One of these poets, Duo Duo, was on his way to the Netherlands for a literary festival when the tanks rolled into Tiananmen Square. (His given name is Li Shizheng; his nom de plume commemorates his daughter, who died in infancy.) He chose to settle in Amsterdam, where he lived for fifteen years before returning to Beijing. Such biographical details help explain the anguished tone of his work throughout the early-to-mid-nineties (“shame, that’s my address,” he writes in his first year of exile), but they matter less when considering the bounty of his full career, especially the poems he has written since 2004, which allude more to the spirit world than contemporary politics.
That bounty is now on full display in English, thanks to Lucas Klein, the translator of Words as Grain: The Poetry of Duo Duo, published by Yale University Press. The volume opens with new work—Duo Duo’s poems last appeared in English twenty years ago, while he was still living abroad—and moves in reverse chronology back to the Cultural Revolution years, which he spent in rural Hebei Province along with other “Misties.” Klein’s introduction helpfully sketches the politics of modern China throughout the poet’s life, but the poems themselves are more concerned with a personal cosmology of memory, desire, and stillness. Many contain explicitly Buddhist references and idioms—“sūtra rivers,” non-self, the “quietude of original dwellings rhetoric abandoned”—as if the poet is forging a new grammar of devotion from his own broken syntax, straying from classical prosody and imagery in a way that recalls—at least for some English readers—the modernists who strayed from Tennyson’s finely cadenced rhetoric into avant-garde mysticism. One might call it modernist Zen: a hunger for unmediated divinity and a deep suspicion of language, with its stale cliches, as a pathway to enlightenment. Ultimately, the impression one gets from the full arc of Duo Duo’s career is that of a poet enraptured by the metaphysics of writing itself. The title’s agrarian metaphor recurs throughout the entire collection—one of the newer poems is called “Words as Grain, Asleep in the Gospels”—as if to suggest that poetry is obscure but honest spiritual labor.
In one sense, this is an unsurprising metaphorical landscape for a man who spent his formative years in a Maoist reeducation program glorifying farmers. In another sense, if words are grain, then “writing” is the act of venturing out into the field of silence (which Duo Duo calls his “audience”) and planting language there in pursuit of strange harvests. The metaphor isn’t as simple as that, and the images have a tendency to contradict each other in the spirit of Zen paradox, but again and again we return to the scene of proverbial cultivation. In “The Whip Brandished on the Wheel,” “epitaphs with the aura of wheat fields” coexist symbolically with “the screams of open grasslands” and—mysteriously—“the ditch of praise.”
Many of Duo Duo’s images capture a meditative state: “a white candle/shedding tears,” “the pupil of expanding evensong.” And the best moments in Klein’s translation are those that preserve this cosmic hush in sound as well as meaning: “the breath of stationary,” for example, or “choral wordlessness.” There are moments when overly Latinate phrases threaten to turn rhythmic Chinese into bureaucratic English (“what is communicated is but inconsequential language”), but that’s a quibble with English, not Klein, who’s faithful to the original. There are also moments of aural triumph, such as this line from “Don’t Ask”: “the year has come beating its wings from the forest of overripe persimmons.” Happily, Duo Duo’s playful imagination always shines through, even when he’s writing in an elegiac mode. In “The Cemetery Is Still Accepting Members,” “the dead are still waiting,” their wristwatches ticking away. In “A Fine Breeze Comes,” the departed “endow themselves into the ringing of chimes.”
This inventiveness is most powerful in the long, abstract poem sequence The Desire of the Rose Now the Same as the Desire of Swords, where the speaker, delirious with longing, tries to abstract his memories and desires from the realm of time:
I enter the other side of night
the fifth season is already singing falsetto
an apple smiles on the windowsill, the rose only knows growing
thorns
all words brighten
What’s affecting about this poem is that, despite its mythic surrealism—a roving spirit conjures up a camel, a lion, a clock with wings, galloping horses, a netful of sharks, and a bird who wears a “maternal expression”—there is, at its heart, a loneliness that is undeniably real (“I’m still/observing the field between us,” he writes, and then, in a later section, “my solitude brokers no disturbance”). In “Promise,” an earlier love poem, we’re treated to a lush cascade of Neruda-like metaphors (“we are a pair of torpedoes/waiting for someone to shoot us again”); here, it’s as if the doctrine of impermanence were pitted against the memory of love—a memory that, by the bittersweet end, is “distant” as a “blessing.”
Duo Duo, like his contemporaries, drew from a range of poets throughout his self-education. Charles Baudelaire, he claims, opened his eyes to a version of the avant-garde, but so too did César Vallejo, Osip Mandelstam, and Sylvia Plath, to whom two poems are dedicated. Such reading was implicitly subversive in the seventies, but the influence of these Western “pollutants” seems to have been primarily aesthetic, not ideological. To the extent that Duo Duo’s poetry has a social or political vision, it comes across both in his suspicion of cheap slogans and in the way he conceives of human life as something more sacred than the majesty of the state. When he mentions “freedom,” he usually means freedom of the imagination—the freedom to write about rivers and clouds; or fathers who reappear in dreams; or the neighbors in the next apartment, who sob and whisper and make love and sing songs to their children; or the universe; or consciousness.
But the subject we return to most is the solitude of writing, which is linked, in the best poetry, to the solitude of being. “Loneliness is grain,” he writes, in “The Landscape of Terms Is Not for Viewing”:
you cannot not be there
when expensive paper leaves no trace
no words on it, no you
only what cannot be erased can be new
only what’s most real is worth burying
The grain metaphor has shifted, but the anxiety remains (and the use of “burying” suggests something weightier than “planting” would). In another variation, “No Dialogue Before Writing,” “the early morning does not answer the crop field of logical thought.” And here’s the image once again in “A Desk Has No Edge”:
from this incomprehensible field
nothing can be called death, and life is not disclosed
yet anxious to be dreamt
this is the road to destroy it, understand it
this is rhythm let the dream interpreter enter dreams
the dream is the land
keep the grain of your personality
to prolong it, let it go fallow
To dissolve one’s personality was the modernist poet’s ultimate dream—it’s also, as this collection sometimes suggests, a Buddhist imperative. In practice, though, it’s impossible—there is no escape from the human realm of memory and desire—and that is why, in each of these poems, a residue of the self remains, deepening their poignancy.
Duo Duo’s attempts to shed the self can be traced back to his earlier work, especially that of the early nineties, which reads as if it were narrated by a spiritual flaneur. “I saunter through the human world,” he writes in a poem called “Winter”:
the great cosmos, parents of eternity
with prayers rising from hearts
silence and what’s beyond sound
fuse into communication with winter:
the wind is a lone rider
and clouds are piles of laughing country brides
December’s miraculous heartbeat
only an obsolete recitation
And here is “Never Dream,” a kind of negative ars poetica:
never dream
be an extinguished candle in a windless night
be starlight, shining on the neck of a horseback rider
be grass that grows for only one season, make poems
be pears frozen on trees
be rye, bearing thought in the wind
“Thought” is often treated as a nuisance or a problem, as if the whole apparatus of cognition might lead us astray. (“This thought,” he complains elsewhere, “this possessed mineral deposit.”) But words are the greatest nuisance of all. “Every morning,” he writes in a poem from 1986, “I get angry at these things”:
I hate these things that as soon as they’re
written are his writing
the dreams I’ve had
are gas leaked from his head
There’s a way to read this collection as an exile’s intimate chronicle of China’s transformation from pariah to superpower. But it’s more than that: it’s the record of a poet’s enduring spirit in the struggle against language and time. In his “Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art,” Mao argued that national struggle alone should forge the consciousness of the new Chinese poet, whereas love and spiritual longing were just fables of the bourgeoisie. His assumption was that poetry is always a species of rhetoric, a quieter propaganda. But that’s not what poetry is—at least not for Duo Duo, who is more cosmically inclined, and for whom writing is not a report of experience, but a live event. Hence the self-consciousness:
wordless, but not quite silent
unless to say love, unless not to speak
—there is leftover gunpowder in this line
becoming a simplified beginning
There is always leftover gunpowder, and there’s always more grain. (“All surplus originates in lack,” he writes in an earlier poem). We’re in the realm of imagination, with all of its provisions: stockpiles of loneliness, munitions of hope, combustible beauty. We’re standing with the poet in the “incomprehensible field.” This is what makes these poems such a thrill to read even when their mysteries bewilder us. It’s not the grain or wheat we’re after. We want to feel the ripening.
