《借深心》节录

Han Bo loves to play. He likes sounds and sound effects, puns and neologisms, mixing the concrete with the imagined. Although each of these compact poems tells a story, they rarely read as linear but instead whip themselves up into little dust devils of scintillating particles. Meanings shift depending on where the reader puts the emphasis, images revolve and molt, and the effect is never that of a static picture but of images appearing out of and vanishing into the whirlwind.

One of the challenges of translating these poems, then, is simply to figure out which particle goes where, and exactly how they’re working together in the original. Then the task quickly becomes how to turn what looks like prosy explanations into something that shimmers and shifts in English as it does in the Chinese. To achieve that, playfulness, abandon, bravery, and a certain risk of folly are required. The point of these poems is not simply what is being said but the indefinability and effervescence of the language itself.

These poems are characteristic of one mode of Han Bo’s writing. He has many modes, just as in life he plays many roles: scriptwriter and theatrical director, visual artist, curator, magazine and travel writer, and of course, accomplished poet. Like his longer narrative poems, in effect although not in technique, these short verses drop the reader into perfectly contained miniature worlds, complete with characters and scenes, rich details that engage all of the senses, and surprising juxtapositions that in their odd unity tease at the edges of rationality. All the reader has to do is let go and fall in.