wong creates poems “for our century” by breaking the forms of classical Chinese poems and curving them to impact an ear that has been listening to English poetry from the last one hundred years. She does not mimic qualities like rhyme or regular line length. A quatrain forms a precise rectangle in the Chinese, while Wong’s dangle down the page like a weeping willow. White space, forward slashes, and ampersands = drama, rest, and emphasis.

In her 100-plus-page afterword, Wong states the goal for the translator and the poet is to disappear, so that the reader can cohabit the act of creation with the poet. Historical context and elucidation on Chinese philosophy branch off of 志 zhi, 神 shen, 文 wen, roughly defined as excellence and knowledge, spirit, and literature (in addition to the better known 仁 ren and 道 dao, benevolence and way). Wong’s capacious and intimate analyses familiarize readers with the humor and flourishes of her voice, like how she proves a point with abrupt eye contact: “You know what I mean?!” For example, here she shows her passion as I imagine her swaying at a party wearing overlong pieces of shimmery fabric:

Vikram Seth’s translation (1992) mirrors the tight box of the original and attempts to preserve rhymes: “Sweet-voiced, leaf-screened, unheard, a yellow oriole calls.” In “A Little Primer of Tu Fu” (1967), David Hawkes translates poems into prose paragraphs that make the poets’ voices sound immediate and pedestrian. Hawkes’s book makes you work for the poem, gathering line by line literal translations and exegesis so you can translate it into poetic form yourself. His version is: “Beyond the trees a yellow oriole sings its glad song unheard.”

Wong’s afterword is like a confession that clears the way for readers to experience the poems as they are—her interpretations. She wants them to be felt. Collectively, the poetry community can’t experience the poems in the original—pronunciations have evolved over the centuries anyway (although even with the sounds of modern Chinese, poems can be so concise and specific, it hits like the miraculous). But this loss we don’t have time to mourn, so if Mary Ruefle is right that “a poem must rival physical experience,” what kinds of physical experiences might we be in for here? These poems have some offerings for our crowd: animism, the sensorial, landscape, communion, negation, emptiness, to say what is missing, longing for a friend, and the absence of an I*, what to do with mist, mountains, the moon, the faraway friend.

The first line of the famous Wang Wei poem “Deer Park” describes emptiness and absence:

Finding consensus about what’s missing is a political conversation. In difficult relationships, when I can’t articulate what’s missing, I can’t/don’t leave. Once you say what’s missing, it becomes possible to change where you are.

A couple common phrases begin with the character that negates: “you’re welcome” and “good,” which are, respectively, 不客气 “don’t be polite” and 不错 “not wrong.” The places you are not outnumber where you are. The “correct” suggested by “not wrong” is bigger than “right.” You don’t ever have to arrive at “right” to be 不错 “not wrong,” which in my experience was often the highest praise on offer (from Chinese-speaking figures of authority).

Poetry can bring someone closer. Bo Yao’s “For Zhang Yuan Fan” exemplifies the endearing synonym for friend, 知音 “know music.”

More distance separates strangers on a bench than friends separated by land and war. A grieving wanderer is like a pregnant person taking in for one plus. I once lost a friend, and later when major events happened in the world, he would distinctly feel present as I took in something he wouldn’t know. I am here where you are not.

Last winter, my second cousin M, who was born in Beijing, moved to Halifax, Canada with his wife and daughter. The rest of my Chinese-American relatives immigrated to the United States in the 1950s and 60s. This move felt sudden and wasn’t expected, but my cousin is, from what I can tell, a political dissident—at heart, if not in the streets. (If he were, I wouldn’t tell you.) In China, he was critical of the government but said that friends do not talk about politics. It could be held against you and show up who knows how or when. Gatherings are discouraged and a community space he went to was shut down. Despite the passion driving his departure, he keeps teaching his 9-year-old Chinese so that she will be able to read poetry—and that’s the only reason why. He asked me for the equivalent in English, where it is beautiful and bitterly untranslatable. Help. I said maybe hope is a thing with feathers.

A couple weeks ago, I read Meng Hao Ren poems to my friend Nico Gregorits on the autumn beach from In the Same Light. She’s more sensitive to beauty and life than I am, IMO. She said,

By omitting the word Chinese from the title and including Tang, migrants, and exiles instead, Wong implores English readers to consider Chinese culture as one that cultivates dissidents. There have always been writers of Chinese who oppose authorities and the corruption of power. Some of the writers in this book escaped to the mountains, living off bark and berries after they were cast out, demoted, or persecuted by a new ruling group. She writes in the afterword, “the exile’s moon lights up differently than the court-appointed moon”—just as the Chinese language is contested territory, lit up or in shadow depending on who’s speaking, and in what context. How do we listen? It’s possible Tang poetry can alter how we listen and imagine being heard and observed. Mountain ranges of this metropolis are observed by poets I know. Thirty seven windows remember my last visit, becoming bright between us. Our surroundings are animated by the writing of peers you admire.

* Note
François Cheng (1977): “The effort to avoid, as much as possible, the three grammatical persons is a matter of conscious choice. It gives birth to a language that places the personal subject in a particular relationship with beings and things. In erasing itself, or rather in choosing only to imply its presence, the subject interiorizes the exterior element… the daily ramble of the hermit is presented as the very movement of the cosmos” (Chinese Poetic Writing, 35). The exchange of elements goes in both directions; without personal pronouns, the cosmos becomes more alive as individual subjects “dissolv[e] into an indivisible whole.”