Xi Chuan intertwines the mountains and roads of Xinjiang with insects and mythical beasts, ghosts and sacred spirits with chess and a Sanskrit inscription

Xi Chuan, Notes on the Mosquito: Selected Poems, Trans. by Lucas Klein, New Directions, 2012.

 “In the crevices of history, mosquitoes are everywhere,” Xi Chuan writes. Notes on the Mosquito introduces English readers to one of the most revered poets of contemporary China. Gaining recognition as a post-Misty poet in the late ’80s, Xi Chuan was famous for his condensed, numinous lyricism, and for radiating classical Chinese influences as much as Western modernist traditions. After the crushing failure of Tiananmen Square and the death of two of his closest friends, he stopped writing for three years. He re-emerged transformed: he began writing meditative, expansive prose poems that dismantled the aestheticism and musicality of his previous self. Divided into two sections that hinge around this formal break, Notes on the Mosquito offers the greatest hits of a deeply engaging poet, whose work intertwines the mountains and roads of Xinjiang with insects and mythical beasts, ghosts and sacred spirits with chess and a Sanskrit inscription.

“In 1988, when he was twenty-five, Xi Chuan and some friends launched an unofficial literary journal, Tendency. At the time, he was translating Ezra Pound and Tomas Tranströmer, Czeslaw Milosz and Jorge Luis Borges, and his own writing suggests a corresponding sophistication and aesthetic range.” - Robert Hass

“Xi Chuan is one of the most influential poets in contemporary China.” Poetry International Web

“Xi Chuan's surprising poems reach into tight corners of mind and matter, impersonal but intimate, new to be heard but also oddly familiar. An impressive voice — bold and calm.”— Gary Snyder 

Xi Chuan has been famous in China (and not just in China) since the 1980s. Until this year, however, there have been no book-length English translations of his poetry. So reading this new career survey from New Directions and translator Lucas Klein, Notes on the Mosquito: Selected Poems, feels like discovering a strange and exhilarating new region of world poetry. Some notes on what one finds there:
At the start, a tight and concise lyric poetry evoking cityscapes, railroad bridges, mountains, cypresses, and wind. One gets the sense that these cities are real -- Xi Chuan has lived most of his life in Beijing and is nothing if not a Beijing poet -- but at the same time dream cities. He began publishing his poems in the late '80s; his early poems follow the “Obscure” (menglong) poets in their registering of psychological states and social criticisms through stark but mysterious images. The Obscure group -- Bei Dao, Duo Duo, Gu Cheng, Yang Lian, and their comrades -- was the most vital force in Chinese poetry when Xi Chuan began publishing, and it’s natural that their work would influence his. But from the start his style isn’t quite theirs. It’s less emotive, and more oblique in its protest against the Communist Party bureaucracy.
Wind moves in and out of these poems, through windows in a concrete high-rise in Beijing, or through the forest, or through the poet’s mind.

Before the rise of wind the woods were still
before the rise of wind sunlight and cloudiness
could be ignored for having
no raision d’etre
before the rise of wind a man walking through the woods
was a man without memory
a recluse
before the rise of wind it couldn’t be said
whether winter wind
or summer wind was harsher

In 1989, Xi Chuan participated in the student protests at Tiananmen Square. After the state repression, the exile of the Obscure poets, and the deaths of two close friends (also poets) from Beijing University, he wrote almost nothing for two years. In 1992, his magazine Tendency (Qingxiang) was shut down.  He eventually returned to regular writing, but with a radically different vision. While not abandoning lyrical poetry, he began writing sharp prose poem sequences that use earthy, sometimes caustic, language to explore and question Chinese history, literature, and society. Some of the best pieces in Notes on the Mosquito (including the title poem) are these prose poems or poetic essays. The recent “Senses of Reality” and “Thirty Historical Reflections” suites are at once wonder-filled and bleakly funny: they cover everything from wild boars to a Sanskrit-inscribed brick found in an antique shop to the behavior of ghosts during the Six Dynasties:

In the Six Dynasties, ghosts were educated, and could discuss The Five Classics with humans and debate atheists about the existence of ghosts.
…
In the Six Dynasties, men had successful romances, but the successes were due to ghosts: female ghosts would host banquets in the grave, and what man wouldn’t make an appearance?
…
In the Six Dynasties, swans were kindhearted, and would pursue a person for five or six miles, just to give back a shoe.
In the Six Dynasties, the tigers were the contrarians, waiting for men to take a piss outdoors so they could bite off their dicks.

Xi Chuan has translated Borges and even written a poem about him, but these prose poems bring to mind another great Argentine: Julio Cortazar in quizzical sketches like Cronopios and Famas.
His poems also bring to mind the Western modernists: urban surrealism, clear images expressed in laconic language, black humor, and dialogues with the dead. But one also thinks of the classical Chinese poets: atmospheres and experiences captured in a few words, a slight shift in mood (a change in the weather, the sight of an inscription on a tree) evoking entire worlds:

An old man with a broom sweeps the street clean.
A middle-aged man paints his door green.
At Allah’s command an ox exits the city alone to wander the Pamirs alone.
A girl returns to her hometown after traveling the world and finds the prisons of her hometown abandoned for fifty years.
Mountains all around, mountains harboring gold and not bandits.

One also thinks of a Chinese wisdom writer as great as Zhuangzi. Xi Chuan has a similarly playful and puzzling mind, embracing the bafflement and ambiguity of the world. Zhuangzi himself makes an appearance in these poems, as do other luminaries of Chinese literature, philosophy, and history: the “grand historian” Sima Qian, the satirical poet Sima Xiangru, the poets of the Tang Dynasty, and even Confucius. These presences are as much a part of Xi Chuan’s landscape as Beijing’s streets, the South Xinjiang mountains, or the huge Chinese plains. From a poem called “Plains”:

the darkness must be dealt with prudently
especially the dog barks and birdcalls traveling too far in the dark
a thousand miles of rainfall, in which someone must be stranded
ten-thousand-mile-away news on a flickering TV
turning around doesn’t mean going home
going home doesn’t mean home is where it used to be
…
to dream of the plains on the plains is a plain thing to do
to dream of Confucius on the plains is as far from plain as Confucius dreaming of the Duke of Zhou

Xi Chuan is something of a wisdom writer himself. The fact that he plays ironic and theatrical games with his writing is actually in keeping with a great deal of Chinese philosophy (Zhuangzi again). From a poem called “Exhortations”:

Don’t demand too much of the world. Don’t hold on to your sleeping wife while dreaming of high-yield margins. Don’t light lamps in the daytime. Don’t smear people’s faces. Remember: don’t piss in the wild. Don’t sing in a cemetery. Don’t take promises lightly. Don’t be annoying. Make wisdom something useful.

This can’t be taken completely at face value, of course, as Xi Chuan is very far from an exhorter. What unites his lyric poems and his essay-poems is that they all carry a sense of the world’s plenitude -- evoked so gorgeously in a poem like “South Xinjiang Notes” -- and of the world’s puzzlement. The plenitude is itself bewildering (what to make of the Turkic Muslims he runs into in beautiful South Xinjiang?) and the bewilderment has a certain beauty, as in his poem “Discoveries”:

even the Tang Dynasty fell in the end
even dumpsters have people living in them
even indulgent idealists have no clue how to live
even men with sloped shoulders run away from home
…
even the doctor got gonorrhea but he kept working
even the drunk knew the way home but forgot which door
even birds learn how to keep silent in May
even the living dead will scream out “Save me!”

For English-speakers, Notes on the Mosquito is a way out of our scandalous literary disorientation (literally: “losing the East”), and into the thrilling disorientation of Xi Chuan’s keen, perceptive mind. - Greer Mansfield

In the fourteen-page Author’s Afterward to his Selected Poems, Xi Chuan references or quotes from Tolstoy, Yang Lian, the Zhuangzi, the Indian social theorist Ashis Nandy, Eileen Chang, Leo Strauss, C.T. Hsia, Jonathan Spence, Milan Kundera, Li Bai, Czeslaw Milosz, the 20th-century sociologist Fei Xiaotong, ancient philosopher Han Feizi, Mao Zedong, Foucault, Tang dynasty literati Han Yu, and Goethe. This is not a poet who can be accused of parochialism. Yet Xi Chuan wears his erudition lightly, at least in the context of his verse. This is not to say that the poems do not give a sense of a formidable intellect behind them—they do—but what is striking in the poems is less Xi Chuan’s breadth of reference than his sense of humor, his humanity, and his attention to the smallest details of ordinary life, ranging from bodily functions to rats to the way drizzle soaks through socks.
Xi Chuan was born in 1963, just after the mass starvation of the Great Leap Forward, and was a small child during Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Lucky and talented enough to be one of the few children able to go to school at the time, he later went on to major in English at Beijing University. As translator Lucas Klein explains in his exemplary Translator’s Introduction, in the spring of 1989 Xi Chuan lost two close poet friends, Hai Zi and Luo Yihe, both of whom were also Beijing University students. Following on the heels of that trauma were the events in Tiananmen, which Xi Chuan participated in and suffered from. The pain of his friends’ deaths and the disillusionment he experienced after the government crackdown discouraged him from writing for nearly two years. When he resumed, his style had changed considerably from the Imagist Western-influenced Obscure Poetry exemplified by poets such as Bei Dao, Duo Duo, and Yang Lian. He moved toward a more philosophical and less lyrical prose poetry that contrasts with his earlier shorter, often nature-inspired work. His most recent poems play with ideas of paradox, inheritance, and the past, present, and future of civilization.
These are large themes, and Xi Chuan knows how to write large poems to encompass them. “Six Dynasties Ghosts” begins:

In the Six Dynasties (265-588 ce), ghosts outnumbered people. Humans would dream of evil spirits at night and meet them during the day, the way mice can never escape humans. Life in the Six Dynasties was bizarre: according to The Chronicle of the Netherworld, ghosts had chest hair, armpit hair, and pubic hair. People would fight over food with ghosts. Ghosts would come to blows with ghosts.

In this stanza, we find several of Xi Chuan’s recurring obsessions: history and references to famous historical works; the relationship of humans to the natural world, not in the sense of lovely mountain vistas, but in the sense of the nasty, inescapable symbiotic struggle between humans and their parasite and vermin brothers; and lastly, the ‘unmentionable’ aspects of the human (here ghostly) body. In a Xi Chuan poem, people vomit and piss and fart. He is not so much interested in the shock value, but in the grounding effect these facts have in literary works. The combination of high and low, of erudition and crassness, brings the reader, body and brain both, to the page. In this poem the ghosts are as much people as the people are, still intimately connected to their human pasts through the physicality of their armpit and pubic hair. Ghosts move through these poems just as they do contemporary China, understated, even buried under, but not forgotten. Many of these images are objets trouvé, found in the books of others. Xi Chuan is a world-class noticer, and in particular, he has an eye for the unnerving, the strange, the disingenuous, and the amusing.

In the Six Dynasties, swans were kindhearted, and would pursue a person for five or six miles, just to give back a shoe.
But in the Six Dynasties, the tigers were the contrarians, waiting for men to take a piss outdoors so they could bite off their dicks.

Humor is essential to Xi Chuan’s work, despite the fact that the topics it addresses are often painful. Here is the short poem “The Hospital”:

a dead gray rain falls on the hospital
the nurse’s youth dissolved by hydrochloric acid
some ascend to heaven, some go under the earth
invisible people check up on sickrooms, those of uncertain identity
loiter in the shadows of the hospital’s entryway
I was there, right there, reading Afanti stories
to a dying man (he’d cough ever so often
and sometimes drift to sleep); I was there, right there
trying to get a dying man to laugh

Afanti is a character in traditional Uyghur folk stories, the Uyghurs being a Turkic-speaking people who live mainly in Xinjiang, an enormous mostly desert province in the far west of China. Here Xi Chuan’s juxtaposition of the cute and folksy with the “dead gray rain” and the frightening “hydrochloric acid” demonstrates the need to balance the dark with the light, horror with humor. It is a defense against despair, if nothing else.
But it is something else. When Xi Chuan writes about the lives of the laobaixing, those left behind in the breathless economic advances of the last decade, many of whom live in dense communities of urban poverty, it is this sense of the absurdity of the ordinary that opens the poem up, and makes it genuine and affecting. In “The Neighbors,” he addresses this urban humanscape directly.

My neighbors. I’ve never invited them over for dinner, never borrowed money from them. I promise myself that, if I have a daughter, I will never let her marry any of them, since they’re like family. . . .
But I admit, I don’t care about their spiritual questions, or whether they have any spiritual questions.
My neighbors are eavesdroppers, snickerers, moral monitors. Monitoring the morality of my neighbors I’ve happened upon nobility, but they let me in on rumors to let me in on the zeitgeist.
The zeitgeist emboldened Old Zhang, who rented his apartment to three girls. The three girls wear heavy makeup, the three girls have stomach-aches, the three girls sleep during the day, wash their faces in the evening, and stand on the street at night. . . .
Rats, surrounding my bed at midnight, call me in unison: “Hello, old neighbor!” I tell them all to get lost. Under my roof you play by my rules.
My roof leaks, so all my neighbors’ roofs must leak; power’s out at home, so the power must be out in my neighbors’ homes.

Much is made of the dialectic of Chinese Collectivism versus American Individualism, often premised on the claim that Chinese and Americans think differently about these issues. Yet here we get a view of the individual within the modern collective, that is to say, the cramped, thin-walled, over-stuffed apartment building that is now a ubiquitous sight in the major cities in China. The rats are as much neighbors, and about as neighborly, as the other human inhabitants. The speaker would not let his daughter marry one of his neighbors because they are “like family,” not so much because it would feel incestuous, but because like family, his neighbors annoy him too much to further cement the already suffocating bond. The building gossips are just part of the scene, like the prostitutes, like the power outages. Hanging over the poem, however, is the memory of public shamings and family members turning each other in for anti-revolutionary statements and neighborhood watches that wielded tremendous power over ordinary people. These are the historical remnants that many of the poems in this collection grapple with. Xi Chuan’s approach is often indirect, but he never flinches from his task. He ends this poem with a zinger rather than a moralistic scolding:

For seven days straight I holed up at home without speaking, or humming, or farting, and the woman next door opened the door and came in, just to see if anything was wrong with my life.

I am thrilled to notice that the Chinese original on the opposing page has a typo in the last sentence. Thrilled because it is a rare book today that is printed in full bilingual edition. Notes on the Mosquito is a thick, handsome volume, which befits the quality of its contents. Readers of Chinese will be able to appreciate the poems in the original while marveling at the deftness with which Klein renders them into English. His translation is consistently intelligent, and admirably captures the full range of feeling in Xi Chuan’s poetry. Translation always involves tradeoffs between trying to mimic the unfamiliar and trying to domesticate the foreign, and in general, Klein finds a balance between the two, allowing for a fair degree of strangeness while not sacrificing readability. On a few occasions, he introduces an ungainliness into the English that is not there in Chinese. These moments, such as when ‘Marxist’ is translated as “Dialectical Materialist,” which slow the reader down unnecessarily. Marxism is already a rare enough term in English-language poetry to capture the heaviness of the original line. In another case, in the poem “Twilight,” Klein uses “deceased” as a noun instead of the simpler and more vernacular ‘the dead.’ In Chinese, often all that is necessary to turn a verb into a noun (like turning ‘to view’ into ‘a viewer’) is a simple particle. This grammatical trick is not as available in English, and in this poem, where the speaker is addressing the dead, any choice in English is going to be awkward. The tone of the original is fairly casual, and Klein’s “deceased” gives it a more formal cast, as in the lines: “oh deceased, appear now / all of the living have shut their mouths / where are you, deceased?” These lines sound forced, rather than conveying the mournful if eccentric tone of the original. It is in these difficult moments where the ear of the translator must come into play.
But Klein’s ear rarely fails him. He captures both the music and slightly anachronistic feel of the original Chinese in the early poem “In the Mountains”: “Dusk congeals over the hungry cliff / excess dusk presses onto my tent / sunlight walks by on stones.” Xi Chuan abandoned this youthful style, and Klein—a scholar of contemporary and Tang dynasty literature—not only keenly identifies this and other more subtle shifts, but also manages to convey the changes convincingly, allowing the reader to come away with a sense of the arc of Xi Chuan’s artistic development. He comes up with lines that resound beautifully: “look to life’s last station / when the long-deceased song passes on again and red Persian asters / assemble in the distance like a chorus of birds.” The sound play of “life’s last station” and “song passes on” moving to “Persian asters” to “birds” builds a lovely alliterative scene that in sheer beauty momentarily surpasses the music of the original. So much is sacrificed in translation that a translator must identify and seize these fortuities wherever he can, and time and again Klein does exactly that. Xi Chuan’s verse could not have been better served in English. - Eleanor Goodman 

 The density of his poetry aside, the other trial facing me and any reader at this time is that we have no serviceable nomenclature for what Xi Chuan is doing, particularly his work of the past ten years or so. He is engaged in an unprecedented project to recast literary expression in contemporary China. And we do not know, cannot now know, whether the results of his project eventually will be the idiosyncratic work of one man, or whether he is setting a path, one possible path, for other poets to follow. Xi Chuan exists at a special time in Chinese literary history when form has finally matured in modern Chinese poetry, when the anxiety of influence can be tempered by several generations of earlier modern poets who bore the major brunt of being compared with the illustrious tradition of classical Chinese poetry and when experiments with Western poetic structures have by and large been cast aside. The successes of free verse poets from Taiwan such as Yang Mu, Yu Guangzhong, Wai-lim Yip (Cantonese, but educated in Taiwan), and others have established a solid corpus in the vernacular mode. Obscure poets from China have safely neutralized the once suffocating omnipresence of Maospeak. Through the use of internal rhymes, rhythmic repetition, alliteration and assonance, Xi Chuan is able to forge his work in an environment in which the so-called avant-garde (which to date has not been adequately defined in China) is the norm. Liberated from the twin strictures of classical Chinese and Western prosody, Xi Chuan has become a successful bricoleur, a world poet who interacts with the tradition, engages literary giants of China’s past within his work, and also establishes a dialogue with Western greats such as Homer, Petrarch, Baudelaire, Rilke, Pound, Gary Snyder, and others. His work is the product of a creative dialectics that violates Hu Shi’s admonition to eschew literary allusion while embracing his demand to articulate things in the vernacular. The conflicts that Xi Chuan bespeaks in his poetry are not those of a clash of civilizations, of traditional and modernity or East and West. Rather, they are internal conflicts, conflicts of the soul. His work is completely personal and untranslatable to others, not just linguistically but emotionally. But at the same time, his problems are genuine and are no different than those that give pain to each of us: the death of friends and family, frustration over failure, difficulty communicating to others, weakness and ineffectuality, humiliation, fear, lust, and limitation. “The one with the greatest vision is blind” 最具视觉功夫的人竟然是个瞎子, he flatly observers, “if Homer wasn’t blind, then whoever created Homer must have been” 如果荷马不是瞎子，那创作了荷马的人必是瞎子. And he concludes at the end of the same poem: “Nietzsche the last son of Dionysus, never touching a drop, still went crazy in Weimar” 尼采酒神的最后一个儿子，滴酒不沾，却也在魏玛疯疯癫癫 (109). Genius has its consequences. It’s not a game. - Chris Lupke

Due to popular demand, and as a concession to common sense, we've decided to put poems here on our website — one poet per week.

This week's poet is Xi Chuan, whom translator Lucas Klein, in his introduction to Notes on the Mosquito, describes thusly: "Xi Chuan (pronounced Sshee Chwahn, not to be confused with Sichuan, the province) has not only become one of contemporary China’s most celebrated poets, he is also one of its most hyphenated litterateurs: teacher-essayisttranslator-editor-poet. Eliot Weinberger has described him as a 'polymath, equally at home discussing the latest American poetry as Shang Dynasty numismatics.'"

One of the most fascinating aspects of Xi Chuan's body of work is the very clear distinction between the poems he wrote from 1985-1987, and the poems he's written since 1990. Klein explains:

Xi Chuan in his early writing reflected a belief in an international poésie pure. His poems often demonstrate the exposed structures and urban timelessness of International Style architecture, or else an abstracted landscape that is clearly China yet, at the same time, not. The landscape exists inside a poetics of mythic power.

The high-lyricism of Xi Chuan’s earliest poetry would not last. Because of the government’s suppression of the democracy and workers’ rights movement in Tiananmen Square, in which Xi Chuan participated, 1989 was a hard year for China’s young intellectuals; it was an even harder year for Xi Chuan, as on March 26, [his dear friend and fellow poet] Hai Zi committed suicide (he was twenty-five), and on May 31 their mutual friend and fellow Beijing University poet Luo Yihe died from a cerebral hemorrhage (age twenty-eight), days before PLA tanks rolled in on the demonstrators on June 4.

Xi Chuan barely wrote for two years. Nothing in this book is from 1989, and only one poem is from 1990. By 1991, his style was shifting: a haunting memory replaces Xi Chuan’s earlier timelessness in "Twilight," pushing the modernist lyric beyond its upper limits the way "plains push out from the edge of the city / mountains lift up at the edge of the plains" ('Three Chapters on Dusk'), and 'Bats in the Sunset' raises the question of whether the bat—a sign of good luck, since it is a Chinese homonym for 'fortune' — should be defined by its Chinese associations or its Western ones, via Goya’s El sueño de la razón produce monstros.

When Salute was published in 1992, it was evident that Xi Chuan’s poetry had undergone a radical transformation. His self-contained lyric opened into expansive prose poems that often reflexively observed their own poetic method... including their representation and construction of poetry, metaphor, and language. Rather than undercutting lyricism à la Han Dong, Xi Chuan’s prose poetry allowed him to reevaluate it and examine, rather than take for granted, the interplay between Chinese tradition and a modernity of Western origin.

Below are three poems: one from that first period, and two from the latter.

"The City I Live In"

The city I live in is made of building blocks
with straight streets and smooth public squares,
and row-houses low but meticulously ordered

The city I live in has no people
wind blows through windows a frail, naïve whistle
the rising and setting sun compelling seasons to revolve
there is only dust in the city I live in

If I died, if color and light died,
no hand would come knock down this city
it will exist forever
because in the city I live in there are no people

from "Beast"
The beast, I see it. The beast, fur thick and stiff, teeth sharp, eyes nearly lifeless. The beast, gasping for breath, growling ill fortune, and from its feet, no sound. The beast, with no sense of humor, like a man straining to hide his poverty, like a man ruined by his mission, with no cradle to provide memories, no destination to locate yearning, not enough lies to plead for itself. It smacks a tree trunk and gathers infants; it is alive, like a cliff, and dead, like an avalanche.
A crow amongst scarecrows searches for a partner.

The beast, it despises my hairstyle, despises my scent, despises my repentance and reserve. In a word, it despises that I deck out happiness in baubles and jewels. It squeezes its way into my room, orders me to stand in the corner, and with no word of explanation collapses in my chair, shatters my mirror, shreds up my curtains and all that belongs to my spiritual defense. I beseech it: “Don’t take my teacup when I’m thirsty!” Right there it digs up a spring, which I suppose must be some kind of response.

One ton of parrots, one ton of parrots’ nonsense!

​​​

from "On My Meaningless Life"
88. In a crowd of people some people are not people, just as in a flock of eagles some eagles are not eagles; some eagles are forced to wander through alleyways, some people are forced to fly in the sky.

89. I fall asleep as soon as it gets dark, I get up as soon as it’s light out. I always dream of a doctor with a fever and a mail carrier with a toothache, and then I meet them; so in order to meet myself I must dream of myself, but dreaming of oneself is so embarrassing.

90. Once I had a dream in which a blind man asked about someone. I replied that I had heard of but didn’t know this person. When I awoke, I howled in shock: it was me that the blind man had been looking for!

91. Only when a nail pierced through my hand did my hand reveal the truth; only when black smoke choked me to tears could I feel my existence. Riding sidesaddle on a white horse ten fairies tore up my heart.

92. For this I have changed my name, concealed my identity, wandered lonely as a cloud, resigned myself to fate.

 Posted by Tom Roberge

  

Xi Chuan: Poetry of the Anti-lyric

BY Lucas Klein

Contemporary Chinese poet Xi Chuan 西川 (the pen-name of Liu Jun 刘军) is a prolific “hyphenated” littérateur: teacher-essayist-translator-editor-poet. The American writer Eliot Weinberger has described him as a “polymath, equally at home discussing the latest American poetry as Shang Dynasty numismatics.”
Currently a professor in pre-modern Chinese literature at the Central Academy for Fine Arts in Beijing, Xi Chuan had also previously taught English language, and Western literature in Chinese translation. (He was an English major at Beijing University, and wrote an undergraduate thesis on Ezra Pound’s translations from the Chinese). His professional career path follows his poetic development: gaining recognition first as one of the post-Obscure poets in the late eighties, his writing was defined by a condensed lyricism in the Western modernist mode. Today, he writes expansive prose-poems that meditate on awkwardness and paradox at the individual and international levels simultaneously. The main shift came in 1989 — the year not only of the students’ democracy and workers’ rights demonstrations, the crushed June 4th in Tian’anmen Square, but also of the death of two of Xi Chuan’s closest writer-friends, Hai Zi 海子 and Luo Yihe 骆一禾 (the former at his own hand) — after which Xi Chuan stopped writing almost completely for three years. When he re-emerged, his form had changed: he was writing a poetry of the anti-lyric, a poetics of contradiction that deconstructed the aestheticism and musicality of his previous self.

…the reader wants to know not only what Xi Chuan says but how he says it, both his images and his style, both his allusions and his elusiveness.

The three poems included here represent the turning point of Xi Chuan’s developing style, where the modernist lyric reaches, and begins to pierce through, its upper limits, the way “plains push out from the edge of the city / mountains lift up at the edge of the plains.” Later, he would describe his focus on the paradox, or oxymoron, as one poetic reaction to China’s political and economic realities; here, those realities are represented by a power outage and an awareness of our becoming history — and Borges’s annotated “aporia of history” — in which, like Borges, we all become librarians “preserving the order of the universe and books.”

Translation is always a challenge, especially between languages as distinct as Chinese and English. My method was to start by clinging as much as possible to the vocabulary and syntax of Xi Chuan’s Chinese, and then, via visions and revisions, to smooth out the edges between the two languages so that two poems could emerge as one. Overall, a consistent consideration has motivated my translation: that is, the reader wants to know not only what Xi Chuan says but how he says it, both his images and his style, both his allusions and his elusiveness.

Power Outage

TRANSLATED BY Lucas Klein

A sudden power outage, and I’m convinced
I live in a developing nation
a nation where people read by moonlight
a nation that abolished imperial exams
a sudden power outage, and I hear
wind chimes and a cat’s footbeats upstairs
in the distance an engine stops with a thud
the battery-powered radio beside me still singing
once the power’s out, time turns back quickly:
candles light up the eateries
the fat kid gobbling on crow meat notices
crows gathering on tree limbs
and the pitch blackness before me
just like a seaswell womb
a mother hangs herself from rafters
each room its own special odor
Power Outage. I touch a slipper
but mutter: “Quit hiding, matches!”
In the candlelight, I see my own
great big wordless shadow cast upon the wall
December 1992

Re-reading Borges' Poetry

TRANSLATED BY Lucas Klein

• 
  

— for AnneThe precision of this statement emerges from the chaos of the past
this pure force, like the rhythm a dripping faucet
annotates the aporia of history
touching starlight I leave night to the earth
night that licks the earth’s crevices: that forked memory
No Man is a man, No Where is a place
a No Man in No Where has written these
lines I must decipher in the shadows
I give up scouring the world of dust for the author, and lift my head to see
a librarian, negligently, just for his livelihood
preserving the order of the universe and books
January 1997

Three Chapters on Dusk

Clouds send dust drifting off the high-up cranes
crows fly into the immense Russian vestibule
the setting sun repeats itself: beauty, it is in concert with dreams
morning rays unfold against the street, please don’t roll up your sleeves to scrub it away
please, please do not ask me why
I am leaving the light of dawn
someone disappears in a crowd
everyone looks for him
to wish him the best
a gradual tune flies out the chapel’s stained window
around psyche’s edges a desolate prospect
this is the eighth dawn of autumn
a grouse plucks its feathers, lovers gaze across the river
a razor passed to the hand of a son
2
Look to the mountains, look to the houses under the mountains
look to life’s last station
when the long-deceased song passes on again and red Persian asters
assemble in the distance, like a chorus of birds
reigniting an internal landscape
you will look to the first leaf falling in the mountains
oh, the land of autumn growing late
plains push out from the edge of the city
mountains lift up at the edge of the plains
in the heights greeting mountains —
skylights or arching bridge floors —
sunlight caresses the hand of the dead
their white shadows quiver
and your bones are cold; within the grand shadows
a cold wind has been blowing for years
3
Evening blown in on the wind, rattling windows and doors
in a headwind of autumn
I see aberrant turrets, lamps, and squares
like I’d only happened on this evening
a happening of people running through a meadow, a happenstance mindset
hearing a blind man’s haphazard fiddle
evening blown in on the wind rattling souls
how many faces vie to appear, then hurry away hiding
only a pigeon milk white breast glimmers in the wind
I hear music
coming from the psyche’s depths
submitting to its guidance, recollecting in the dark
a ray of light, we become history
that page has been turned
I will write a poem of perfect beauty
I will raise a child of perfect goodness
1991

from Notes on the Mosquito

Beast

The beast, I see it. The beast, fur thick and stiff, teeth sharp, eyes nearly lifeless. The beast, gasping for breath, growling ill fortune, and from its feet, no sound. The beast, with no sense of humor, like a man straining to hide his poverty, like a man ruined by his mission, with no cradle to provide memories, no destination to locate yearning, not enough lies to plead for itself. It smacks a tree trunk and gathers infants; it is alive, like a cliff, and dead, like an avalanche.

A crow amongst scarecrows searches for a partner.

The beast, it despises my hairstyle, despises my scent, despises my repentance and reserve. In a word, it despises that I deck out happiness in baubles and jewels. It squeezes its way into my room, orders me to stand in the corner, and with no word of explanation collapses in my chair, shatters my mirror, shreds up my curtains and all that belongs to my spiritual defense. I beseech it: "Don't take my teacup when I'm thirsty!" Right there it digs up a spring, which I suppose must be some kind of response.

One ton of parrots, one ton of parrots' nonsense!

We call the tiger tiger, we call the donkey donkey. But the beast, what can you call it? Without a name, its flesh and shadow are a blur, and you can barely call it, can barely be sure of its location in broad daylight or divine its destiny. It should be given a name like "grief" or "embarrassment," should be given a pool to drink from, should be given shelter from the storm. A beast with no name is a fright.

A song-thrush does away with the king's foot soldiers.

It knows temptation, but not by a palace, not by a woman, and not by a copious candlelit gala. It comes toward us, so is there something about our bodies that makes it drool? Does it want to slurp up the emptiness off our bodies? What kind of temptation is this! Sideways through the passageway of shadows, colliding head-on with the flash of a knife, the slightest hurt teaches it to moan—moaning, existence, who knows what stuff belief is made of; but once it settles down, you hear the sound of sesame at the jointing stage, you catch the scent of the rambler rose.

The great wild goose that clears a thousand mountains, too shy to talk about itself.

This metaphorical beast walks down the slope, plucks flowers, sees its reflection by the riverside, and wonders inside who it could be; it swims across the river, climbs ashore, and gazes back at the mist on the river, with nothing to discover or understand; it rushes into the city, chases girls, finds a piece of meat, and passes the night beneath the eaves, dreaming of a village and a companion; sleepwalking for fifty miles, knowing no fear, waking in the light of a new dawn, it finds itself returning to the location it had set out from: that same thick bed of leaves, the same bed of leaves still hiding that dagger—what's going to happen?

Pigeon in the sand, you are enlightened by the sheen of blood.

Oh, the age of flight is near!

1992

The Distance

for Akhmatova

there is a snowfield in a dream
there is a white birch in the snowfield
there is a small house that will resound in prayer
there is a shingle that will fall off the north star

in the distance

there is a crowd of commoners as purple as red cabbage
there is a pot of boiled water that was lapped up by animals
there is a wooden chair caught in recollection
there is a desklamp whose illumination represents me

in the distance

words I can't read written on glass
soybeans and sorghum grow on a blank page
a face that makes me put down my pen
when I pick it up again the ink's frozen solid

in the distance

roving clouds of December rise off tree limbs
the train of my soul stops in the cold
on a cold road I see me walking
at a girl's door I cough three times

1994


Poison

What is poisonous is beautiful and dangerous. This sentence could be reversed, so that what is beautiful and dangerous is poisonous. Medusa is a product of such beliefs. In general what is poisonous is not in and of itself a sin: nightshade, the oleander, the cobra, and so on, are all components of nature; but their toxin has been extracted by the apothecary, and so some will succeed with subterfuge while others meet untimely death. But let us speak not of poison's practical applications—it divides poisoner from victim, the one in front from the one behind the curtain; likewise it binds politics and fairy tale, granting death by poison an aesthetic significance. The symbol for poison is the skull; in it is the potential to change both environment and human psychology: a room in which poison has been placed is no ordinary room, and anyone concealing poison is either a demon or an accomplice to one. As for suicide by poison, I'll say nothing. All the explanation I can offer is that before taking poison the suicide splits in two. He poisons himself. Thus every suicide by poison, too, involves the element of subterfuge.

1992

translated from the Chinese by Lucas Klein


Five sections from Thirty Historical Reflections

by Xi Chuan, translated from the Chinese by Lucas Klein

That Person Writing

Eighty wooden slips, lining up with the fate of little old men. Interposed in the slips the seal script writing is difficult to discern, but what it conveys about heaven, the state, war, and the thoughts of the sages remains unchanged. The work of the brush of this anonymous writer looks like the brushwork of Sima Qian or Sima Xiangru. Only at a remove of two thousand years can the customary greatness of his era be perceived! From afar he may yet have glimpsed Sima Xiangru or Sima Qian. He dips his brush in ink, working stroke upon stroke, permitting himself not one false word; writing the aphorisms of Zeng Zi, delighting in his thoughts. He’s nearly convinced that the thoughts he transcribes will be of great use to humanity. These thoughts he protects, these thoughts he transmits. Wittingly or not certain words are altered, wittingly or not he retains his own breath within the views of another. From a humble stenographer, he unwittingly transforms into a minor author beside a great author, like an ant tethering thought’s kite against the wind. Sunlight spilling onto the writing desk, he sneezes. On the street shoe sellers call out to him: “You—you’re the guy who deals in thought!” He writes on wooden slips, in a time before the invention of paper or movable type, and so what he writes is the “one” book (each book so written must be the “one” book). But later, a dead man takes his book underground. The thought that evolved from this book, the thoughts that were transformed from this book, would ultimately reshape the world, but this “one” book, through the slow stretch of time, was no more to be found. And now, even if it were to be brought back to light, those thoughts transformed from it, the thought adopted by the world, could never be corrected. Like a forgery re-entering the site of civilization. And that person writing, it’s as if he had never been born. He is a speck of dust on the earth, disseminating civilization in its limited way.

Six Dynasties Ghosts

In the Six Dynasties (265 – 588 CE), ghosts outnumbered humans. The living would dream of evil spirits at night and meet them in the day, the way that mice are never free from people. Life in the Six Dynasties was bizarre: according to The Chronicle of the Netherworld, ghosts had chest hair, underarm hair, and pubic hair. People and ghosts would fight over food. Ghosts and ghosts would come to blows.

In the Six Dynasties ghosts were educated, and could discuss The Five Classics with humans and debate atheists about the existence of ghosts.

In the Six Dynasties ghosts had powerful magic, and knew the birthdates of each emperor, plus their death dates, and when rebellion would break out under heaven.

In the Six Dynasties, with the help of ghosts, men would travel to faerie and the underworld, and write fiction when they came back.

In the Six Dynasties men had successful romances, but the successes were due to ghosts: female ghosts would host banquets in the grave, and what man wouldn't put in an appearance?

In the Six Dynasties when a female ghost's true nature was exposed, she would turn back into a white egret or swan, or anything white, through which veins would faintly show.

In the Six Dynasties swans were kindhearted, and would pursue a person for five or six miles, just to give back his slipper.

But in the Six Dynasties the tigers were the contrarians, waiting for men to take a piss outdoors so they could bite off their dicks.

Six Dynasties people say, Back in our day, animals turning into people happened every day, but that lugubrious so-and-so Kafka, always making much ado about nothing, wrote about a guy turning into an animal—obviously he got it backwards! Obviously he got it mixed up!

 A Sanskrit Brick from Nanzhao (738–937): after a Vietnamese poet

An antiques shop on Jadestream Rd. in Dali's old quarter. A grey-green brick in the shop from the late Nanzhao era. Eleven lines of Sanskrit on the grey-green brick. The hands that molded the Sanskrit lines. The hands that inlaid the brick into the base of the pagoda. The late Nanzhao monk who could read the eleven lines of Sanskrit. The man or men who brought Sanskrit from India through Nepal to Nanzhao. Buddhists. Buddhists who had or had not achieved nirvana before dying, and the loiterers who couldn't give a damn about achieving nirvana. The questions Hīnayāna Buddhism never encountered when encountering Mahāyāna Buddhism. The pain the emperor of Nanzhao suffered unbeknownst to the emperor of Tang. The dusk of Nanzhao kingdom's demise. The thugs who knocked over the pagoda. The astonished onlookers. 902 CE. From then till now, countless I's have searched for this grey-green brick molded with eleven Sanskrit lines. In this antiques shop on Jadestream Rd. in Dali's old quarter, coming down with a cold and with a runny nose, I pulled the grey-green brick out of the glass case, held it in my hands, and in the end talked the clerk down from 800 to 430 RMB. Just by shifting my hand, I could have dropped it and seen it shatter into shards. But I only had such a notion for an instant. Also present were the poet Song Lin and a spider dangling off a thread hanging from the rafters.

Falcons, Swans, and Pearls

The Emperor of the Liao loved pearls, for which his troops time and again attacked the lands in the north that would later be established as Jin. Pearls were not in fact bounteous in the Jin, but the falcons that made nest and flew over that land were what the Liao soldiers coveted. Time and again, the soldiers of the Liao would bring home falcons, bringing home Jin women while they were at it. Locking the women in their rooms, they set the falcons after swans. Liao soldiers knew the basics of the forces of production: they didn't mind that swans had a more exquisite physique than the women in their rooms, since they knew the swans hungered after the delicacy of mussels. Good thing swans would go after mussels with such aplomb, they'd get the mussels' pearls down in their bellies—sometimes even expelling the pearls in their shit. The Liao soldiers would cast the falcons into the sky and wait for them to bring back swans from the Bohai Sea, when they'd pluck the pearls from their bellies. The Liao teemed with swans, and no one ever felt sentimental about having to kill one or two. Killing swans felt to them the same as killing chickens. The midsize pearls they kept for their women, while the small pearls piled up to trade with the rich hedonists of the Southern Song. They would have to bestow the biggest pearls unto the Emperor, or the Emperor would cut off their heads just as they did to the swans. The Emperor would play with his pearls, and the more he played the more he grew like the Southern Song hedonists. He played the Liao into extinction. When the Jin rose in the north, and sent no more falcons, they also stopped letting their women be kidnapped. The Jin destroyed Liao, to keep from sending more falcons.

King Jöchi Khasar's Land

700 years ago King Jöchi Khasar was granted land,

nothing but grassland stretching to the heavens, nothing but a few grey tiles in the clumps of grass. A strong wind blowing.

700 years ago, Chinggis Khaan and Ögedei's 100,000-strong Mongol horde

launched their blitzkrieg over the Central Asian mountains and the Russian steppe, proclaiming laws and setting up a postal system between Hungary, Austria, and China.

But now,

on the land of Chinggis Khaan's younger brother Jöchi Khasar, nothing but the name of Jöchi Khasar.

Night falls so quickly!

when night squeezes out rain, drop upon drop falling on the steppe, wooden wheels of abandoned carriages turning silently black,

It is time for Jöchi Khasar to take supper. We walk into a restaurant nearby.

Behind the counter,

a poster of the Mona Lisa tacked on the wall, and the smiling face of a 16 year-old Slavic girl.

After I've eaten, the Han woman who runs the place says to me:

"Help this poor girl who can't go to school. Such a pretty girl! She needs to go to Hailar for school, which would cost 3000 RMB for tuition and living expenses. Or else, you could take her with you, back to Beijing, so she could have a bright future."

ILL FORTUNE C 00024

There is a lotus floating in the sky. There is a splotch of bird shit caught by the
          ground. There is a fist that has penetrated his ear. On Sunlight Avenue he will
          be transparent.
The fire in the sky has already been put out, how many lives is this dust on the
          ground? He hears his childhood nickname called, a boy who constantly walks
          into his heart.
In the dawn stockade of his heart is only one chair.
On the bloody battlefield of his heart a chessboard is waiting.
He has been submitted to nine times, been resisted ten, been killed three times, and
          killed four.
Moonlight cast on the scum-covered river, dew washes clean the romantic spirits.
In a carnival, a spirit stepped on his heel. Ill fortune beginning, a guy with
          revolutionary eyes shoved him out of line.
Many years later he lit his first match. “Just like that,” he whispered to the butterfly.
On both sides of the street swept up by butterflies, on both sides of the street that
          had been a field, each compound looks like the family he betrayed, every
          magpie is falling.
The old world demolished right up to his feet, he feels himself becoming
          transparent.
Grief rushes into his temples like the Big Dipper rushing out of rooftops … a
          cough, a dizzy spell, and he utterly forgets the script of life.

ILL FORTUNE O 09734

The province he was born in was covered in rivulets and jade-green rice fields. Agriculture’s cool breeze chilled his
          behind. He requested the gods in the temple to look after him better.
He studied hard, studied until the female ghosts of midnight washed his feet; he
          labored hard, labored until the earth could put forth no harvest.
Venus twinkled low in the sky, the wind took his boat right beneath Venus. With
          the thrill of eloping he opened Nero’s door, but strolling into the majestic
          square his bad breath aggravated Nero.
The other hemisphere’s deities heard his blubbering, the other hemisphere’s
          blubberers received his breadcrumbs. But according to everyone in his
          hometown he was a success: once back in his homeland he set up a limited
          dictatorship.
He put locks on every drawer.
His mouth was full of poison blood.
He imagined all girls submitting to his molestation.
He endorsed a check to the night.
In a transitional period, the small eat and drink their fill. He loosened his belt,
          trading small favors for ovation.
On a winter’s morning he fell dead in his countryside villa, some say it was murder,
          and some say it was suicide.

KING OF CHESS

The King of Chess who was slaughtered on the chessboard by a fifteen year-old
boy, the King of Chess climbing up a mountain alone with two bottles of DDT,
unable to bear a shame not suffered in thirty years, unable to bear a thunder that
hadn’t cracked, wind that hadn’t blown, rain that hadn’t fallen in thirty years.
Called a loner for thirty years he became a loner in the end. Only at the moment of
self-reckoning did he realize the pointlessness of calling it quits, and grow a bit
braver.
Chirping cicadas. Sunset. Or the sunrise of that little boy.
He opened a bottle of DDT.
(A little less for the bugs to drink.)
He rolled his eyes to see the black and white birds in chess formation against the sky.
But he was no longer qualified to play chess: he couldn’t move the birds, the birds moved themselves.
He never guessed I’d snatch the bottle of pesticide from his hand. He thought I was going to usurp his death, or that I
          wanted to die before him, and so couldn’t control his rage.
I said I was another King of Chess overthrown by a boy.
He vacillated for a moment, curiosity dampening his death wish.
“Did the same boy overthrow us both? Is regime change God’s will? Why have we
never met? Why have we had the same experiences?”
We set up a chessboard on the mountaintop.
Each felt he faced himself.
The setting sun continued its sunset. We realized neither of us could beat himself.

Twilight

in the vast expanses of a nation
the twilight is just as vast
lamp after lamp lights up
and twilight spreads out like the autumn

appear, ye deceased
all of the living have shut their mouths
where are you, deceased?
the twilight invites you to speak

some names I will memorize
other names search for their tombs
countless names I have written down
as if I were writing a nation

and the twilight spreads over the earth
the outstretched hand grasped
as twilight reaches the window, where someone
is always rapping lightly at my door


 Dusk

In a vast country
Dusk, too, is vast
Lamps light up one by one
Dusk spreads like autumn

Let the dead step out
And we, the living, seal our lips
Where are you, oh departed
Dusk is inviting you to speak 

Some names will live in my memory
Some will search for a tombstone
The rest will spill from my pen
As if making a new nation

Twilight on the horizon
Extends its hand to be held
When dusk arrives, someone



The Ant’s Plunder

When I stuck out my hand to grab the iron door handle, a hidden ant attacked my right
index finger. I don’t know if it pinched me with its pincers or bit me with its mouth. I
don’t know how it got so strong.
In an instant, it turned itself into a weapon. The pain was so great that I cursed this
neither common nor rare 1.5–centimeter long ant. This may be the greatest
achievement of its life: to cause a man such piercing pain.
Like the filament of a light bulb, the six legs of an ant befit its existence. Its body,
bright yellow in front and brown in back, is filled with liquid, like two water droplets
fused together.
Two water droplets fused together to produce a will to live, a will to live that produces
the pincers protruding from the ant’s head. The ant and the crab both use pincers,
whose only difference is their size.
In stabbing pain, I examine this ant.
In the throbs of pain the ant and I encounter each other. I never thought ―the encounter
between Man and World‖ of which Heidegger spoke would find form between me and
ant. This ant lives to sting me; I live to curse it in pain.
The arc of my life hooks onto the arc of its life, which is kind of significant. Kill it? Easy. But it
knew I couldn’t. It scurried away, flustered, pretending to ignore my curses.


 On False Causality and True Chance in a Dark Room

26. In a dark room, I put my ear to the wall, listening in, but don’t hear anything stirring in the neighbor’s home next door. Then suddenly I hear someone next door with an ear to the wall as well. Quickly I pull my ear back, sure to behave like an upright and proper man.

27. In a dark room, I should not wake from a good dream while my father wakes from a bad one. He reprimands me, and his reprimands are valid; I turn introspective, completely loyal and filial. I tell him my good dream, so he could have his own, but his good dream was already forgotten in the bathroom.

28. After a brush with death an ascetic becomes a philanderer.

29. One handsome young man kills two handsome young men just because they all look the same.

30. In a dark room I have a séance with smoke and mirrors. Some fool really does walk in the door and kneel down before me. I kick him away, continuing my indulgence, when another fool breaks down the door, wielding a butcher-knife to overthrow me.

31. In a dark room, I turn on the radio. Its melodramatic love story awakens my self-pity. Just then a burglar crawls out from under my bed, engages me in a discussion of the meaning of life, and vows right then to turn over a new leaf.

32. An enthusiast of the Analects of Confucius refutes another enthusiast of the Analects of Confucius to a bloody pulp.

33. Du Fu has received too much exaltation, so no other Du Fu could ever win anything.

34. In a dark room, I fawn over a dead man. He was not my ancestor but my neighbor. I create for him a life of glory, his cast-iron face flushed with pink. Many years later, I overeat at the home of his grandson.

35. In a dark room, I paint a portrait of a fictitious girl. An acquaintance says he recognizes the girl in the picture: she lives in the East District, 35 Springweed Lane. I find the place, but her neighbor says she’s just left on a long journey.

36. Faced with an emptied grave the giddy graverobber has nothing to do.

37. With nothing to do the line cook goes back to his dark room.

38. In a dark room, my gold ring, passed down for three generations, rolls onto the floor, never to be seen again. Therefore I suspect that beneath my dark room is another dark room; therefore I suspect that everyone who ever wore a gold ring lives beneath me.

39. In a dark room, some guy comes in the wrong door but tries to make the most of it. He puts down his backpack, washes his face and brushes his teeth, and then orders me to get out. I say that this is my home, this is my lifeline, I’m not going anywhere. And so we start to wrestle in the darkness.

On My Meaningless Life

88. In a crowd of people some people are not people, just as in a flock of eagles some eagles are not eagles; some eagles are forced to wander through alleyways, some people are forced to fly in the sky.

89. I fall asleep as soon as it gets dark, I get up as soon as it’s light out. I always dream of a doctor with a fever and a mail carrier with a toothache, and then I meet them; so in order to meet myself, I must dream of myself, but dreaming of oneself is so embarrassing.

90. Once, I had a dream in which a blind man asked about someone. I replied that I had heard of but did not know this person. When I awoke, I howled in shock: it was me that the blind man was looking for!

91. Only when a nail pierced through my hand did my hand reveal the truth; only when black smoke choked me to tears could I feel my existence. Riding sidesaddle on a white horse ten fairies tore up my heart.

92. For this I have changed my name, concealed my identity, wandered lonely as a cloud, resigned myself to fate.

93. I once demanded of a boss lady at an inn that I be the boss of the inn. To her enduring surprise I also demanded she provide me with room and board at no charge. She asked: “Who are you? Where do you come from?” I said: “I’m just the man who makes these two demands. You choose.”

94. I once found myself astray in a gloomy abode, like a mercenary upsetting its order, like a ruffian arousing ladies’ fears. At this time I could taste a different kind of astray—astray from happiness, I forgot all disorder and fear.

95. I once was caught in a besieged city, and once I ran into an aged scholar. When I pointed out our “plight” and “lonesomeness,” he said his sole concern was the fortune of all god’s children. So I spit into the mouth of the crow.

96. I once asked a magistrate about the key to promotions, and he told me to go back home and be a good little citizen. I asked him: “Do you want to know how to turn stone into gold?” And when he revealed the greed behind his eyes, I said: “I too know how to keep secrets.”

97. If you can sit down then sit down, if you can lie down then lie down. Just to get by, every day I work more than three jobs. But every time I finish, someone takes my remuneration.

98. The wise men say: “To fly intoxicates the eagle.” Wrong, flying does not intoxicate the eagle, any more than walking intoxicates the human.

99. So please let me stay in your room for an hour, since an eagle plans to live in one of my ventricles for a week. If you accept me, I’ll change into any form you wish, but not for too long, or my true form will be revealed.

from “somebody”

Spring stays inside the hat
Autumn stays inside the blouse
Morning stays on the treetops
Evening stays in the shithole

The barren mountain stays on the barren mountain
Jadeite water stays in the teapot
The mansion stays on the map
The poor stay in the gutter

Three pounds of ink stay in the intestines
50 grams of sweat stay in the bloodstream
Spit stays outside the store
Foul language stays on ivory

Lucas Klein on Xi Chuan and translating "Written at Thirty"

Written at Thirty

in my first decade
the moon revealed its silent craters
while under that moon, in the town I lived in
a clatter of exorcismal gongs and shouts in the street
my limping uncle swore in the courtyard
careless I met with a white rooster's kiss
and a girl pulled down her pants in front of me
I ran into a suicide's shade on the stairs
and was instructed: do not be scared
my father lifted me over his head
hail bounced in exhaustion on the road to the commune
I entered an immaculate school and studied revolution

in my second decade
with working crickets of all countries I grew up
together we scorned difficulty, together fell in love with
     violence and moonlight
a tiger appeared at my door
I smelled the scent of flesh
I bunny-hopped to a stranger's doorway
and saw a man and woman preparing their festive attire
I stole, and others stole too
I set fire to sparrows, and others did too
such is life, but I had an outstanding gift
for painting ideals of mountain landscapes
without too many sins requiring forgiveness

some doors shut, some doors were yet to open
my third decade was for travel and study
it made sense to torment myself
I sang for the brow and knees of love
but saw no faerie queens descend on the streets
friends came, wild and vivacious, then vanished
leaving me a shirt and glasses but no way to wear them
the spearhead of judgment called forth catastrophe
as riots of flesh that called forth rainstorms
I shouldered an umbrella and climbed up a hill
a bird searching for someone greeting thunder and lightning
making circles in the
how can you doubt both yourself and the world at once?
you can't stop the rain, can't get a bird to land in your hand
thought's like a knife, a flick of the blade
drenches my spirit in sweat
I drive out thirty contentious philosophers
and say to the shadow who guards me, I'm sorrysalty sweat, salty tears, what else is flesh supposed to taste
     like?
night is like a display of identical rooms
I walk through, pacing
back and forth as if it were all one room. Morning to night
my worries for the future prove I'm ill at ease—
the earth is in motion but I have yet to sense it—

On Xi Chuan and translating "Written at Thirty" 
Xi Chuan (pronounced Sshee Chwahn, not to be confused with Sichuan, the province), one of contemporary China's most celebrated poets, was born in Jiangsu in 1963 with the name Liu Jun, which means "army," reflecting the ethos of the era. Raised in Beijing, where he still lives, he attended a foreign-languages school for future diplomats at a time when most schools were closed, and enrolled in Beijing University (where he gave himself the name Xi Chuan, meaning "West Stream"), to graduate from the English department with a senior thesis on Ezra Pound's translations of Chinese poetry. He teaches pre-modern Chinese literature at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing—where his art-major students have remarked that they learn more about artistic concept in his classes than in the bulk of their coursework on technique—but before that he taught Western literature in Chinese translation, and before that, introductory English.
Emerging as a poet in the second half of the eighties, Xi Chuan wrote what would become known as "Post-Obscure" poetry in the early heyday of Deng Xiaoping's "Reform and Opening Up" ("reform" in post-Cultural Revolution liberalization, "opening up" to trade with the capitalist West). His early writing reflected a belief in an international poésie pure, often demonstrating the exposed structures and urban timelessness of International Style architecture, or else an abstracted landscape that is clearly China yet, at the same time, not.
The high-lyricism of Xi Chuan's earliest poetry would not last. Because of the government's suppression of the democracy and workers' rights movement in Tiananmen Square, in which Xi Chuan participated, 1989 was a hard year for China's young intellectuals; it was an even harder year for Xi Chuan, as two of his close friends and fellow Beijing University poets died that spring, one from a cerebral hemorrhage at age twenty-eight, and another from suicide at twenty-five. And then the tanks rolled in on the demonstrators on June 4.
Xi Chuan barely wrote for two years. When he began again, it was evident that his poetry had undergone a radical transformation. His self-contained lyric opened into expansive prose poems that often reflexively observed their own poetic method, metaphor, and language. This is a drive he has maintained since; at an open dialogue this past winter at the MLA convention, he said he wasn't interested in writing "good poems," which I take to mean both acceptable to more conservative aesthetic standards as well as simply poems that are too "well-behaved." He says he still writes "good poems" from time to time—just to make sure he can—but mostly, he is interested in writing texts that explore possibilities rather than neat poems that offer one emotion or sensation at a time.
"Written at Thirty" comes from right after Xi Chuan's switch from lyric to expansive prose poem. While it's not prose, obviously, it nevertheless contains the multitudes that any open look at one's biography requires. Other translators have published their versions—both online and in print—but my translation takes advantage of Xi Chuan's explanation to me of what he meant by the line I had earlier translated as "I grew up with the whole world's crickets": he said his teenage years coincided with the end of the Cultural Revolution (1966 – 1976), which also entailed a change in Chinese people's relationship with Maoist rhetoric. Much of his poem, he said, was an attempt to "write through" his upbringing and the language around him. English-speakers being, for obvious reasons, much less attuned to Marxist diction, I rewrote my translation through the final appeal of The Communist Manifesto, to translate the line as "with working crickets of all countries I grew up."


A Personal Paradise


If this reality is the only reality, then you can only call it “great.” Just as the great sun is the only sun, yellowing the local zodiac.

If you thought that wiping out autumn would wipe out sorrow, then you’ll be doubly disappointed: this idea is no less idiotic than slaughtering people to wipe out hunger during famine.

Life: an excuse against life; it seduces people smelling nothing but fragrance in fragrance; it predicates insanity on the omen of neurosis.

The street dirty yet quiet, changing its name so often it’s nearly forgotten itself, may the great things it bears break over small things.

Great things and small things dissolve into nothing, while unresolved music vainly creates a spaceless paradise.

Let me count the ways of paradise: from that of the Monkey King to that of Hong Xiuquan is a flight of two hundred thirty-two years, from that of Hong Xiuquan to that of Chairman Mao is a flight of twenty-nine.

The card-player threw down a King of Hearts, since he didn’t have an Ace of Hearts.

Five boys with running noses stand around the pool table: even lofty entertainment gets played mundanely.

Chairman Mao’s paradise befits the appetite of the poor; in Hong Xiuquan’s paradise there’s only him wandering around; but Monkey King’s paradise attracts both children and delinquents.

The only reality is a great reality. So-called happiness is just decreasing your vocabulary without decreasing your songs. Each day the little man who comprehends this hangs his stockings to dry while humming a tune.

Paradise lost, as it should be lost, committed to rote memory on page one thousand two hundred forty-six of the Dictionary of Modern Chinese.

Paradise lost, as if the head of a pin lost its elemental pax et lux. Making the creator of paradise labor in vain.

So, could it be, when you are absolutely thought-free, that you just happen to be passing through your own paradise? One thousand times you deny that you are your own distance.

from The Scenery       Friends

Zhang is having company, Li and Wang come together. Li orders. We eat like our lives depended on it.

Between all the toasts and refills we talk about recent events, from SARS to the bird flu to foot-and-mouth to mad cow disease. The animals have gone crazy, attacking kamikaze-style, but we pretend we’re sober.

We sigh that it’s passé to sigh over idealism being passé. We sing songs of the old days together, vigorously singing the ideas of a new era.

Wang pays the bill, and I say thanks.

The three of them get bloodshot eyes.

I say thanks. The three of them push back their chairs and crowd around me. I sense they’re up to no good, but can’t remember when I offended them.

Zhang says: “Let’s go!”

I say: “What are you doing?”

Li punches me.

I say: “What are you doing?”

Wang kicks me.

I say: “What are you doing?”

Zhang looks on, then spits in my face.

I say: “What are you doing?”

They beat me black and blue. Finally they’ve had their fill.

Sitting on the ground I can’t stop asking, “What are you doing?”

The three of them say in unison: “What do you think we’re doing?”


from Flower in the Mirror, Moon in the Water

  Companion

I still don’t know who she was.

I still don’t know if she walked into my yard and opened my front door in search of me or someone else.

She climbed onto my bed, sleeping through my insomnia, like a white candle that had lost its flame.

Holding her felt like crossing a mountain.

The half-moon shone onto my forehead through the rectangular window, like shining on a public square through a ghostlike haze,

and at least that night I never spoke freely,

I didn’t want to make her angry.

At least that night I barely breathed,

Because her heavy breathing made clear she was lonely and weary.

Oh, no, there is no “her” whose loneliness or weariness could be made clear by heavy breathing.

No night on which I barely breathed, or I wouldn’t be alive today.

I never make anyone angry.

I never speak freely it’s not my style.

I have in fact strolled through public squares, but never felt any ghostlike haze. I only allow the full moon to shine on my forehead through round windows.

I’ve never crossed mountains, never even imagined it.

And I never have insomnia, even if a white candle were dripping wax on my eyelids.

So I don’t know who “she” is, that much is certain.



What the Tang Did Not Have

Translated by Lucas Klein

All products of modernity aside, the Tang didn’t have, well, let’s count: in the Tang there wasn’t this, in the Tang there wasn’t that, uh, in the Tang there weren’t any Thinkers! In the Tang there were emperors and beautiful ladies and palaces and armies and officials, there were astrologers and the moon and the clouds and poets and minstrels and dancers, there were drunkards and hookers and revolts and stray dogs and wilderness and ice storms, there were the poor and the illiterate and national exams and nepotism… but in the Tang there were no Thinkers. How could that be? With no Thinkers, there could be jade and gold splendors; without Thinkers, everyone was worry free, especially the Emperor. Free to play. In the Tang, they played up the great Tang, poets played up their great poems (only after the middle of the dynasty did poets start to furrow their brows). There were so many poets in the Tang, it was like there hadn’t been any before the Tang! Not that in the Tang they thought that poets could take the place of Thinkers, but just that in the Tang there really weren’t any Thinkers. For anyone now who dreams of taking us back, let me just warn you: prepare your thoughts — either give us a second Tang dynasty without any Thinkers, or else give us something that isn’t the Tang.

So in the Tang there were no Thinkers, which shows in the eyes of Han Yu, who loved to rack his brains — well, Han Yu got himself all worked up. Han Yu considered himself some kind of Transmitter of the Great Moral Way, but he was envied by no one, because in the Tang they just didn’t think there was anything great in ranking as a Thinker. Let him go make his noises, let him build up his cerebral cortex, while we build up our lower bodies! But Han Yu was so serious. Han Yu supposed, perhaps there is a Creator, else how could the mountains and waters embody the majesty of their logic? Han Yu supposed, bugs being the outcome of rotten fruit, that humans must then have crawled from the rupture of Yin and Yang’s cosmic order. But hearing Han Yu spout his nonsense, no one didn’t burst out laughing. Just leave him be. Leave him be. Han Yu opposed the reception of the Buddha’s finger bone, so why shouldn’t Han Yu just leave the capital? Han Yu went to the Chaozhou riverside, where ten crocodiles mocked him and called him stupid. In his rage, Han Yu posted this warning by the river: Within seven days all you crocodiles must pack up and return to the sea, and anyone who dares disobey shall be killed without a further word! The crocodiles stuck out their tongues and dispersed in a huff, leaving Han Yu just a little bit more relaxed.

– from Thirty Historical Reflections


Drizzle


it’s not fur—it’s mold—mold on stones mold on bread
it’s drizzle
it’s drizzle that makes clothes grow moldy the spirit grow moldy—this is the decay drive
making wood sprout mushrooms making gums grow cankers—the very same force
making love grow mold—love couldn’t it use a bit of mold?
making the lyric grow mold—only this manifests the moldless lyric—the middle-aged lyric
mold’s just mildew—my mom said it’s a fungus—my dad said
mold on the shingles on the street after 11:00 p.m.
the tick-tock of the clock—
the hoarse voice the rain speaks in—
growing criminals loiterers waverers—these are the effects of drizzle
a wet woman—

eighty days of drizzle—not too long
eighty days of drizzle enveloping 120,000 square miles of land and sea—not too broad
a wet woman miserable and alone—
it’s drizzle that soaks shoes that drenches socks—freezing feet
and then the water pushes into our bodies
from bottom to top up into the brain—and all a vastness once there
drizzle falling on vast seas—cargo ships sailing to Asia—raining on Japanese courtyards
some grow old in China—
raining on factories far from the coastline water’s nonstop drip-drop—food prepared in an age neither fair nor foul
an age neither fair nor foul producing notions neither fair nor foul—
some die
the unlucky the unwilling migrate to the cities—where they don’t know a soul
rich and poor both get moldy
but the rich don’t worry—they can throw away whatever gets moldy—aside from themselves
a fair economy and a foul economy both get moldy
but the fair economy knows how to make money off mold
those things that can avoid the drizzle avoid mold
curses of the indignant—

a swelling of interior life—
seagulls and crows huge in size
cucumbers at the grocer’s huge in size—is it from all this drizzle?
hinges swelling—the sound of opening doors—dogs barking madly
the drive of dogs barking madly which is the drive of footsteps upstairs
which is the decay drive—the thanatos drive
manifest in the drizzle that is mold
the bald man with no hair but mold—this too is a new life
mildew and then a new life—
in the drizzle—
this is the force of drizzle, look—

Victoria, 2009


Answering Venus (45 fragments)…excerpts


1.

night is the sleep of seven wax moths

dawn is the singing of five mermaids

noon is the scratching of three field mice

dusk is the shadow of a crow

12.

I placed seventy-two iron chairs in a meadow

facing seventy-two stars in the northern sky

My point was; seventy-two sages have left us

14.

in sudden loneliness

someone who rarely worries can’t help but sob

30. POUND

lonely Ezra Pound peels a tangerine

when the moon soundlessly slips through the Atlantic sky

Ezra Pound broods on the whole of humanity

33.

when my life is a mess

my watch is particularly precise

34.

Crows resolve the problems of crows,

I resolve my own problems.

37.

no one has yet tested the pencil

to see how many words it can write