China/France | Chinese | Poetry
November, 2019Song Lin is the most open and self-effacing Chinese-language poet I have ever met. He suffered for democratic causes, and after two years of imprisonment, migrated to France, “flee[ing] with beautiful wounds.” This was something he stood up for and he simply did what he had to do, and then literally, with light-handed humor, moved on. He asked for no laurels for his civil disobedience. Once overseas, he did not dwell on nostalgia and his chosen isolation, rather, “the fugue marches on,” displacing alienation with an “encyclopedia of the sky.” He looked up and forward. Symbolist and Surrealist touches are increasingly evident in his poems, and forms like the couplet enter his repertoire, as he “turns sorrow into craft.” He did not look back and assume an “exile” label. In fact, he has no labels. His labels, or rather, labors, are words; his true struggle, “the tribulation of a word, until it spits you out.” The natural world is turned to; museums are visited; the circus becomes a gaze on the poetic craft; words become sperm whales; the bell is tolled in the ear; there is fainting; and there is fainting again. The agony of a poet wandering in words and worlds strikes:
the fallen, lifted by our hands, leaking through our fingers
that once belonged to the stars are sands that boil like tears
What better description is there for a poet that blows wounds into wonders! This dazzling, he leaves to these lines of gold. He lets others shine. Through his poetry editorship at the important literary magazine Jintian (Today), he has been bringing foreign and unsung works to Chinese readers. He was an early advocate for classical Chinese and translation. He champions underrepresented masters, aspiring young writers, and everybody else, except himself. “Strangled / by the umbilical cord,” he takes seriously where Chinese poetry came from, and cares even more about where it is going. In SONG Lin’s poems, the strange becomes stranger, the familiar turns familiar again, the quiet becomes quieter and explodes. With understated restraint and exploratory openness, this is a poetry that strikes and burns. It is perhaps safe to say SONG Lin is the last centaur of contemporary Chinese avant-gardists, a rare poet that straddles the liminal space of words and wounds.
- Dong Li
The Brooklyn Rail welcomes you to our web-exclusive section InTranslation, where we feature unpublished translations of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and dramatic writing. Published since April 2007, InTranslation is a venue for outstanding work in translation and a resource for translators, authors, editors, and publishers seeking to collaborate.
We seek exceptional unpublished English translations from all languages.
Fiction, Nonfiction, and Poetry: Manuscripts of no longer than 20 pages (double-spaced).
Plays: Manuscripts of no longer than 30 pages (in left-justified format).