In Chinese-speaking cultures, poetry can be traced back to 221 B.C.E. Over the centuries, poetry has appeared in classical languages, many of which are preserved in Chinese-speaking educational systems, museums, libraries, and among speakers themselves. Classical Chinese poetry is layered with allusions, metaphors, and meanings that sometimes shift with their sentiments. The study of this poetry has long been a requirement for those pursuing a literary education in Chinese-speaking countries. Almost everybody can memorize a poem or two by heart, which leads to classical poetry appearing in advertisements and everyday language. Most importantly, the classical works influence contemporary Chinese vernacular poetry, such as the work of Ma Yan (马雁).
Ma Yan makes playful use of languages in her poetry — the Sichuanese dialect, Mandarin Chinese, and classical language. For translators, and for me as a translator from the Chinese, expressions colored by the classical texts may be challenging to translate. At times, simply indicating a literal translation may sufficiently express the imagery. At other times, shades of significance add complexity to the translator’s task. As Stephen Nashef comments in his Translator’s Note, “My constant fear when translating poetry is that while I may be able to get across what is being said, I might leave behind the voice that is saying it.” Chinese and English have distinctly different sentence structures and unique ways of rendering “brevity.” The emotional urgency contained in Ma Yan’s poetry, its simmering of desire,and its haunted sufferings, are beautifully displayed in both languages.
“Jokes, Irony, Mockery, and Deeper Significances” allows us to perceive the strangeness and surrealist elements of Ma Yan’s poetry in both languages. This short poem is rich in its depiction of birth, motherhood, and identity. Notice the rhythm of your breathing as you read this:
What surges in my chest, what keeps gushing out,
isn’t milk, or passion either. It can’t be named.
The singular crowds, they are only them.
Unsure what to do, they roam the alleyways.
The people inside the crowds pace outside the brothels.
They tremble
and weep with their heads in their hands for the passing of joy.
In the filth
I give birth to a son. I name him me.
I want to touch the halo that encircles me, I want to snap the
bones inside.
No dagger can pierce him. I spread my legs and grab
my son’s head, drag him out, stretch him out big.
Merging moments of physical and cerebral pain with a contained violence and strength of assertion, Ma Yan amplifies the emotional urgency in an intimate way, as in a letter. The poet portrays moments of deep emotion, as if telling us her dark secrets. You may perceive different breathing rhythms in English and Chinese. In English, “They tremble” and “In the filth” are placed slightly differently than the structure in Chinese. They have their own lines in English, which can be read together. “They tremble / In the filth” somehow echoes the previous sentence, “The people inside the crowds pace outside the brothels,” which makes the translation all the more fascinating.
“Sufferings,” in Chinese, an almost omnipresent mix of pain and bitterness, are encountered throughout Ma Yan’s collection. In “Cherry,” there are such fraught lines in the first two stanzas:
It was a desolate plea
bringing neither complaints nor
illusions. Suffering is direct.
But suffering is not having the strength to enter,
it is frailty, a fear of insisting. It is quiet.
I wouldn’t dare reach into its core
to pull out the ghost dripping with blood.
My eyes are on sanitary lines.
In “Murder,” “A Gray Attic Houses Us,” and “We Boarded the Rollercoaster and Flew into the Future,” sufferings are named, as in “Cherry.” The language emphasizes the various aspects of the emotional experience. “Sufferings” is a landscape, an seemingly inevitable yet often unmanageable emotion, one embedded in personality: What do sufferings long for? Where do they reside? What are their emotional valences? In these poems, sufferings establish enduring relationships with humans and inform wisdom. The intimacy of Ma Yan’s melancholic longings creates a bond with me as a reader.
Emotions are moments. And there are moments of emotions that Ma Yan grasps as her language. Her tone is somber yet powerful. In addition, narration and storytelling dominate a number of poems, such as “A Teahouse on a Rainy Day (Or Lion Rock)” and “Extravaganza,” another way Ma Yan leads me to witness the internal turbulence of these poems. for us to feel.
A Teahouse on a Rainy Day (or Lion Rock)
Our newspaper tells more tales of grisly deaths:
Young married couple engrossed in game of mahjong unaware
when child
of three years falls down manhole, is buried in shower of
golden manure.
Sometimes the old couple by the scrapheap write complaints to
the editor.
Lion Rock with its lush forests and damp air
seems to have nothing to do with any of this. But how can it not?
Another report:
Young man and woman strangled to death and left in a heap in
the woods.
(Better yet, you and I should play illicit lovers and elope.)
Who killed them? A rival in love or murderous bandits?
“Our rivals in love,” you say with a self-mocking smile.
Only the hair-washing girl ten years ago on the corner,
or would the exquisite young carpenter take a wood plane to me,
peel me layer by layer … I can only lay myself
without scruples before you. They have long left our city.
No, it is the city where we parted ways — I am a stranger to you
and you have no intention of getting to know me. The light shoots in
at an angle. As it begins to recline you leap behind the sun’s back
and I jump into your shadow. The shadow is bigger than I thought.
(I might have even played a game here.)
You try to perk up while I sink into an exaggerated languor.
Yes, silence came too late. Temptation will arrive sooner or later.
It’s just right now we have found ourselves caught in the light.
When I was younger, living in Taiwan, we were told to memorize classical poems from Du Fu (杜甫), Lee Bai (李白), and Wang Wei (王維), and to pay close attention to the punctuation so we could recognize how to breathe while reading. Poems by these poets either sing to the beauty of nature, sigh with the longing for home, or reveal deep emotions through layered metaphors that were hard for us as children to grasp. Nevertheless, reading classical poetry set a foundation for our life with poetry. Many well-established, Chinese-speaking writers and poets are well-read in both classical and vernacular literature, and therefore, shape their voices to resonate with languages from inside and out. As readers of their new poems that incorporate multilingualism, we may wonder about – and feel the wonder of – traveling in time with such voices.
To navigate dialect, classical texts, allusions, and the act of crossing between Chinese and English is no easy task for a translator. Moreover, the difficulty of translating a deceased female poet, while the poetry itself contains deep challenges, makes the work all the more unique. I believe we can say there is choice rather than an answer along such a process. Both Ma Yan and the translator invite us to a masquerade of “moments.” Secrets speak to secrets, and it is from the intimacy built from within Ma Yan’s words that readers obtain a space for their own emotions.
[Published by Ugly Duckling Presse on October 1, 2021, 160 pages, $22.00 paperback]