第西天（2009 美国爱荷华）

I met Han Bo at the Vermont Studio Center in 2018, paired as poet and translator by a Luce Foundation Chinese Poetry Fellowship. We worked on a series of poems he wrote on an earlier trip to the USA in 2009, The Western Days, in which he considers the cyclical, interconnected nature of life as seen by ancient Chinese philosophy, in contrast with the more linear, progressive viewpoint of western traditions. By no means a simplistic dualism, the poems probe the complexities of how west and east perceive each other, in a flickering parade of glimpsed people, places and conundrums. 

The first poem in the series, “The First Day”, describes Han Bo’s arrival in America and the experience of going through immigration as a foreigner. Having read some of his earlier, more narrative work, I admit to being baffled, and to alternately admiring and loathing the poem as I despaired of translating it in any meaningful way. The poem itself is an apt metaphor for my process, as rays of light slowly pierced the confusion. A moment of despair proved to be a turning point and necessary rite of passage in translating each poem, along with multiple drafts, online research and helpful consultations with Han Bo. It helped to have lots of time in Vermont, a beautiful writing studio in a converted church and the poet himself right across the corridor, happy to explain his thoughts over coffee. I found that as each poem gradually yielded its secrets my fascination with it grew, so that by the time one possible English version was coaxed into shape it had won me over completely and I couldn’t wait to start the next one. In fact, immediately after leaving Vermont I began translating the new poems Han Bo had written during the residency. 

Han Bo asks a lot of the reader in these poems. His language is inventive and sometimes startling, employing homophones, sound effects, visual puns and neologisms, juxtaposing ancient and modern, real and imagined in a shimmering cascade of images. Challenges included how to reflect in English the homophones, alliteration and word play of the original. Incorporating classical references was another issue. I began by notating each one, but in the end left them as quotations, or formal images woven into the text. Traditional poetry has a surface perfection and Han Bo likes to disrupt surfaces of all kinds in order to delve beneath. The scarcity of grammar is also noteworthy. By mostly avoiding an individual voice, Han Bo creates a sense of shared space and consciousness, but also ambiguity. Minimal prepositions or conjunctions leave the relationship between ideas, images and phrases open to interpretation, while the lack of tense, sometimes even of a verb, allows multiple readings of a phrase in Chinese. The translator’s challenge is how to capture this playful multiplicity in English whilst maintaining the pared-down style, aiming to convey some of the ways these multi-faceted gems reward the reader with shifting viewpoints and insights.