MCLC: Notes on the Mosquito review

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: Notes on the Mosquito review
***********************************************************

Source: Bookslut (Nov. 2012):
http://www.bookslut.com/features/2012_11_019582.php
 

Notes on Xi Chuan’s Notes on the Mosquito: Selected Poems
By Greer Mansfield

Xi Chuan has been famous in China (and not just in China) since the 1980s.
Until this year, however, there have been no book-length English
translations of his poetry. So reading this new career survey from New
Directions and translator Lucas Klein, Notes on the Mosquito: Selected
Poems, feels like discovering a strange and exhilarating new region of
world poetry. Some notes on what one finds there:

At the start, a tight and concise lyric poetry evoking cityscapes,
railroad bridges, mountains, cypresses, and wind. One gets the sense that
these cities are real -- Xi Chuan has lived most of his life in Beijing
and is nothing if not a Beijing poet -- but at the same time dream cities.
He began publishing his poems in the late '80s; his early poems follow the
“Obscure” (menglong) poets in their registering of psychological states
and social criticisms through stark but mysterious images. The Obscure
group -- Bei Dao, Duo Duo, Gu Cheng, Yang Lian, and their comrades -- was
the most vital force in Chinese poetry when Xi Chuan began publishing, and
it’s natural that their work would influence his. But from the start his
style isn’t quite theirs. It’s less emotive, and more oblique in its
protest against the Communist Party bureaucracy.

Wind moves in and out of these poems, through windows in a concrete
high-rise in Beijing, or through the forest, or through the poet’s mind.

<<Before the rise of wind the woods were still
before the rise of wind sunlight and cloudiness
could be ignored for having
no raision d’etre
before the rise of wind a man walking through the woods
was a man without memory
a recluse
before the rise of wind it couldn’t be said
whether winter wind
or summer wind was harsher>>

In 1989, Xi Chuan participated in the student protests at Tiananmen
Square. After the state repression, the exile of the Obscure poets, and
the deaths of two close friends (also poets) from Beijing University, he
wrote almost nothing for two years. In 1992, his magazine Tendency
(Qingxiang) was shut down.  He eventually returned to regular writing, but
with a radically different vision. While not abandoning lyrical poetry, he
began writing sharp prose poem sequences that use earthy, sometimes
caustic, language to explore and question Chinese history, literature, and
society. Some of the best pieces in Notes on the Mosquito (including the
title poem) are these prose poems or poetic essays. The recent “Senses of
Reality” and “Thirty Historical Reflections” suites are at once
wonder-filled and bleakly funny: they cover everything from wild boars to
a Sanskrit-inscribed brick found in an antique shop to the behavior of
ghosts during the Six Dynasties:

<<In the Six Dynasties, ghosts were educated, and could discuss The Five
Classics with humans and debate atheists about the existence of ghosts.
…
In the Six Dynasties, men had successful romances, but the successes were
due to ghosts: female ghosts would host banquets in the grave, and what
man wouldn’t make an appearance?
…
In the Six Dynasties, swans were kindhearted, and would pursue a person
for five or six miles, just to give back a shoe.
In the Six Dynasties, the tigers were the contrarians, waiting for men to
take a piss outdoors so they could bite off their dicks.>>

Xi Chuan has translated Borges and even written a poem about him, but
these prose poems bring to mind another great Argentine: Julio Cortazar in
quizzical sketches like Cronopios and Famas.

His poems also bring to mind the Western modernists: urban surrealism,
clear images expressed in laconic language, black humor, and dialogues
with the dead. But one also thinks of the classical Chinese poets:
atmospheres and experiences captured in a few words, a slight shift in
mood (a change in the weather, the sight of an inscription on a tree)
evoking entire worlds:

<<An old man with a broom sweeps the street clean.
A middle-aged man paints his door green.
At Allah’s command an ox exits the city alone to wander the Pamirs alone.
A girl returns to her hometown after traveling the world and finds the
prisons of her hometown abandoned for fifty years.
Mountains all around, mountains harboring gold and not bandits.>>

One also thinks of a Chinese wisdom writer as great as Zhuangzi. Xi Chuan
has a similarly playful and puzzling mind, embracing the bafflement and
ambiguity of the world. Zhuangzi himself makes an appearance in these
poems, as do other luminaries of Chinese literature, philosophy, and
history: the “grand historian” Sima Qian, the satirical poet Sima Xiangru,
the poets of the Tang Dynasty, and even Confucius. These presences are as
much a part of Xi Chuan’s landscape as Beijing’s streets, the South
Xinjiang mountains, or the huge Chinese plains. From a poem called
“Plains”:

<<the darkness must be dealt with prudently
especially the dog barks and birdcalls traveling too far in the dark
a thousand miles of rainfall, in which someone must be stranded
ten-thousand-mile-away news on a flickering TV
turning around doesn’t mean going home
going home doesn’t mean home is where it used to be
…
to dream of the plains on the plains is a plain thing to do
to dream of Confucius on the plains is as far from plain as Confucius
dreaming of the Duke of Zhou>>

Xi Chuan is something of a wisdom writer himself. The fact that he plays
ironic and theatrical games with his writing is actually in keeping with a
great deal of Chinese philosophy (Zhuangzi again). From a poem called
“Exhortations”:

<<Don’t demand too much of the world. Don’t hold on to your sleeping wife
while dreaming of high-yield margins. Don’t light lamps in the daytime.
Don’t smear people’s faces. Remember: don’t piss in the wild. Don’t sing
in a cemetery. Don’t take promises lightly. Don’t be annoying. Make wisdom
something useful.>>

This can’t be taken completely at face value, of course, as Xi Chuan is
very far from an exhorter. What unites his lyric poems and his essay-poems
is that they all carry a sense of the world’s plenitude -- evoked so
gorgeously in a poem like “South Xinjiang Notes” -- and of the world’s
puzzlement. The plenitude is itself bewildering (what to make of the
Turkic Muslims he runs into in beautiful South Xinjiang?) and the
bewilderment has a certain beauty, as in his poem “Discoveries”:

<<even the Tang Dynasty fell in the end
even dumpsters have people living in them
even indulgent idealists have no clue how to live
even men with sloped shoulders run away from home
…
even the doctor got gonorrhea but he kept working
even the drunk knew the way home but forgot which door
even birds learn how to keep silent in May
even the living dead will scream out “Save me!”>>

For English-speakers, Notes on the Mosquito is a way out of our scandalous
literary disorientation (literally: “losing the East”), and into the
thrilling disorientation of Xi Chuan’s keen, perceptive mind.