one string of blue smoke / burns like longing (Zhang Er)

Fire warms whom?
Whoever dares to seriously
receive this truest flame?

Only the ones who have left.

On the photograph
your grandparents smile.
Great grandfather does not smile,
in his torn felt hat, black cotton jacket
                  batting spilling out --

and your great-great-grandfather
has no photo from where
the ancient dead look at us.

Closely follow Elder Brother.

We take off our hats and bow
beneath our bundles of suspicion.

Mountain god, earth god,
Do we bow to all four directions?

Do we repeat one, repeat two, repeat three
hundreds thousands of
time's reincarnations?

Who presides here?

Who is pleased, and who is angry?
"The world belongs to you,"
Chairman Mao remarked.
So, it belongs to us?
Is life a kind of luxury
or a chewed-over crust?

Eyes are burning, body explodes
I can't see you. Where?

....

Can I now speak with you,
send you my regards
from among the living?

....

The message that would be
one sheet of paper
is too insignificant to be
mentioned in the field of late autumn
where one string of blue smoke
burns like longing
lingers only a few steps away
unsent
in the morning sun. Would it be
better to mail it home using
a non-standard address:
as one would send
a big gift package of
strawberries and chocolates and pears?

Will you be there to sign for it?

This is yet another place
that offers us no answers.

So what? Where else can we go
to escape from human desire?


(from Zhang Er's "Return on the Third Day", from First Mountain, trans. Joseph Donahue and Zhang Er (2018). The book arose from attending a traditional burial ceremony, in Shanxi province, for the poet's grandparents.)

Another extract from the anthology women: poetry: migration, ed. Jane Joritz-Nakagawa  (2017).

Zhang Er was born in Beijing and moved to the USA in 1986 -- she lived for many years in New York, and now lives in Washington where she is an associate professor at Evergreen State College, Olympia. She has a PhD (Cornell University) in molecular pharmacology. She's a well-known and much-admired poet and my delighted discovery of her clearly astonishing work testifies to significant ignorance of both the Chinese and US poetry scenes.

 (She writes her poetry in Chinese, but many of her poems have been translated into English.)

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Note for UK readers: "batting" = lining filler, of e.g cotton wool, synthetic fibre

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... The poetics represented here fundamentally embrace the system of understanding underlined by the Chinese metaphysical concept of “Heaven and Human are one” — which denies separation of the subject and the object. True knowledge, in this respect, can’t be determined, given that mind and matter are the same, and observer and observed are one. Such knowledge is fluid and multi-directional in time and space.   ...

The difficulty of translation created by such writing is significant. Translators, who are often poets not unfamiliar with imagism or other post-Poundian multi-perspective writing strategies, are nevertheless perplexed by the seemingly arbitrary usage of personal pronouns in many Chinese poets’ work — as well as the fluid shifting of perspectives, the animation of things without any warning, and the tenseless transition of events defying a linear timeline, even when the poem is telling a story or following an obvious plot. If nature and human are one, the subjective and objective are one, mind is matter, and the conception of the world is not a human-centered activity, then the lack of “I” in many Chinese poets’ work becomes perfectly understandable. The absence of “I” is the manifestation of a presence everywhere, by every thing. Things have mind, or rather things ARE mind — or in Williams’ term, ideas are things. Animation is therefore unnecessary.

... Everything in a poem, I mean everything, is fluid: there is no fixed reference frame. ... Things tend to know themselves better than humans, who are simply other “things.” The prepositional words used to position them, to pin them down, in turn become meaningless or even misleading. Is pan-perspectival the best word to convey this lack of a human-centered epistemological view?

From Zhang Er's introductory note to the valuable How2 online anthology of Contemporary Chinese Women Poets:

https://www.asu.edu/pipercwcenter/how2journal/archive/online_archive/v2_4_2006/current/translation/index.html

Also in the same anthology is her irresistible poem about a newborn, "Mother Event", which later appeared in So Translating Rivers and Cities (2007). Here's an extract:

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he says—
“I saw the hair first, black     hair”
                                     “blood”
blood?
                   “screams” and “cries”
Cries? Screams?


~


let’s go home
OK
leave this place full of hands
                                              too bright too noisy
whether rain or heat
          we have a window, with shades
          bassinette   blankets                      turn off the light

~

it can cry	without tears
(like a bomb already set, but with an erratic timer)
hungry wet tired sleepy delighted	cry cry cry cry
(when lacking means of expression      it doesn’t smile)
dressing		cry
full diaper	cry	cry	cry
belly down	cry
held up against the chest
up and down	cry

~

when not crying
it (can) look at me
          those eyelids
Open the door
          let “me” in
eye of eyes
clarity of no distance hide me
is me! (is this mine!)

put this mirror down—can’t
little hands        little feet                 a little bonnie
tight fists
stinky
won’t open up

                       it rains
hualahuala                   water
a little spider
                slides down the hill



(from "Mother Event", trans. Bill Ransom and Zhang Er)


And here's a lovely 2012 conversation about "Mother Event" between Zhang Er, Bill Ransom and Leonard Schwartz (who is actually the dad in the poem).

https://jacket2.org/commentary/so-translating



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Other online poems by Zhang Er:

"The Husband of a Younger Cousin on my Father's Side" trans. Steve Bradbury
https://jacket2.org/poems/poem-zhang-er
...where we were regaled with a “certified authentic” Ma Po Tofu that was absolutely drenched with salt. All the while he rattled on about the day’s fluctuations in the stock market index and was continually on the phone....

Four poems trans. Bob Holman and Zhang Er: "Let it be Distinguished. Let it be Pure", "Plastic Flowers in the Porthole", "Bridge under Construction", "Noodles".
http://levurelitteraire.com/zhang-er/
Alright then, how
should we treat life,
with all its transient needs?
Hunger, for example, sex
and (ta da!) marriage contract? Mountains rivers
all rush by- ... (from "Plastic Flowers in the Porthole")

On the train: two poems trans. Bob Holman and Zhang Er: "Fourth Brother", "In the Soft Sleeper Waiting Lounge".
https://www.wordswithoutborders.org/article/two-poems3
                              Now
continue conversation
started two years ago: "There is no grassland any more,
desertification they say."
Wrote a few poems,
had a child,
now there's no grass left?
Rain beats down on yurt, a sheep of rain—
where's ruby-faced girl in long apple-
green skirt, gold-trimmed vest?
Second Uncle hasn't changed, only fatter, "Eat only vegetable dishes,
no more rice, still get fat!" (from "In the Soft Sleeper Waiting Lounge")

Three more poems from First Mountain, trans. Joseph Donahue and Zhang Er: "All Aboard", "Hou Ma Station Sketch", "Old Yard".
http://poeticsresearch.com/article/zhang-er-3-poems-trans-by-joseph-donahue/
The moment has arrived
for ID, ticket, fated seat in life, and
feelings that stream away.
What you’ve found does not fulfill you.
No hairstyle can fashionably
tangle over your eyes. (from "All Aboard")




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