Featured Poet: Wang Jiaxin
Wang Jiaxin is an eminent Chinese poet, essayist, and translator and has published more than forty books. His collection of poems in English is Darkening Mirror (Tebot Bach, 2017), translated by Diana Shi and George O’Connell, with a foreword by former US Poet Laureate Robert Hass. His poems have been published in The American Poetry Review and The Kenyon Review, and he has been a poet-in-residence at the Dutch Literary Foundation (Amsterdam, 2022) and at the the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa (2013). An esteemed translator of Yeats, Mandelstam, and especially of Paul Celan, he has also translated books by American poets Jean Valentine and Ilya Kaminsky into Chinese. He has won many domestic and international awards, including the inaugural Ai Qing Poetry Award (2023). John Crespi, Director of Asian Studies at Colgate University, has extolled his work：“Wang Jiaxin has exerted a far-reaching influence over contemporary Chinese poetry not just as a poet but also for his role as a critic and translator. Wang’s poetic voice stands out for the gravity, clarity, and resolve with which it explores the individual’s relation to history, destiny, cultural inheritance, and humanity.”
Wang Jiaxin was a professor at Renmin University of China for years—he now splits his time between New York and Beijing—he has led a translation workshop at the Hudson Valley Writers Center, lectured and read at Walt Whitman’s birthplace, and a number of American and Canadian Universities.
Translators:
John Balcom
John Balcom is Professor Emeritus at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies. Recent publications include My Village: Selected Poems 1972-2014 by Wu Sheng (Zephyr) and The All-Seeing Eye: Collected Poems by Shang Qin (Cambria). He is a past president of the American Literary Translators Association.
Arthur Sze
Arthur Sze’s latest book is The Silk Dragon II: Translations of Chinese Poetry (Copper Canyon, 2024). His previous book, The Glass Constellation: New and Collected Poems, received a 2024 National Book Foundation Science + Literature Award.
from “Marginalia,” Six Fragments
Du Fu in 2021
Some contemporary poets are just parrots
fighting over a few grains of rice.
And from the great tree of my childhood,
a phoenix is coming.
Bertolt Brecht
“Don’t go driving nails into the wall!”
—Brecht said so.
But we’ve already driven so many nails into the wall;
aside from some black holes,
nothing else is hanging.
Vermeer’s Little Girl
Vermeer’s little girl. So many poets
praise the pearl’s beauty hanging from your ear,
but for me, its beauty,
coalescing light and
weight, is that it’s a tear.
The Street of Crocodiles
I still haven’t read The Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz,
but I can already see a pair of wine-cup eyes
pretending to be asleep.
Fortunately, the sun is lovely here, the streets tidy, and the shops open—
except for a few remote-controlled garage doors
that stay closed.
Tsvetaeva
You died in the small town of Yelabuga,
but you’re still wandering valleys of the Czech Republic.
Even the birds can recite your poems.
And now you’re tired and want to sit down and smoke a cigarette.
Can you find someone to lend you a light?
Rereading The Gulag Archipelago
Barbed wire, numbers, loudspeakers, searchlights—
years ago, reading The Gulag Archipelago,
what drew me in was the story of prisoners escaping;
it seems Solzhenitsyn wrote this
just to make people run.
Are we still running now? Yes, still running.
Are we still running now? No, no more running.
(2021)
—Translated by Arthur Sze
“Homage to Paul Celan”: Anselm Kiefer’s Exhibition in Paris
A wheelbarrow loaded with charred stones
A concentration camp inside a glass case
On a leaden, ash-colored canvas, covered with huge scars,
sticky, withered, hemostatic ferns …
In Paris, this is a large-scale exhibition at the Grand Palais Ephémère
A poet-painter who escaped from the smoking brick kilns
of the Third Reich,
is he paying homage to Paul Celan?
The July air heats and heats
In the Arctic Circle, ice melting
Here, the hot concrete streets are full of shadows
From a distance, curses come from drivers lined up at gas stations
And I look away from the map of Ukraine
with its arrowheads of war
Black suns we can’t see are burning above us
(2022)
—Translated by Arthur Sze
The following poems were all translated by John Balcom:
Untitled
It doesn’t start at the beginning of an era, but at the end
Inevitably a person comes walking toward you.
One who just might be a lover you haven’t seen in years.
(1994)
For Imre Kertész
Between your words, fire and ice,
A convict’s
Chains and freedom,
All creak and rustle.
In this country you’ve never visited,
The scenery is not all that different.
Already iron has grown into the land,
Poor children grow up eating icepicks for fun,
And beating on empty jar from a past life,
When I read you
The echo comes back—
Yes, it was, and I’m afraid it will be
Our only music.
(2012)
In the Native Place of Laozi
Legend has it that Laozi was born an old man
Laozi had no childhood
No one but Confucius, who asked him about the rites
Knew who Laozi was
We climbed to Laojuntai, high up and precipitous
Twenty-five hundred years later
Living in troubled times, he went to Hangu Pass
Where he paid his ‘toll’ in full and left
Some say he became a crane
Others say he’s held up in Denmark to this day—
Like Bertolt Brecht, listening to the howl
Of his old country over the radio
While using a pen of no use to write
In his fortunate journal of exile
(2017)
After Kobayashi Issa
We walk on the roof of hell
Gazing at flowers
- Kobayashi Issa
Sometimes we walk on the roof of hell
Gazing at flowers
Sometimes we walk on the edge of the flowers
Looking down into hell
I look out the window again now
Seeing nothing at all
How I long to return to the roof of my hell
Gazing at flowers
(2020)
Remembering 11 White Temple Hutong in Xidan
What number was it exactly? I can’t seem to remember,
But Hai Zi wrote it down in his address book,
I saw it written there in black ink.
My family and I lived there for seven or eight years,
In the courtyard was a hundred-year-old date tree,
Two low buildings with gray tile roofs, on the ridges
Of which snails would appear after an autumn rain—
Duo Duo put it all in a poem.
Our son grew up there.
Every year we ‘chopped wood for the winter’.
We wept when we heard the tanks rumbling on the streets
Amid the pungent smell of gas....
Later, a monstrous bulldozer appeared,
Uprooting the old date tree,
Even the rib-like rafters were buried in the tile and rubble....
Today stuff is sold in the highrise stores there,
No one knows a hutong once existed below.
For the living, the place held laughter, footsteps,
the soughing of the wind
And even the near silence of falling snow,
Preserved now only in the memories of one dead.
(2021)
At the Same Time
...at the same time, the Myanmar poet Khet Thi
Was tortured in an interrogation room
His organs were removed while he was still alive
At the same time, my wife’s recently purchased pot
of moth orchids blossomed
Swaying gently in the breeze
At the same time
I read the latest news online about a student who fell
to his death at 49 High School in Chengdu
The official story is that “the family supports the
outcome of the inquiry”
And so died that high-school student
At the same time
I wanted to write a poem
No, I tore up that poem!
(2021)
Last Year’s Snow
The snow finally fell, it was last year’s snow.
Making the room colder and darker.
Last year’s snow finally fell today.
I’ve been through a lot of snowfalls,
But I feel that the snow falling in late February 2022
On the path of millions of fleeing Ukranians
Is the real snow,
Other snows are just vestiges.
It’s the sort of snow that draws us to the window
To look farther into the distance.
(2023)
“The Great Poets in Sad Times”
- for the Kharkiv poet Serhiy Zhadan
The great poets in sad times
Talk of hope
To keep their lines of defense from collapsing.
Nor does he give up his poetry, at least
He could share the art of song
With the darkling thrush alighted beside the trenches.
(2022)
Someone
Someone talks too much, someone lives in silence
Someone says: “playing a violin in Auschwitz
is just like dancing on a corpse”
Someone’s eyes burn in the dark
But are blinded by bright light
Someone writes disaster poems, others ask me to do so
Just like dancing on a corpse
Someone walks down the red carpet again, someone
Turns down a small path through the woods
Pine needles carpeting the ground, moister than our eyes
(2023)
Joseph Brodsky on Cape Cod
In exile, Thomas Mann said where he was,
There was Germany;
Similarly, where Brodsky went, old Russia
Went too, for example on Cape Cod in Massachusetts
He wrote: “The eastern tip of the Empire dives into night.”
(as if it were the shore of the Black Sea)
Fortunately a mysterious cod came to visit him at night,
(his door was creaking)
Giving him another dream, an unearthly one,
A dream about hell, heaven, and Nothingness.
(2023)
To W. H. Auden
You once wrote an epitaph on a tyrant,
But you never realized
That was just one of his stand-ins.
(2023)