In an interview from The Kenyon Review, the poet Ye Lijun (叶丽隽) confesses: “I feel and think of myself as a nature poet, not a contemporary Chinese pastoral poet,” perhaps revealing the specificities of genres in Chinese ecoliterature. Poetry within Chinese nature writing comes in loose nomenclatures: among others, there is shanshui shi (山水詩), the poetry of mountains, rivers, and landscape; tianyuan shi (田園詩), the poetry of fields, gardens, and farmstead; and shanshui tianyuan shi (山水田園詩), nature poetry. This latter category is brilliantly displayed in My Mountain Country (World Poetry Books, 2019), the first bilingual publication of Ye, a promising poet of the post-70s generation.
The book explores the visceral connections between the poet and the landscape she inhabits, with its poems taken from Ye’s three Chinese-language poetry collections and translated by her long-time translator, the award-winning writer, poet, and zheng harpist Fiona Sze-Lorrain—named in Chinese Literature in the World: Dissemination and Translation Practices (2022) as one of the most prolific translators of modern Sinophone writings. In this conversation, kindly mediated by her translation, I spoke with both Ye (in Lishui) and Dr. Sze-Lorrain (in Paris) on this English-language debut, and how their book speaks to the larger body of Chinese nature poetry.
Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): My Mountain Country is a bilingual volume of selected poems taken from your various Chinese-language poetry collections. Could you share the story behind these poems and the journey of bringing these collections to life?
Ye Lijun (YL): In 2005, I was alone in Hangzhou at the China Academy of Art, two years into my studies in oil painting, and living in a rental on Mount Jiuyao near West Lake, painting, reading, writing. I’d resumed writing poetry for about five years by then; I participated in the twentieth Youth Poetry Conference, and my poems appeared in journals such as Shikan (Poetry Magazine) and Renmin Wenxue (People’s Literature).
A friend, poet Xia Jifeng, happened to work in publishing. With his encouragement, I published my debut collection, Tiaowang (Survey, Dazhong Literature & Art Press). It included some of my earlier work—simple and fresh, but not unagile.
I devoted my next few years to studying and writing, and kept up this creative momentum until 2019. Recommended by poet Li Yuansheng, I published my second book, Zai heiye li jingguo wan jia denghuo (Passing by Ten Thousand Lights in Black Night, Chongqing University Press). At that time, I wasn’t yet forty, but my poems had gradually matured. A few were circulated far and wide.
But by 2014, I had experienced some bottlenecks in my writing and often lamented the difficulty of inspiration. I too mourned my limits and inability to achieve what I’d hoped. Coincidentally, the poet Dawei was working in publishing, and he invited me to publish Hua jian cuo (Flower Complex, Changjiang Literature & Art Press). I wasn’t too satisfied with it, so added some poems from my previous collections.
AMMD: Fiona, beyond your translation process, could you share your approach to selecting and curating Ms Lijun’s Chinese-language originals? How did your editorial vision shape the three chapters of My Mountain Country—“Song of Tremble,” “Partial Solar Eclipse,” and “In Search of Porcelain”?
Fiona Sze-Lorrain (FSL): I get asked often about my “curating and editorial vision.” It sounds conceptual. People ask because what they see is a neat and finished result, not the years it took to get there. There is no method or formula, but it requires imagination. Every book is different. Some are more prescriptive, others less so. I’m aware, though, that there is a distinctive voice or vision that’s mine.
I like surprises. I enjoy edginess but not loudness. I believe in elegance and simplicity.
In this case, Ye Lijun and I have been working together for fourteen years now. The choice of poems comes more naturally to me because I’ve lived a long time with this work. I’m not into fast food or consumerist culture.
AMMD: Lijun, in a previous interview, you mentioned skipping classes to immerse yourself in books (Lolita by Nabokov, The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Kundera, The Myth of Sisyphus by Camus, as well as works by Tomas Tranströmer, Juan Ramón Jiménez, and Pierre Reverdy) despite your mother’s advice. Fiona’s essay, “More than Mountains: Reading the Mystery in Ye Lijun,” also offers insights into your literary influences and reading life. How, if at all, have these Western writers shaped or resonated in your Chinese poetry?
YL: I feel that traditional Chinese culture and poetry have forged my body. Or it could be an innate instinct that molds my flesh and blood, helping me to survive and grow. Since my early years, I’ve been reading the writings of foreign masters on my own, becoming smitten. They are like nectar for my thirsty soul, coaxing me to spread my wings and soar.
AMMD: You’ve also mentioned Western visual artists as your influences: Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cezanne, Munch, Modigliani, Giacometti, Balthus, Bonnard, and German painters.
YL: Unfortunately, in order to make a living, I had to return to Lishui after my studies at the China Academy of Art, and did some work on intangible cultural heritage preservation at the public art center. I had no time and place to continue painting.
But painting is still my love. Where language and words can’t reach, painting can sometimes express it. Maybe when I retire, I can pick up my brushes again. I’m looking forward to it. But even though I’m not painting, the process of learning and painting has been beneficial to my poetry writing. Art is from the same source as poetry, and what comes from the mind will eventually return to the mind, as long as one keeps exploring.
AMMD: Fiona, your long-awaited translation of Zhang Zao’s selected poems, Mirror, is due out in May 2025, and your corpus in translation includes many varied Sinophone authors: Yu Xiuhua’s Moonlight Rests on My Left Palm (2021), Yin Lichuan’s Karma (2020), Yang Jian’s Green Mountain (2020), to name a few, as well as modern French and American poets. Particularly in Yi Lu’s Sea Summit, you described your translation process as something ‘to be determined by the intensity of listening’. Did this approach also guide your work on other Chinese poetry collections, particularly Ms Lijun’s My Mountain Country?
FSL: Yes. Not just the intensity of listening. Silence too. The quality of silence matters most to me. And in a stanza, even for free verse, I need to hear each cadence, how it resolves if it resolves, etc. I wait for the inner music. This goes for any language.
Cultural understandings of any word are more fluid in reality. Words can be transposed from one language to another but not the stories, experiences, or timespaces beneath the surface. I think translation succeeds when it remaps one imagination to another. It’s also about finding a creative distance.
Translating prose, as you know, is another vehicle. I’ve worked with Ma Jian on his essays, and with Mark Strand on his prose pieces in Presque invisible (Almost Invisible). Still, as in poetry, I need both clarity and music.
AMMD: In that same essay, you wrote:
. . . few contemporary Chinese poets have grounded the corpus of their work and aesthetics in ecopoetics. In fact, ecocritical attention is scant. This is hardly a surprise, given the dominance of a Marxist ideology in favor of harnessing nature.
Could you further enlighten us on the tensions that come at play when ecopoetics is seen under the lens of Marxism?
FSL: In that essay, I elaborated:
I am reluctant to focus on the process of translation—its worthy accidents, defeats, and investigations—instead of the poetry and its ecological literacy. This might have something to do with a moral impulse from an era when our children must confront industrial toxins in their daily life. At the same time, astute citizens might grow conscious of a political and cultural “trendiness” to ecological concerns in America and Europe today. It makes me anxious to think of us reading Yi Lu simply as a departure point for discussions on ecopoetics.
This is the case for other authors I translate whose work, prose or poetry, may involve current ecological issues. It makes me anxious to think of us reading them simply as a departure point for discussions on ecopoetics. I’m not keen on intellectualizing. Writing stories or poems about the environment is one thing. Engaging in concrete acts of ecological awareness in everyday life and beyond concerns of the self or interests is another.
AMMD: In the sea of writings on Chinese nature poetry, where does My Mountain Country come in and how does it speak to that literary tradition?
YL: I feel that “pastoral” sets a limit to itself. This is an evolution of civilization in the history of humankind. I do not wish to be constrained to the pastoral. Only Nature is eternal and evergreen.
FSL: I’m unsure about labels or categories. “Pastoral” has an idyllic ring to it in specific contemporary contexts and “ecopoetics” may seem attention-seeking, a catchphrase for particular groups in the Chinese audience.
AMMD: In My Mountain Country, we find traces of Japanese zuihitsu, allusions to Tang dynasty poets Wei Ying-wu and Po Chü-i, the fiction of Jorge Luis Borges and Terézia Mora, and even Flemish mysticism, as Dr Fiona notes in her essay. Ms Lijun, could you share which Global Majority, Asian/East Asian, and Chinese poets, scholars, writers, and thinkers have most influenced your philosophy, writings, and ethos?
YL: In an early interview, I’ve mentioned Li Zhiyong from Gansu. I loved his collection. Later, I learned about New Zealand poet James K. Baxter, who is Li’s source of inspiration, and began reading and studying him. His Autumn Testament is particularly close to my heart. Its elegiac yet unsentimental feel, as well as its insights and meditative thoughts, lingered in my mind for a long time.
I guess what I’m interested in now is a collection of all my previous experiences, and I never want that pursuit to stop. As long as something touches my heart, I want to respond and explore it, be it Chinese or from elsewhere. My life experiences, the pains and disappointments and knowledge I’ve gained, and the various masters I’ve admired—they’ve all made me who I am now and have shaped my poetry into what it is today. As long as I don’t stop learning, I’ll also be a brand new self in the future.
AMMD: Fiona, are there other translators working from the Chinese whose works you think shouldn’t be missed?
FSL: I don’t pay much attention to buzz. Chinese translation is considered niche. This said, there are so many publications now (which is wonderful). Translation is a thankless and largely misunderstood task. Every translator who practices good ethics deserves recognition and support. In terms of nourishment, I return to Simon Leys. I too look forward to reading more translations of contemporary Asian-language fiction whenever I can.
AMMD: Lijun, are there contemporary Chinese poets—particularly from the post-70s generation or southern lyricists like yourself—whom you wish could be read more globally or even translated further?
YL: Well, I’m not really active in the Chinese literary world. It’s still relatively niche, but some experts have given my work recognition. At the moment, the literary scene in China is fairly impatient, and there aren’t really many real “masters.” Literary writing has developed into a self-centric media frenzy in this era, in which publication hardly requires any threshold. It’s like fast-food; people can’t quiet their minds and only seek convenience.
My poetry is probably an art of slowness and may not be suitable for the current Chinese speed. I look forward to having readers for my poems. I think of how reading the writings of foreign masters helps my soul to fly. There are Southern poets of the post-70s generation, but in terms of my own preferences, there hasn’t been one whom I find particularly breathtaking.
AMMD: If either of you were to teach a course on Chinese Nature Poetry, which poetry collections would you wish to include as key texts? Could you also share some poets you’d be inclined to include in this imaginary syllabus?
FSL: I think immediately of the Six Dynasties poets Tao Yuanming and Xie Lingyun, Tang poets Wei Ying-wu, Po Chü-i, Liu Zongyuan, Wang Wei, Meng Haoran. Shanshui poetry is such a major canon in Chinese tradition. For the benefits of variety, I’d include Chinese translations of Edna St. Vincent Millay, René Char, Gary Synder, etc. and encourage spontaneous responses to their work.
YL: By “Chinese nature poetry,” do you mean since ancient times or just contemporary work? If the former, we cannot leave out works from the Tang and Song traditions, in which nature poems abound. For contemporary poets, I prefer texts by Chen Xianfa, Hu Xian, Ya Shi, Li Zhiyong, Lü De’an, etc.
Ye Lijun’s answers have been translated from the Chinese by Fiona Sze-Lorrain.
Ye Lijun was born in 1972 in Lishui, Zhejiang province to an impoverished rural family. Her publications include My Mountain Country, translated by Fiona Sze-Lorrain (World Poetry Books, 2019), and three poetry collections in Chinese: Tiaowang (Survey, Dazhong Literature & Art Press, 2005), Zai heiye li jingguo wan jia denghuo (Passing by Ten Thousand Lights in Black Night, Chongqing University Press, 2009), and Hua jian cuo (Flower Complex, Changjiang Literature & Art Press, 2014). A graduate of the Zhejiang Educational Institute for Professional Art Pedagogy and the China Academy of Art, she has worked as an art teacher in Shuige and as an arts administrator for intangible cultural heritage. Ye has received several literary prizes in China. She is presently an editor at Lishui Literature and lives in her native city.
Fiona Sze-Lorrain is a writer, poet, translator, zheng harpist, and editor who writes and translates in English, French, and Chinese. She is the author of a novel in stories, Dear Chrysanthemums (Scribner, 2023); five poetry collections including Rain in Plural (Princeton University Press, 2020) and The Ruined Elegance (Princeton University Press, 2016); eighteen translations; and three coedited anthologies of international literature. Longlisted for the 2024 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, she has been a finalist for awards such as the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Best Translated Book Award, and the Derek Walcott Poetry Prize. As a zheng harpist, she has performed widely. She is a judge for the 2025 International Dublin Literary Award. She lives in Paris. Her website is http://www.fionasze.com.
Alton Melvar M Dapanas (they/them), Asymptote’s editor-at-large for the Philippines, is the author of M of the Southern Downpours (Australia: Downingfield Press, 2024), In the Name of the Body: Lyric Essays (Canada: Wrong Publishing, 2023), and Towards a Theory on City Boys: Prose Poems (UK: Newcomer Press, 2021). Their works have been published globally, from South Africa to Japan, France to Singapore, and translated into Chinese, Damiá, and Swedish. Their writings have appeared in World Literature Today, BBC Radio 4, The White Review, Sant Jordi Festival of Books, and the anthologies Infinite Constellations (University of Alabama Press) and He, She, They, Us: Queer Poems (Pan Macmillan UK). Formerly with Creative Nonfiction magazine, they have been nominated to The Best Literary Translations and twice to the Pushcart Prize for their lyric essays. Find more at https://linktr.ee/samdapanas.
*****
Read more on the Asymptote blog: