Chinese Poetry in The Believer

http://believermag.com/issues/201006/?read=article_hass

The reading consisted of one live and surprising voice after another. The poets, men and women, ranged in age from their late thirties to early fifties. They belonged, as did Zhai Yongming, to what critics were calling the New Generation. All of them seemed to me interesting, and—the most surprising thing about them—interesting in different ways. Over the years I’d attended a few international literary gatherings at which Chinese poets had read their work. In those years, in the 1980s and 1990s, you did not, in the first place, know whether the poets you were hearing were the actual poets, given the People’s Republic’s tight control of its public culture, but you did know that, if they were the actual poets, they were nevertheless writing in some utterly opaque code. Poets from around the world—from Vietnam and the Netherlands and Brazil and Canada, quite different from one another, coming from quite distinct literary traditions—were part of the same conversation. They were trying to invent in language, trying to say what life was like for them, to bear witness to it, to find fresh ways of embodying the experiences of thinking and feeling and living among others. That was what I was suddenly hearing in Beijing—that familiar, exhilarating sound, not so much of poetry, but of the power of the project of poetry. It felt like something very alive and new was stirring in China.

Comments

# 1.   

I'm very pleased that Yu Jian and, especially, Xi Chuan are beginning to get some of the attention in the Western literary awareness that they deserve. Attentive readers of translation should note, however, that my translation has gone through several revisions since the version Hass quotes. The title, for instance, is no longer "Free Association," but "Exercises in Thought."

Lucas

 Lucas Klein, June 21, 9:11a.m.

# 2.   

Want to give us the whole (revised) poem? :)

 Eric Abrahamsen, June 21, 10:48a.m.

# 3.   

Well, the whole poem is two pages long, and will be available in my translation in the forthcoming Copper Canyon / NEA anthology of contemporary Chinese poetry. But the two paragraphs in question now read:

But the bald man doesn’t need a comb, the tiger doesn’t need weapons, the fool doesn’t need thought. The person with no needs is practically a sage, but the sage also needs to go and count great big rivets on an iron bridge as a diversion. This is the difference between the sage and the fool.

Nietzsche said that a person must discover twenty-four truths each day before he can have a good night’s sleep. But first of all, a person shouldn’t find that many truths, so as not to let the supply of truths in this world exceed demand; secondly, anyone who discovers that many truths would hardly be able to fall asleep at all.

Lucas

 Lucas Klein, June 21, 11:56a.m.

# 4.   

Much improved!

I'll look forward to the Copper Canyon anthology…

 Eric Abrahamsen, June 21, 12:19p.m.

*

Your email will not be published
Raw HTML will be removed
Try using Markdown:
*italic*
**bold**
[link text](http://link-address.com/)
End line with two spaces for a single line break.

*
*