INTRODUCTION

I started to read Zhang Zhihao’s poetry while a friend and I were looking for poems to translate for entertainment, but once read, I could not have enough of it. Zhang’s poetry is simply enjoyable with its eloquence, elegance, and elevating power. During the past three years, I turned to examining it with the more professional eyes of a translator, cultural studies specialist, and college educator. This volume of poetry translation is therefore a labor of love. Wearing three hats, I aim to share a delightful poetry experience with readers who love poetry for what it is and to help expand the global landscape of contemporary Chinese poetry.

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Zhang’s poetry is very eloquent. With a minimal repository of poetic techniques—metaphor, symbolism, parallel structure, personification, pun—it covers all sorts of subject matter in a remarkably accessible manner. Whether writing about the cityscape or countryside, current state of being or erstwhile Chinese common people’s experiences, the personal or the public, Zhang’s poetry comes with a magic sheen that adheres to “whatever the eyes see is poetry目击成诗,” which Du Yi《杜臆》, a famous literary commentary, used to characterize poetry by Du Fu who is one of the most influential Chinese poets ever. Zhang strives to turn out poetry that can speak to the core of the common, quotidian, and visceral.

More specifically, Zhang believes in the axiom, “Write what you know.” He values truth and embraces truth even as it is beyond grasp, and if he cannot tell it, he decides not to lie. He accomplishes this by closely observing the smallest of life’s details and distilling them for meaning. He insists these are the very moments that do matter—small pieces of daily living that define people and connect people as human beings.

For instance, in “A Steelyard” (一杆秤See page 66), Zhang delineates a countryside afternoon he experienced and transforms it into an enlightening reading. Apparently, the villagers gathered to slaughter a buffalo for celebration because they were surrounding a giant boiling cauldron “in high spirits.” The stars, measurement marks on the scale, were too greasy or illegible to read suggesting this slaughtering was a common practice. Since “I” narrate the story and “I” position “us” as apart from the rest of the villagers, “we” are likely children. It is just because of this innocence, the poem leads to the cutting truth: The scale was used to weigh how much buffalo meat there would be and how much meat each of the villagers would have. Therefore, the fact that “I” was on the hook and being weighed suddenly enabled “I” to at least momentarily empathize with the poor buffalo that was to be sacrificed. In addition, the Chinese phrase “斤两,” which means one’s worth, enables “me” to question “my” own worth or to realize “my” own insignificance and vulnerability. Ultimately, Zhang uses this poem to ask human beings to stoop down to the level of the buffalo to understand the other creatures’ sacrifice and reexamine human assumptions and hubris. On the scale is not only bodily weight but also human lack of self-understanding.

Zhang grew up in the countryside. His knowledge of the countryside or everyday life of the country folks helps his poetry writing in detail, giving it a quirky twist to tone and style. It shapes Zhang’s own content and thought to grow on that content, which forms a significant part of his poetry. It is no surprise to see him use planting rice seedlings as a vehicle for his poetics.

“Left Align” (左对齐See page 4) portrays the poetry composition process, from a blank piece of paper to a page full of human characters, unfolding story, and eventual interior sensation. The extended metaphor—composing poetry is like transplanting rice seedlings in a field—is both picturesque and dynamic; visual and cerebral; sensual and analytical; and familiar and freshly new. It’s hardly imaginable somebody who has never experienced that life would write in such surgical precision and yet with such poetic sensuality.

These poems reassure readers that daily life, whether hard or happy, is precious and meaningful if people contemplate it observantly. And it does it in a strikingly elegant manner. Zhang has fashioned a poetic voice of his own. He excels at a sound register ranging from the medium to the low. This sound register is characterized, as Zhang relates in “Poetry and Sound Register,” by shunning exaggerated high-sounding tone and words, such as destiny, human society, nation, times, history, etc. His is a poetic voice that refuses to budge to the pretentious, spectacular trend, or yield to self-desire. He chooses to be deliberate, as Ralph Waldo Emerson believed that Man Thinking should.

For instance, it cannot be said that “In Response to My Love, to the New Year as Well” (答枕边人，兼致新年See page 160) does not contain barbs, but the language register and tone of the poem sound so gentle and intimate that the poem flows almost like a lyrical love poem. The poem considers it miraculous to stay to the “original intention” and consoling to have days free of “smog.” Readers easily read the poem as a social critique, or gentle buttering up, which means some built-in ambiguities. The language used is low-key, personal, and familiar. A poem like this sits well with general readers as it provokes thoughts and empathy with the speaker. The speaker finds it lucky to have survived it all with “you” at year’s end. This feeling is highly relatable and intimate. There is no intricate poetry form, glaring technical somersaults, high-flown diction, and pretentious piety or insincerity; the poem simply speaks gently to the heart and lingers with a long finish, creating a delightful image of beauty.

Zhang is in truth very adroit with image creation. In “Conveyor Belt” (传送带See page 53) he focuses on one who is waiting at the airport baggage carousel. Anyone who has taken a plane or long-distance bus, waited for a loved one, or experienced life in a similar manner, could relate to this hope, or yearning, the speaker conveys. In a world where increasingly people decline personal relationships to wrap themselves in technology, this poem can transport readers quickly back to beautiful old-fashioned sentiments. Zhang achieves this effect by comparing waiting for one’s loved one to waiting for luggage at the carousel, and comparing the patience and commitment needed for nourishing a loving relationship to those needed for successful baggage claim. While using this metaphor, he is doubly engaged—the visual denotation and the emotional connotation. More than one thing is happening at once, and he invites the readers to respond at both levels. Zhang relishes the fun of playing with the purported meaning though he is mainly concerned with the second meaning of his poem. The resulting image is vivid, delightful, and easily identifiable.

Zhang’s poetry is also effective in elevating the heart and mind to the most touching, daring, and far-reaching. For example, in “The Mushroom Spoke, and the Wood Ear Listened” (蘑菇说，木耳听See page 46) the main literary device is personification, but the poem is humorous and profound. Evidently, the two characters cannot get along with each other despite their shared desire to return to where they grew up. The poem lends itself to many interpretations–racism, prejudice against people due to their weight, lack of dialogue, inability to return, mutual foible, etc., and it can thereby appeal to many different audiences.

“Hoop Rolling” (滚铁环See page 54) is another poem that evokes children’s innocence, but subtly morphs into awareness of the abysmal, difficult to grasp world. The poem presents a vignette of a countryside milieu: threshing ground, resting parents, and a child playing with an old bike tire. The poem begins with the child wide-eyed with amazement. But added into the mix are strains on the farmers—busy harvest time, hot weather, and exhausting field labor. The most unexpected looms large near the end where the child runs at high speed into thicker and thicker darkness. The early strains are nothing compared with this imperious darkness. In 15 lines, the poem turns one late evening into a symbol of unfathomable precarity of life while youthful in tone.

As shown, although these poems may appear to be about the routine, personal, and even insignificant, they not only penetrate deep into the essence of life and human circumstances but also elevate the mind to where readers can sustain through the day, spot beauty in the simple, and aspire to be resilient, empathetic, and dignified.

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Given the characteristics of Zhang’s poetry, how should I translate it? There have been many approaches to translation. As translation of Chinese poetry into English is concerned, Western translation moved historically from missionaries to sinologists, and then to aesthetes. Their divide in purposes diverges their translation approaches into domesticating the original or foreignizing the translation. Meanwhile, Chinese translators have focused more on translating English poetry into Chinese, and their debate about translation has centered on three criteria—faithfulness, expressiveness, and eloquence.

All these approaches exist for good reasons and work well for one purpose or another. However, I shun the models set up by the foreignizing vs domesticating dichotomy and its implications, as well as the rigid understanding of the Chinese translators’ three criteria. I am not ready to sacrifice accuracy for stylistic elegance nor elegance for accuracy because turning a Chinese poem into a poetically cogent English one should be a matter of exercising moderation. It’s about creative ways of using language, and sensitivity to audience reception. I agree with Fusheng Wu that “great works of translation, like great works of any art, often cannot be fully ‘framed’ or accounted for by a general theory. They demand individual treatment, which must be rooted in the specific times and circumstances of their production” (115). Thus, the three hats I wear decide which poems I translate, how I translate, and what appearance I fashion for them. Most importantly, I firmly believe good poetry translation should be good poetry in and of itself.

I illustrate what I mean by discussing the translation of a few poems in this volume.

In “Forms” (形色See page 191) the title word of the poem could be Forms or Rūpa. Rūpa is a Buddhist term. It includes anything that has impact upon the human senses (which is “real” in Buddhist terms), such as people’s dreams, ideas, memories, thoughts (Ingram and Loy 99, 100, and 103), and in this poem’s case, the flowers and names. The speaker obviously realizes the fluidity, transiency, and ephemeral nature of the self. If Rūpa were chosen as the translation, the poem would be domesticated as it shows a strong urge to channel English readers to read the translation in Buddhist or religious terms, which the poem connotes. When translated as Forms, the “story” dwells in this world but with philosophical or Buddhist subtlety. Zhang is not a Buddhist, but as most Chinese use Buddhist concepts in their lives, I keep the nonreligious dimension of the poem. Moreover, the fact that the speaker is obviously obsessed with having a name, a beautiful name, and a famous name shows that the speaker has not achieved the Buddhist non-self, or the universal “oneness” (Barash 88). Therefore, the word Forms sounds faithful to the original poem, but the Buddhist connection is also well kept.

While the above translation pays attention to denotation and connotation, and differences in understanding Buddhism between Easterners and Westerners, my translation of “The Mushroom Spoke, and the Wood Ear Listened” entails another type of flexibility. There are several choices for 木耳, a mushroom that grows on fallen tree trunks and used in cooking: fungus, edible wood fungus, cloud ear, or tree ear. I chose “wood ear” because it’s perfect for the situation. The two dried fellows are level in the same bathtub, and one spoke and the other obviously needed an ear or ears to listen, especially when the poem uses personification! This choice is neither due to domesticating (Fungus does carry a nasty connotation) nor foreignizing (Wood ear is chosen more because the two fellows need to be in the same bathtub and equal in status than it is an effort to do a literal translation).

While these word choices are in correlation with contextual nuance, “Haystack” (草垛See page 100) juggles two cultures and revolves around a rock. Here, which word should be chosen for 石头? Rock, stone, pebble? Given the youth and mischievous behavior of the speaker, the warm sentiment the speaker feels now, the varied gender possibilities for “you,” the rock seems a more proper choice; it is more substantial than a pebble, and smoother than a stone in denotation. Besides, in Chinese, there is the idiomatic saying “egg hitting a rock” that means “overestimating one’s strength or oneself, not knowing one’s own limitations.” So, using the word rock can readily bring out the allusion and accompanying image of innocence and exclusive relationship. Is this foreignization? Maybe, but it is simply a faithful and felicitous choice.

Other times my choice hinges upon a reflection of language sensibility. For instance, in “The River That Would Never See the Sea” (看不见大海的河流See page 20), the father of the speaker responds by body language to the speaker’s question about the Yanzhi River’s destination. The original poem treats the father shaking his head as one reaction and pointing to the sky as another. Two images ensue, which are both used by the speaker to speculate on the metaphysical origin of the river or human life. The poem is about the speculative intellect of the Emersonian man-thinking type of father and son. However, it would be awkward or unnatural to use “reactions” in the lines “I deliberated over his reaction for many years” and “my father’s reaction” in English. Therefore, I opted for the singular form, which alters neither the feel nor meaning of the poem at all.

My decisions are often as cultural as they are linguistic. Translation is mediated transmission, thus the site of interaction for beliefs, values, and structures with disparate origins. Choosing a word could be a cultural decision. For example, Zhang had a pet dog, called Hua Dan, and the poet’s close relationship with the dog is reflected in many of his poems in this volume. In these poems, Hua Dan is either a personal buddy, a family member, or a sentient philosophical being. Some of the poems are written in the second person narration, which does not generate any complexity for translation, but others are written in the third person. In those cases, to translate means to juggle cultural differences.

For instance, the title of “Remembering My Dog in the Year of the Dog” already indicates the poem’s focus, the oxytocin-infused relationship between human beings and their canine friends. Zhang conveys his love for his dog, but does it by saying how much his dog, not himself, had already missed him while the dog was still alive. What pertains to translation is that despite Zhang’s close relationship with Hua Dan, he uses the pronoun它/it to refer to his dog. In the West, dog owners would use “he” or “she” to refer to their dog depending on the dog’s gender, whereas Chinese dog owners, though they love their dogs dearly, still likely use “it” as it is traditional. So, which pronoun to use? I chose she/her/hers because these pronouns make the translation better attuned to the sense and sensibility of the Western readers, and they align better with the sentiment the poem presents. It turns out domesticating the original can be more faithful to the original. The change of pronouns helps the readers feel closer to what the poet feels.

A unique characteristic of Zhang’s poems is that they often use no end of the line punctuation or stanza division. As the volume shows, Zhang’s repertoire is minimal—occasional inverted commas, dashes, and periods within the lines. For inverted commas, I sometimes opted for italics. For instance, in “He Who Searches for the Signal” and “The Span,” I adopted italics to indicate words spoken by the characters. I could have chosen inverted commas, but because Zhang usually uses no end of the line punctuation marks, I avoided that by choosing italics instead.

Where Zhang manifests a rare degree of confidence in and linguistic awareness of what makes poetry is syntax. He fashions a tightly coiled syntax for each individual poem. Such powerful play of syntax, typographical extension as a condition of syntactical progress, makes the poems almost painting-like in effect, which is particularly enjoyable for most readers. For instance, when reading “Sketch of a Winter Day” (冬日速写See page 146) the hand of the poet creates a pastoral picture in a few strokes. Though they appear last, the magpies on the twigs are prominent in this image, their black and white contour literally visible and their chirping clear and sweet. Each of the previous lines opens the bucolic vista wider and wider, with the last two lines pushing the poem to the summit of aesthetic beauty. Zhang has written many such picturesque poems, some of which are found in this volume, such as “Three Days After the Snow,” “Sunday Snow,” “Old Days,” and “Spring Equinox.”

Distorting syntax in translation reduces and deforms meaning, and the poems can be syntactically vandalized. With stops added, there would be less desirable visual flow and, in some cases, ambiguity and complexity. Therefore, I kept the syntactic layout of Zhang’s lines without sacrificing the fluency of the English version. Except for rare situations, translations in this volume adhere to the line arrangements of Zhang’s poems. This is usually a challenge to translators as discussed in many translational studies. It comes natural for me as a native speaker of Chinese and a speaker who learned English both from a formal education as well as decades of language immersion. This advantage lends my translations a high degree of faithfulness, fluency and ease. For illustration, while English translations are often longer than their Chinese originals, my translations are generally equal in length by sticking to the original syntax.

In total, 183 poems are selected from Zhang’s award-winning collections, Wild Flowers on the Plateau and The Everlasting Pot. These poems are arranged into groups with quotes from great English poems to showcase how Zhang engages with major elements of poetry writing: definition of poetry, writer’s personae, deployment of poetic devices, poetry’s depth and heights, poet’s family background, varieties of poems (including untitled poems, longer poems with stanza division that are rare in Zhang’s writing, and poems in the traditional Chinese farewell poem fashion), and a supply of additional Zhang poems for further exploration. As a college professor, I hope it facilitates fun, but also some versatility for pedagogical use. On a more ambitious note, this volume marks thefirst book-length English-language edition of Zhang’s poetry, providing access to the writings of a major contemporary Chinese poet.