MCLC: June Fourth Elegies review

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: June Fourth Elegies review
***********************************************************

Source: Words without Borders (July 2012):
http://wordswithoutborders.org/book-review/liu-xiaobos-june-fourth-elegies

Liu Xiaobo’s “June Fourth Elegies”
Reviewed by Fiona Sze-Lorrain

===========================================
June Fourth Elegies
By Liu Xiaobo
Translated from the Chinese by Jeffrey Yang
Graywolf Press, 2012
===========================================

Poetry charts a circular path to freedom for Chinese political activist
and writer Liu Xiaobo. “I am merely / a discarded wooden plank / powerless
to resist the crushing of steel / still, I want to save you no matter if
you’re / dead or still barely breathing, breathing,” the poet writes in
“Memories of a Wooden Plank,” on the twelfth anniversary of the 1989
Tian’anmen Massacre.  Powerless to narrate history as a public
intellectual in his own country, Liu finds in poetry a force of resistance
and an unlikely promise of solace.  “I’m still alive / with a name of some
disrepute / I possess neither courage nor qualifications,” he confesses in
the second elegy, “For 17.”  A year after writing those lines, Liu still
believes poetry has a singular power to disarm.  As he concludes in the
third elegy, “Suffocating City Square:”

This death-cast girl
has become a line of pure poetry
that surrenders all ideograms

While he was in jail, Liu Xiaobo corresponded with his wife, Liu Xia, by
writing her poems. Five of the poems he wrote her—“Daybreak,” “A Small
Rat in Prison,” “Greed’s Prisoner,” “Longing to Escape,” and “One Letter
Is Enough”—are published for the first time in the English-speaking world
in this bilingual collection, June Fourth Elegies.  They appear in its
final section, Five Poems for Liu Xia.  “From the Tremors of a Tomb”
serves as an introduction, enabling us to situate his poetry within a
historical context.  In this landmark essay, Liu Xiaobo revisits work from
Li Sao (Departing in Sorrow), an ancient poem by Qu Yuan from the Warring
States period to Lu Xun’s writings at the turn of the century during the
May Fourth Movement.  He then addresses the social implications of Wang
Shuo’s “hooligan literature,” a literary fashion that emerged in China
during the 1980s.  In emblematic writings of “hooligan literature,” the
rebellious “punk” is the hero in an exposé and satire of Beijing’s
metropolitan underbelly.  Liu Xiaobo also traces the failed freedom in
China since its Communist beginnings, and questions how he can work for
the cause of democracy in his quotidian life without being merely
concerned with “sublime abstractions” of “justice, human rights, freedom.”
 Above all, he refuses to aestheticize or mythify the Tian’anmen Massacre—
a resolve that characterizes the integrity of his poetry.

What strikes me most about June Fourth Elegies is the longevity of the
project, kept up over two decades: Liu Xiaobo’s ritualistic commitment to
elegizing the Tian’anmen Massacre every year—to fighting against the
collective amnesia of this historic tragedy.  The book’s dedication is
telling: “To the activist group the Tiananmen Mothers and to those who can
remember.”  However, the verb “remember” is not just an antidote for
forgetting; it carries the burden of honesty in a culture where national
consciousness is routinely thwarted by propaganda, Confucian asceticism,
and a subdued inferiority complex.  This fight against amnesia—in word and
in silence—endures over the span of years and against the formidable
obstacles of prison life.  In the first elegy, “Experiencing Death,”
written from the Qincheng Prison in June 1990, the poet grieves:

On Central Television News
my name’s changed to “arrested black-hand”
though those nameless white bones of the dead
still stand in the forgetting


Two years later, released from imprisonment, the poet wrote the fourth
elegy, “From the Shattered Pieces of a Stone It Begins,” this time from
his home in Beijing. Here he sounds a more introspective note to help ward
off the forgetting:

Amazing how the forgetting
enables deathly ruins to be reborn
the fortunate nourished by the decomposed

(. . .)

In the brain-mass there’s one shoe
that cannot find the road to memory

In these elegies, intended as anniversary offerings, Liu Xiaobo creates a
marginal space that defies but also transcends dissent and denunciation.
As a survivor, he lives in guilt and shame.  He speaks as a man, but
writes as a ghost, hollowed out by what he’s had to endure.  Qui s’excuse,
s’accuse: to the student victims of the tragedy, he mourns their sacrifice
and the massacre of youth; to his kin and friends, he pledges his love and
confesses his fears; to himself, he writes to engage in a difficult
relationship with language, using self-examination to plumb the linguistic
depths:

Bitter awakening
permeates each moment of desperation
suspended in the dark night
white-lily bloom an obscure haze
the fallen flowers of silent spring
lift me out of the abyss

Emotionally, June Fourth Elegies is a difficult read—not simply because
the poems stir and disturb, but also because they remind us of our own
damaged humanity.  In today’s political culture dominated by passive
spectatorship, it would be a moral wrong to read these poems simply as
“poems.”  In the lineage of Brecht, Neruda, and Akhmatova, Liu Xiaobo
writes poetry from a place that knows the danger of poetry.  These lines
have sprung from prison.  There is something more to their eloquence: the
elegiac voice in his work brings alive feeling confessing to itself, to
borrow the words of John Stuart Mill.  The possibility of catharsis hardly
exists in Liu’s poems.  The departed souls whom he eulogizes year after
year are forgotten, and he himself is in prison.  He cannot create freely,
and often has to settle for a poetry that will go unheard.  As the title
of his last elegy testifies, he fears—and at times, believes—that the June
Fourth Massacre now exists, irremediably, in his own body and nowhere else:

The day
seems more and more distant
and yet for me it
remains a needle inside my body

(. . .)

This needle
that has stayed for so long round the heart’s periphery
is determined to plunge inside
and bring an end to all guilt
but then just before acting
it hesitates
not daring to move forward

Compared with the rough, coarse language of the original, the translation
is somewhat embellished.  The result is a stylistic rendering of Liu
Xiaobo’s plainspoken language, which at times can be physical—gnawing and
piercing in its implications.  Liu Xiaobo is not a reticent poet; his
language is biting even when his words do not bite.  In some places, the
translation is literal; in instances that are more narrative-driven, it
slides into ravines and gullies of interpretation.  Ultimately, it is
subjective as to how far the translator interprets the spiritual weight of
these verses.  Liu’s edgy literalness is displaced by small but inevitable
measures.  The translator faces the particular challenge of locating Liu
Xiaobo’s voice, and confronting its uncanny inner hold.  Determination and
weathered experience—mottled by self-reproach, remorse, and questions of
life and death—propel the original work, and make for a certain elegiac
beauty in its English version.

Copyright 2012 Fiona Sze-Lorrain