Urine in poetry annoys all the right people in contemporary China. The state, hyperfixated on productivity, political cleanliness and national power, can’t burn it, sell it or shoot it from a gun. A substantial part of the reading public loathes piss, too, especially those fixated on China’s rich and ancient tradition of poetry as a tool to promote national civilization, civic virtue and the value of being Chinese. And yet urine, shit, blood, and rot are everywhere in contemporary Chinese poetry — for instance, in the work of the “Lower-Body Poets” and the “Garbage Poets,” two avant-garde groups who make the unpalatable a key element of their artistic practice, or in the work of Mu Cao, whose writing about contemporary queerness is no stranger to the public toilet. On page one of Pee Poems, the emigrant poet Lao Yang announces his membership in this oppositional coalition: “Don’t call me a poet, call me a piss person.” A few pages later, he explains in more detail:
When even the right to cry is denied
Incontinence is one of the few remaining liberties
Seeing rulers raise walls in the eyes of the people
I reinvent the act of pissing
That reinvention is simultaneously playful and elegaic, a kind of revelry that constantly indicates the suppression of the right to weep, and in so doing weeps all the harder. Poetry is often figured as a kind of incontinence, a blurting or shout. Stephen Owen translates the Great Preface to the millenia-old Classic of Poetry like this: “The affections are stirred within and take on form in words. If words alone are inadequate, we speak it out in sights. If sighing is inadequate, we sing it …” It is surprisingly un-strange to see these pee poems as part of the oldest Chinese poetry tradition: underneath the stentorian respect given to the great poets of the Tang, though, there is the sense that the earliest surviving Chinese poems were folk songs, little people using music to say their truths because words weren’t quite enough. Nobodies. Piss people. In the third section, “This Country,” Lao writes a laundry list of the sorts of things that piss Chinese people off, the exact sort of thing one likely couldn’t write inside the People’s Republic today:
Into luxury goods incorporate Communism
Into the disaster area introduce Party and State leaders
Into the developed nations of the West mingle descendants of future generations
Into the prisons stuff prisoners of conscience
Into the starry sky put Wen Jiabao
Into your tears mix cement
Into your head add shit.
It’s not dissent, exactly, it’s certainly not a threat to the Republic, it’s just the truth. Lots of people hate their government, that’s natural: the disorder, in Lao Yang’s figuration, comes from having to hold in that resentment past the point of bursting.
In an English-language context, though, where it is all too easy to criticize the Chinese government without upsetting the local social order, Pee Poems is most interesting for violating other kinds of piety. In China, piss people come to their shared position against the status quo from an immense variety of places — from queerness, as in Mu Cao’s case, or from aesthetic positions, or because they are ethnic or linguistic minorities. Pee Poems comes to its criticisms not from any of these, but from Buddhism. This piece from the second section, “This Person,” is a good example:
Under the sun, with transpiration
Sea slowly becomes lake
Lake slowly becomes puddle
Puddle becomes cloud
Cloud becomes tears
Tears become crystal
Crystal illuminates everything …
This little passage encapsulates a viewpoint common to many strains of Buddhism, in which the sensible world’s illusory, shifting quality can be seen only through by the experience of suffering, here represented by tears. Pain is real: when we look through pain, like a crystal lens, we see the world that our fantasies of safety and prosperity are hiding from us. It is Buddhist belief, in these poems, that is pitched against all those who promise pleasure and luxury, that hide the world’s suffering under the rug: “In the ocean of pain,” Lao writes, “lurk the dark designs of those / who propagate happiness.”
In its Buddhist roots, too, are the origins of the collection’s strange, hard-fought feeling of release and relief. If the world of forms inside which we suffer is an illusion, if we can only see reality through our experience of suffering, then the forms of the world are infinitely mobile and mutable, open to whatever. The full text of a poem titled “To a Poet Who Hasn’t Replied for a Long Time” reads:
Erect, waiting for you.
Another poem, titled “Poetry,” or 《詩》, pulls the traditional Chinese character for the word “poetry” apart into its component parts in a totally ahistorical, even goofy way, as 言 寸 土, which the translators render as “Shallow-dirt speak.” It then compares this extremely humble definition for poetry to another dissolution of the character, 言 寺 or “temple speak” — a composition for the character that is still ahistorical, but much more widely accepted. The poem thereby neatly, and playfully, makes the point that these two types of speech are the same, that the words of shallow dirt are the words of the temple and are poetry. And it does so by rigorously abusing what serious people believe they know about how a character like 《詩》came to be.
The deep playfulness of Pee Poems demands a great deal of its translators, both in terms of rendering extremely idiosyncratic and linguistically-focused poems like “Poetry,” and in terms of letting go of some of its more complex and culturally situated elements, like the book’s repeated imitation of Qu Yuan (ca. 300 BCE)’s poem “Tianwen,” or “Questioning the Heavens.” Lao Yang, even writing from Marfa, Texas (which figures in several poems) obviously could not care less whether his poems are translatable or not. One poem in the first section is four different characters that are pronounced deng: 等凳瞪燈. Faced with a text like that, a lot of translators would just wince, and skip it.
In the their afterword, the translators choose to walk readers through their decisions in “Poetry,” and not to do it in the case of “Tianwen,” but it seems clear that these are not problems to be solved with long, scholarly explanations: in this bilingual edition one can read the Chinese poetry, which is highly readable and engaging, the English poetry, which is highly readable and engaging, or both, which makes the decisions of the translators as clear as day, and amounts to reading the Chinese poems alongside a well-educated friend. You may have differences of opinion, but that’s why we read together. Joshua Edwards and Lynn Xu, the translators, translate the deng poem above like this:
Stay stool stare star
But I’d choose the following version, which reflects my respect for the choice they make to use consonance to get across the original’s homophones, but which underlines the poem’s internal/domestic scene, and makes it a bit less transcendent:
Sit stool stare stove
The poems themselves, though, take the piss out of this kind of distinction. Translation is futile and abject, and we do it because we have to; the question isn’t whether a translation is stable enough to found a government on, but whether it relieves our internal pressure. Edwards and Xu start their translators’ note by outlining the scope of their challenge — the poetry is really difficult to translate, and they need to use it to get across the “spirit of its author” — but by the second page they’re admitting, and rightly so, that they “also just followed Yang’s lead and fooled around with words.” Right on. For these pieces, grim faithfulness and a fascistic fetish for perfectibility should be replaced with a sense of possibility, of openness. Lao writes,
Give the haunted house back to the ghost
Return the garbage dump to the garbage
Restore the dream to the pillow
Put the seeds
Back in the goddamn plant
Pee Poems is written from exile, from loneliness, from an understanding of real suffering, but it is not defeated. It finds its community in its translators, its solace in its deep faith, and its futurity in a rigorous opposition to any restraint. It plays because it has the urge; it moves because it has to go.
[Published by Circumference Books on March 15, 2022, 135 pages, $18.00 paperback]