A poet is a lot of poets. Like anyone who creates a large and varied record of their thoughts and language, most poets appear in one way or another according to the cross-section through which readers view them. People read Plath and remember “Daddy” but forget, sometimes, the poems on beekeeping; we puzzle over Ashbery’s poetry but overlook his collages. This effect is sharpened when editors are strongly in play, for example in television interviews: if the reporter or their broadcaster has the power to edit and arrange the responses of interviewees, they therefore have the power to create a cross-section, to make their subjects appear to be one kind of person or another. Translators, especially poetry translators, have precisely this kind of power over their readers’ experience. They have to select some works and not others. Sometimes they try to organize the use of that power by working to make their translation representative of a poet’s whole oeuvre, or to represent a historical or cultural movement; often, I suspect, they simply translate the pieces they like most or the ones they think will find the most appreciative readers.
Andrea Lingenfelter’s translation of Wang Yin 王寅’s poetry, titled Ghosts • City • Sea, is a rare translation that uses its power for a formal purpose: to create a coherent story and a cohesive collection, one that suits not just its poet but the historical moment in which the book appears. It is a selection of his works between 1985 and 2015 that is thematic rather than sequential, partial and partisan rather than objective and inclusive. In China, Wang is sometimes identified as a Shanghai poet with a “post-Obscure” sensibility. Unpacked, that means that Wang and poets like him helped spread underground, independent poetry after and outside its epicenter in early 1980s Beijing, but it also means that he resisted and updated the poetics of early 80s (“Obscure”) poets like Bei Dao, Mang Ke, and Gu Cheng. Labels like this are an inexact science, but when reading the work of Wang Yin, one does find poetry that’s resolutely independent from official writing, but also work that operates in a much more direct and colloquial register than the Obscure poets used. Wang has a piece called “The British” (英国人) in which every line claims that the British have something in surplus, something to spare: exceedingly funny, excessively paunchy, super-abundantly violent towards Indians and the Chinese. The effect is cynical, cutting, and quite clear — a far cry from the allusive, elusive work of someone like Bei Dao.
“The British,” however, doesn’t appear in Ghosts • City • Sea. In Lingenfelter’s selection, the Wang Yin we see is much closer to the surrealist and associative mode of the 1980s, and consistently circles trauma, historical memory, healing and forgetting in a way that’s familiar from the roots of contemporary Chinese poetry after Mao. In the first section of the translation, titled “Ghosts,” a spectral meditation on the transformation of history seems right at the surface: “at last there is yesterday,” Wang writes. “Revolution resembles something like normal life at last.” The way the section’s dissatisfactions resolve into faith in youth feels like a letter-perfect rendition of the feelings of the years right after Mao, when Chinese society was turning the lights back on, surveying the damage done during the long night, and looking forward to the days to come. Here is a section from “White Sea”:
the universe is easily corrupted
but youth is beyond reproach
a white sea courses through the hospital before dawn
while supple steel gives an account
of a summer long fallen into rust
The center section, “City,” attaches the ghost of history to Wang’s haunted city of Shanghai — a city “harboring grief” in which, as one poem title says, “Today’s Heavy Rain Poured Down Last Night” — and then, in the final section, “Sea,” the particular tenor of Wang’s relationship with Shanghai is knitted into Wang’s global travels. When the shore of Shanghai and the shore of Brittany seem to resonate with the same feelings of loss and isolation, one begins to suspect that the haunted landscape is interior, following Wang as he moves. One stand-out poem, “Now,” gestures towards the suppressed memories that animate the collection’s hungry ghosts:
the glass bends the green blades beneath it
like past events you don’t remember
until someone mentions them, like bullets
piercing the body of a gazelle
May, almost upon us
still deep in the fishbowl
dreaming of rain-drenched
sugarcane far from the capital
The sense of mood and tone that the book builds is quite powerful, but one might ask why it is this story that gets told and thismood that gets built out of Wang Yin’s poetry, rather than another. Readers may be used to translators opening and explaining their choices, but Lingenfelter’s introduction emphasizes the how of the book, not the what or the why. She describes her 12-year friendship and collaboration with Wang Yin, the studio residency they did together, and the way they encountered and connected with their publishers at Seaweed Salad Editions. The point is, the introduction seems to say, that the book’s selection of tropes, its order, and its tone exist because poet, translator and publisher sat together and decided that it should be so. The embodied artistic and translatorial process, performed with consent and participation of all involved, is the justification of the document. This pushes the book away from a globalized transparency — in which the losses and gains of translation are describable, and the reader knows what kind of experience they are meant to have in order to “access” Chinese culture — back towards an experience of art. A reader doesn’t have to privilege the question of what this book teaches about Chinese culture or where it fits into contemporary Chinese poetry, and a reviewer doesn’t have to obsess over the relationship between the English and the Chinese. This particular work wasn’t compiled for a Chinese audience, even though the original poems were, and it wasn’t made by a translator working alone who needs to be mistrusted or resisted: the book was made by a transnational, translingual collective with Chinese tools and English-language readers in mind. And so we can simply ask: how does it feel to read?
When I read Ghosts • City • Sea today, I feel the power and relevance in the way it tells a story of haunting in the long view. When I was younger, I read elegiac poetry (including the poetry of China’s 1980s) as a marker of the difficulties that previous generations had passed through, a reminder to those of us in other conditions to feel gratitude for all our plenitude and intellectual space. But today, elegy feels like a chronicle and commitment to uninterrupted labor, a reaction to the haunted world that persists through stages: a struggle to overcome (in poems like “Storm”: “life and death blur together / only wordless prayers / escape my heart”) a struggle for equilibrium and healing (“These Seven Years”: “living bread, living fresh water / give me those portions I cannot give myself”), and the dogged pursuit of joy, as in “Days Without Love”:
… winter’s wounds
sewn together by tender roses
exhausted fingers almost touching the stars that skim the water
the storm fills my sleeves like grieving mercury
distant happiness like a sharp knife
slicing at my heels
The collection invites this reader, at least, to see these as phases or moments in the single work of living. If we had loved better, we wouldn’t have so much to overcome; if we heal better, we can love harder. If we don’t push back when the “callous rituals leave us numb,” we won’t find either rest or affection. From my context, in which I am trying my best to survive the slide towards eternal pandemic and heat wave and bad government, the book serves as a reminder that the answer is to care, build and heal with a revolutionary energy: one phase of combat against the careless, destructive, harmful revolutions that may come.
But that’s just me. The book, as a work of art does, may speak to you differently, perhaps even better. One resource to reach you that this collection has is, to the best of my knowledge, unique to this Chinese-English parallel version: Ghosts • City • Sea features eight of Wang Yin’s original photographs. His selected works in Chinese (灰光灯, 2015) were paired with color prints by a graphic artist, but the ability of Seaweed Salad Editions to insert Wang’s own photography into the collection and situate it in a way that reinforces the mood of the poetry seems true to Wang’s emphasis on the visual and to the spirit of the collection. The poetry doesn’t need images, and doesn’t correspond to them in a one-to-one way, but the collection is more beautiful for their inclusion. Again, one returns to the table around which the collection was made: the poet/journalist Wang Yin mentioning his photography, the visual artist and publisher Monika Lin asking to take a look at them and nodding in approval, translator Andrea Lingenfelter selecting translations to suit the photos and photos to suit the translations.
There is no one method by which a translation should be created. I dream, like a lot of translators do, that every text should be encountered as a future classic and given the maximalist treatment: translated by own-voice intimates, by distant scholars, by interventionalists, experimentalists, and literalists, a single book swelling into a stack of variegated art that serves as a space for inspiration and dispute. When we are talking, however, about the contemporary translation of living poets, it feels especially important that at least one translator resides with and alongside the poet not simply to interpret and transpose their words, but to share with them the tools to create their own work in the new language. This process isn’t perfect, and it’s not any kind of end to the work of translation and retranslation, but it does draw meaning from the one thing that is unique to the translators of living poets: their ability to make contact. Ghosts • City • Sea is not a complete translation of the poet Wang Yin, but it is obviously, and powerfully, a moment of deep contact with him and with his poetry. That contact transforms, to me, the collection’s dark tone. These are ghosts of pain and loss, but they are ghosts around which we can gather — a poet, a translator, a publisher, a reader. Wang writes in “Sunlight”:
then we will be able to hear
in a room where gardener and goldsmith await us
blue-tongued birds singing
like ghosts chanting prayers for the living
[Published by Seaweed Salad Editions, Shanghai, on June 30, 2021, 64 pages, $16.00. Available from Small Press Distribution by clicking here]