How far can poetry go? What physical distances, what social distances can it travel? Some people like to talk about poetry as a practice of empathy, a way to jump the deep gap between individuals, but what if that gap is more than existential, what if we want to use poetry to connect to people that are physically, culturally, and economically very distant from us? All poetry travels — translations, on average, travel even a bit further than other kinds of poetry do — but some collections travel a particularly long way. Among the contemporary poetry we can read in English translation, Zheng Xiaoqiong’s first book In the Roar of the Machine has traveled an especially long way to get to English readers. As an example, here’s a piece of the poem “Moonlight: Married Workers Living Apart.”
the moonlight illuminates their fifteen-day honeymoon, illuminates his memory
of her body taken over by shade inch by inch, privet fruit trees
her body lies fallow in the moonlight, inch by inch
slipping along the forty-five metres between buildings 5 and 6
The scene is a workers’ dormitory in southern China. Erected quickly and cheaply, designed to hold the millions of young and middle-aged workers migrating from inland rural areas to the megafactories of the south, the dormitories are a place where daily life is organized by whatever is convenient and cheap for factory bosses — so genders are segregated at night, and vacations are tightly scheduled. The couple in the poem has gotten married and had a rare chance to be together freely before returning to their allotted bunks. The memory of their physical encounter then fades, replaced by the ornamental bushes planted between his male dormitory and her female dormitory. He sees her in the way a rural man might, as fallow, unseeded — can they have children this way? This particular couple’s particular stack of concerns is made up of the competitive pressures of transnational capitalism, the traumas of manufacturing labor, the deep inequities of Chinese society, the needs and desires of their bodies, and the demands of rural tradition. Their lives are immensely important in China and in the world and they are very far from the average reader of English-language poetry. In the poem “Li Juan,” the title character moves furiously through the world of Southern Chinese labor, trying to escape her fate back home:
changes of factory changes
of hairstyle changes of boyfriend changes of
future plans she’s like a hopping frog
always taking a leap on urban paved streets
that she can’t get used to she wants to evolve into
a frog who can live in a jungle of steel bars
she wants to escape a traditional fate leaving home at eighteen
she’s like a tree transplanted in the city she has to put down roots fast
or else she’ll return to her village
We may recognize or remember the experience of poverty in our own places, the desperation and the propensity to take risks, the restlessness that lack causes, but the additional dislocation of farm workers thrust into precarious urban contexts changes the tone and the struggle. Habituated to the rhythms of countryside life, Li Juan feels like a plant or an animal, forced to adapt to a world that is deeply alien to her.
The scholar Maghiel van Crevel has pointed out that Zheng and her poetry have moved great distances through repeated processes of cultural transition and translation. Zheng began writing after migrating from her home in Sichuan province to work in a hardware factory in Dongguan, a thousand miles to the south. She took that experience and those of the millions of people who left home to work in the south — sometimes called “migrant workers,” in Chinese called dagong ren — and rendered them into poems. Those poems were then taken up into the literary journals and newspapers of migrant worker literature, publications circulated by workers for workers. From there, migrant literature was “discovered” by the larger Chinese literary world, and Zheng’s poetry in particular was singled out, sometimes as exemplary (of a higher literary quality than other migrant poetry), sometimes as representative (understanding and reproducing the basic themes of all workers’ literature). An influential anthology of migrant poetry worker poetry was published, and a documentary was made about its authors — both of those then found translation, also by Eleanor Goodman, under the title Iron Moon (her translation of the anthology, from White Pine Press, is especially worth reading). Among the dozens of poets in that anthology, Goodman chose this single poet to feature in an individual collection. From the perspective of the English reader, the process feels like a lucky lottery ticket, like an accident. Factories don’t like to be examined, workers are rarely able to write after twelve or fourteen hour shifts, elite circles in Chinese literature tend to denigrate worker writing as crude, and English-language readers are notoriously averse to translation. But somehow, a piece like Zheng’s “Zhou Yangchun,” despite the odds, may now be read by the people who consume the products that the poem’s injured girl makes:
her remaining fingers repeating motions like a machine her upper back
legs lower back she couldn’t control them strange pains
as though stones were crushing her body she had to extract
a deserted field from her body it made her scream there was a beast
that escaped her sleep this girl of seventeen from Hunan
screaming as though she were being crushed alive by stones in her sleep
screams erupting from her flowing veins
penetrating the whole dorm
We get the basics, the things we might be able to guess from reading the newspapers — there are few fixed and dependable rights for workers in Chinese factories, the work is difficult, dangerous, and the hours are long — but we also see things we might never imagine. People lose fingers and have to go back on the job; the dormitories aren’t soundproofed, so at night you can hear your coworkers scream in pain; Li’s repetitive stress injury took no time at all to develop, she was only seventeen.
While she is always a writer of the migrant experience, Zheng Xiaoqiong is much more than a poet of the factory floor. For every migrant who leaves home to work in the factories of South China, a space opens, a void: a sibling, parent or child disappears from their home village, a participant in rural life is replaced by a voice on the phone or a remitted paycheck. Migrants in these poems are always measuring themselves against the past they’ve walked away from, one that the sheer scale of migration has now made irretrievable. In “The Mutating Villages,” Zheng mentally returns to a village life that has ceased to exist.
I uselessly seek the voices of the old fields and gardens
the rainy day swallows, the ancestors of Tomb Sweeping Day
…
oracle-bone inscriptions through leaves, the heavens and plains
are covered with the rust spots of constellations, surrounded by tranquillity
the dusk piles up on a sliced-off mountaintop in the cooling gloom
The final line above is a brilliant mutation of the ancient poetry of gazing towards distant scenery: the hilltop has been removed and mined for ore, and the cold darkness is accumulating atop it like an output of industrial waste. Zheng’s escape from the omnipresence of factory thoughts and feelings takes her into the nostalgic, the postmodern and the Romantic, into a heavily transformed and subjective version of the great poetry traditions of imperial China, and back to village life. In her collection Rose Courtyard, excerpted in the last section of Goodman’s translation, Zheng invents ghosts for the past women of her abandoned, dying home place.
Autumnal winds stir the bleak courtyard, the birds on branches
sing, the water clings to dull rocks, autumn roses
slowly sway, and everything exists in ripeness and death
five thin shadows follow the wind through the paneled door
I return to the courtyard, carrying three damp books
and feminist thoughts unsuited to the time
longing for the old days of the courtyard, the five grandmothers
with their love and disparate fortunes
Zheng’s desire to return to the old days is emotionally resonant but hard to think through. After her struggle to make the plight of migrant workers visible, In the Roar of the Machine ends with a desire to return to the Tang Dynasty, more than a millennium ago. Zheng accepts that there is really no going back for her, but the fact that this poet of iron and pain, of social consciousness and womens’ experience, would identify so strongly with Chinese tradition is deeply resistant, even revolutionary. It is a rejection of the present and a refusal to entertain the factory-built future. Even though a working woman like her would have been nearly invisible during the Tang, Zheng still dreams of going back to a time before secret, invisible illnesses, to a time when the lychee groves had not yet been felled, before her world had been poisoned by iron. In China today, where migrants sacrifice their own present and future for their families and children, this backwards-looking timeline is both traumatized and defiant.
All this — one of the most important Chinese poets of our generation, writing from the epicenter of the largest migration of human beings in the history of the species, exposing force lines of suffering, justice and wealth that invisibly influence lives around the globe — all this has to happen despite the two very powerful languages that shape the collection. To Zheng, the Modern Standard Chinese language (people sometimes call it “Mandarin Chinese”) is a tool like all the other industrial tools; it was forced on her, she needs it, and its use leaves marks. In a nearly untranslatable poem called “Dialect” (rightly not included in the collection), she imagines her mother language, Sichuan dialect, as a worker: trudging out of the factory, exhausted, longing for home. The languages of In the Roar of the Machines are languages of conquest — standardized, centralized Chinese and global English — and Zheng is trying, with her frequent reference to classical Chinese, her seizure of the bureaucratic language of factories, her repeated return to the scene of the crime, to make language new so that she and hers will have a place to call home.
That new language accumulates around the pain of migrant life like a callus; in learning it, we learn the places that dominant language and the owners’ rules have wounded most frequently and deeply. This poses an immense challenge for the translator, and Goodman has written persuasively about her need to borrow the rhetoric of English language worker poets like Philip Levine, as well as poetry that speaks as an individual for a collective, like Langston Hughes. The size of the challenge, as well as the immense resources she has brought to addressing it, are visible in the first stanza of the translation of one of my favorite poems in the collection, “Drama”:
She extracts a wide wilderness from her body
burying disease and moodiness, planting glimmering words
steadfast, calm, believing, installing inside her body
a high-powered machine, it bores into time
eating through her youth and enthusiasm, and it produces
her fake fat life
她从身体抽出一片空旷的荒野
埋葬掉疾病与坏脾气，种下明亮的词
坚定，从容，信仰，在身体安置
一台大功率的机器， 它在时光中钻孔
蛀蚀着她的青春与激情，啊，它制造了
她虚假的肥胖的生活
In line two, this word “moodiness” is such a problem — it renders huai piqi, a completely anodyne and unpoetic word that is literally “broken personality” or “bad temperament,” but it also serves, in the concrete and understated rhetoric of some villages, as essentially the most negative thing one can say about a woman’s spirit. “Moodiness” gets across the sense of disordered feeling that matches the nameless woman’s physical illness, the psychological analogue to her physical problems. But “moodiness” feels bourgeois as well, transitory, an accusation of inconstancy. The world in which a young woman can be labeled as huai piqi and punished for it, the fear underpinning the woman’s desire to find an open and blank space in which to bury her own temperament, is almost unsummonable in a single word or a few words. In other moments, though, subtexts and counter-discourses in English create a sense of the smoldering heat that the straightforward, declarative Chinese runs on: once “installed in her body,” the machine produces a “fake fat life,” and this phrase’s very American rhetoric of self-loathing gives English readers easy access to the moral damage (as opposed to the physical or psychological damage) of factory life, the way it provokes a degraded and degrading self-image. Managing these echoes and concatenations is a monumental task; it is, as Goodman has written, much about the translator herself being a woman and a worker, a reader and an organizer. There is little in English that is truly equivalent to Zheng’s work at what “Drama” calls “the machine of the Chinese language.” Experiences of oppressive labor exist in the English-speaking world, of course, the suffering, the migrants and the alienation, but our language for it remains shadowy, under construction. That’s a task for writers today as a collective: Goodman contributes mightily, but of course nobody invents a language alone.
In the Roar of the Machines is a book to use. Although it was written and has been translated in an accessibly artful language, it is immensely complex, disturbing and challenging: it is a book about work, class, women, fantasy, home and suffering. Its translation is additionally about the globe-spanning, networked relationships between producers and consumers, profit and sacrifice. Because, as far as Zheng Xiaoqiong’s particular voice has traveled, and as much has happened to her words since she first started writing after her shift at the tool factory, at heart this is also a poetry of transnational capitalism and its many effects. Zheng’s work is distant from contemporary Anglophone poetry in its outlook and rhetoric, but the world of her poems is also already an elemental, constitutive part of your life and my life today. That we now have a chance, in these poems, to feel Chinese labor and our relationship to it is an immensely rare and lucky gift.
[Published by Giramondo Publishing on July 10, 2022, 112 pages, $25.00. To access the publisher’s page for this book, click here.]
To read Nick Admussen’s recent On The Seawall reviews of poetry by Wang Yin and Lao Yang, click here.