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Ha Jin and the Western Tradition (of Chinese Poetry)          by Jack Granath

Chinese poetry played a bracing part in the snarl of cultural collision that rocked (and made) the last century. Those early translations by Arthur Waley and Ezra Pound were among the most beautiful inventions in the history of English, so quietly explosive and vivid and standing-there stark that to call them inventions at all seems disparaging. But inventions they certainly were:

          March has come to the bridge head,
          Peach boughs and apricot boughs hang over a thousand gates,
          At morning there are flowers to cut the heart,
          And evening drives them on the eastward-flowing waters.
          Petals are on the gone waters and on the going,
	                 And on the back-swirling eddies,
          But to-day's men are not the men of the old days,
          Though they hang in the same way over the bridge-rail.

These lines from Pound's translation of the eighth-century poet Li Po have all the basic features: simple, direct language in a concise free (or, as often in Waley's case, loosely accentual) verse broken gently along with the syntax. The two-tongued tell us that these free-hand versions capture the spirit of the originals—a certain intense compression—better than any formal attempt can do. Whatever they do, they do it extremely well—and with so much authority that many of us one-tongued are surprised when we find, somewhere down the road, that the originals were insistently metrical and often heavily rhymed.

But despite the great influence these translations had—and as part of the Imagism mix it's still on the go in every show-don't-tell echoing from the writing factories of academe—the mode itself did not survive as a significant vehicle for poets working in their wake. The "gentle" line break, which many writers remember as the eternal first impulse of their earliest efforts, seems static to the self-consciously fractured modern ear, redundant in its pausing (right where we'd pause anyway), and naïve. Later in the century a very different sound came out of ancient China in these lines, for example, from Kenneth O. Hanson's translations of Han Yü:

          Folks say
          when your teeth go, the end's
          near.  But I think
          all life has its limits—
          you die when you die
          whether with or without teeth.

Contemporary poets settled on a more jagged look and feel, for the most part, digesting this piece of Modernism without touting it as an actual diet.

Nevertheless, the poetry that Pound and Waley made has an enduring power. Several of the best translators to follow, such as Sam Hamill and Burton Watson, have continued along their road. Many poets slip into Waley-sounding verse now and then, when they want to point East. And every once in a while a book of original poetry comes out that works this set of sounds with new enthusiasm. 2001 saw a remarkable example of such in the publication of Wreckage (Hanging Loose Press) by someone much better known for his fiction— Ha Jin, the Chinese-American writer whose novel Waiting won a National Book Award in 1999.

Wreckage is reminiscent of those old versions of older poems, but it doesn't imitate them. The book calls classical Chinese poetry to mind largely because of its subject matter, which exists in a mix of past tense and tenselessness: drought and flood, emperor, scholar, farmer, foe, the Lord of Heaven and the lively dream. And it calls the translations to mind because of its straightforward English and its forceful free verse line:

          Our land is dying of thirst:
          elms and willows stripped of bark,
          grass gone, clouds dry like rock,
          even mountains seem withered.
          Some parents have eaten their children;
          fresh graves are opened
          for the flesh on the bones;
          a dipper of cash cannot even
          buy a dipper of grain;
          peasants are rising up everywhere—
          still the river withholds
          its water.

Notice, though, in this passage from "A Drought," the break between subject and object in those last two lines, or between the words in a verb phrase, "cannot even / buy." Ha Jin works the gentle break in a way that few contemporary poets would feel comfortable doing, but he knows how (and when) to modulate the rhythm. Every kind of poetry has its concomitant danger, and monotony is obviously the loose board on the steps of heavily end-stopped poems, but Wreckage is never monotonous. Like the best writers of iambics, he turns that danger to his own advantage, flirting with it to achieve a measure of quietness, but never letting it deaden or drain.

Another danger with this sort of poetry, as indebted to the old as it is, might be irrelevance, but Ha Jin avoids this trap too by working yet another feature the classics were famous for, the double reference. "Burying Them," for instance, obviously alludes to the Cultural Revolution when it tells of scholars rounded up, put on trial ("they pointed fingers at one another"), and eventually executed by burial.

          We had fun, slapping and spanking them
          with our swords before we pushed them in.
          Of what use now were their clever tongues?

Poems on women's difficult lives work in a similar way, pointing to the liberation effort of today. The very architecture of the book seems to fish forward: it opens with a section called "The Cyle of the River" and closes on "Meeting the Barbarians," poems about early frictions between China and the West, thus enacting some sort of lurch toward modernity. And after sifting through all these resonances and mirrorings, one returns to the opening section on the river and wonders if those poems aren't a little bit about the ecological nightmare that is the twentieth century, the arrogance and ironies involved in our attempt to change the world's rivers (with China's massive Three Gorges Dam project, for instance), to control all those big things that have just always been there, doing what they do and going where they go. You can hear it in these lines from "Seized":

          Look at that sandy ribbon on the horizon,
          like a piece of silk
          flickering in the north wind.
          That's the river, raised by our effort.
          Caged in high dikes,
          it flows easily above our city,
          where factories bustle day and night,
          where trains blow dark whistles.

          Who can keep the river up
          in the clouds forever?

          Someday it will thunder down
          like millions of crazed
          elephants and whales.
          So, many of us live as though
          there were no tomorrow.

Ha Jin's first book, which was a book of poems, makes any charge of irrelevance impossible anyway. Between Silences: A Voice from China (University of Chicago Press, 1990) comes straight out of the grittiest stuff that modern China had to offer. It's the work of a man who joined the People's Army at the age of thirteen or fourteen, lived through the Cultural Revolution, and landed in America, writing about those experiences and the history they fell out of. This book too sounds nothing like the poetry of its time, using a variety of voices in monologues, or maybe broken dialogues, since many of them address a "you" that doesn't get to answer. Ha Jin takes on the voice of a soldier thinking back on his military photograph ("two submachine guns were passed from hand to hand"), a mother who sent her sons off to die in the army, a general boasting of his own savagery. Other poems address a boy whose father was denounced, a man returned from twenty years of hard labor, and a tough-talking teacher who wound up groveling for mercy at the hands of accusing comrades.

The composite portrait has an all too human face, and that's the book's main strength. Between Silences humanizes history in a warm, complex, unsettling way, much as Chen Kaige and Zhang Yimou did in their great films about the Cultural Revolution. It's a very strong book, though the author was not yet writing very strong poetry, the kind of stuff that reaches out and knocks you down in Wreckage. Principal among the problems is a line-break monotony, as here in "On the 20th National Anniversary":

          On the morning of the 20th National Day
          my uncle came home and told us:
          "All our troops have got into position,
          for the Russians may throw an atom-bomb on us today."

          After breakfast he returned to the headquarters,
          but I had to go to school and join the celebration.

          The fear oppressed my back like a bag of sand.
          I could not raise the little triangle flag in my hand,
          nor could I shout slogans with my classmates.

In this poem Ha Jin captures a certain weighty naiveté characteristic of the Atomic Cafe nuclear age ("Benli said, 'I must go home / and tell my dad to kill all our chickens'"), but these line breaks conspire with the parade march sentence structure and the occasionally stiff diction ("oppressed my back"?) to strip the poem of the larger effect it could have.

His next book, Facing Shadows (Hanging Loose Press, 1996) takes off in a totally different direction. Though many of the poems in Between Silences are in the first-person, it is usually someone else's first person; here, the speaker and the author appear to be the same guy, or at least close cousins. Many of the poems are about living as a Chinese expatriate academic in America. The issues of nationality, tradition, and race that inevitably arise park this work firmly on the couch of contemporary American poetry, with its nervous confessions of identity confusion & unhappiness. In a poem called "Gratitude" on an occasion unlikely to inspire poetic flight— an MLA convention—he writes:

          I thought finding a job shouldn't be a problem.
          With a doctorate I would have a dozen interviews
          and a few offers, like my African friend Patrice
          who had four choices and chose a major university.
          If so, I promised, I would write a poem
          to express my gratitude and must not
          attribute the luck to my talent.

He doesn't get the job, as you guessed, and so moves on in a more elegiac strain:

          I remembered the fate of Tu Fu and Li Po—
          two great poets who had the bitterest lives.
          The Lord of Heaven wanted them to sing,
          so he made them feed on misfortune.
          He cut their wings and put them into cages
          and forced them to watch other birds soaring.

Fairly soon after the poem ends, of course, he wins a NATIONAL BOOK AWARD, which is marvelous but somewhat damaging to the poem's overall punch.

This is not to say that Facing Shadows is a bad book. It's just a book that's like a lot of other books. The best poems in it, though, show a remarkable talent emerging. My favorite is called "To Ah Shu," a poem that picks through the shattered glass of personal identity-language, politics, religion, and poetry—in the quiet, sad voice of these opening lines:

          It's raining in Boston tonight.
          The roofs glisten while thunder
          rumbles through the spring woods.
          Again, I took out your letters
          and read them one after another.

I don't know if we should conclude that, with Wreckage, Ha Jin has found his poetic voice. He has written three highly accomplished books of three entirely different kinds. Whether his fourth develops the marvels in Wreckage or lights out for yet another new land—language poetry, love lyrics, rap—it will top my list of things to read.

                                           Jack Granath is a poet and bookseller who lives in Kansas City, Missouri

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Carnelian   V2 Iss2  April, 2002