As I wander in the supermarket aisles of contemporary poetry, I am dazzled and confused – until the equivalent of a pleasant shop assistant with a tray of delicacies approaches, and I pluck out something called "The One Hundred Years of Solitude of Chinese Poetry". Different, yes, but tasty and fresh: I'll buy it.

In fact, of course, I came across it in PN Review, not Tesco's. The poet is the leading Beijing writer and scholar, Zeng Di; the translators, Ao Wang and Eleanor Goodman. Outlining their approach to translation, Goodman writes: "We are looking to keep as close as possible to the original poem in voice, tone, meaning, structure and emotional import, while simultaneously producing something readable in English. In fact, our ultimate goal is much more ambitious: an accurate translation that reads like an original poem."

That's just as it should be. Any new poem involves foreign travel, after all, but a poem properly at home with its language, native or not, will usually let you map-read. At first, as I read Zeng Di's poem, I was not sure where I'd be going, but I knew there was an authoritative mind directing the journey – and the voice in the poem quickly established a conversation with my own inner voice.

In fact, the dialogue is a little more complicated than I've suggested, because the speaker in the poem remains outside it, playfully addressing its author. Classical Chinese poets were fond of the epistolary form, and this is perhaps a contemporary equivalent. Someone is writing a letter to, or having a quiet word with, the poet. His muse? His native country? His poetry, in crafty disguise? His ordinary, daily self? I would opt for the latter. I like this interpretation because I can relate it to my own experience of being caught in the middle of a conversation between different selves. And it is culturally familiar, because of Freud and other diviners of the divided self.

So the poem seems wise, as perhaps the western stereotype of Chinese poetry decrees, but also, in its irony and finesse, streetwise. The ordinary self who is able to talk empathetically and intelligently to the poet self, who listens without comment, is an earthy soul who shops and cooks and finds homely, irreverent similes. The author's Poetry itself is the subject of the conversation. The speaker presents it through a variety of metamorphoses. In human form, Poetry becomes unpredictable, roguish, a bit of a clown. In that key third stanza I love the opening pun on "fires" and the theatrical verbs: "It slaps the customer. It pulls off/ the condom of prosody." I suspect we have a political as well as an aesthetic rebel on our hands.

To the Sinologist, "The One Hundred Years of Solitude of Chinese Poetry" probably says many specific things about the CPR and poetry. The reference to Gabriel García Márquez reinforces the likelihood of that bigger context. Perhaps the Colombian novelist's Nobel lecture holds a clue when he speaks of "that boundless realm of haunted men and historic women, whose unending obstinacy blurs into legend", and adds, "We have not had a moment's rest". Perhaps that is as true of modern China as of Latin America? The poem's concentration and modesty suggests its refusal to sing the propagandist's "main melody". However, a cultural outsider must stick to the smaller meanings and rely on limited, personal recognition.

Which means that, for me, it makes haunting and funny analogies for the familiar mysteries of creation. And then, after all its dancing informality and domestic slapstick, half impudent and half respectful it suddenly places a finger-tip on the crux of the matter, and we reach, at the right moment, the point where there is nothing more to be said. "This poem is yours./Yes, for a moment, it almost seemed not your writing." This makes me think of Pushkin's love-poem, "I remember a wonderful moment." If you write you will know just how that feels and how mysterious it feels. You've finished the poem and it seems to work – but it's not yours any more. Whose is it? "If I could tell you I would let you know." All I know is that, as I browse the supermarket aisles of contemporary poetry, too few of the poems seem to bear the mark of that humbling moment.

If you're interested in knowing more about avant garde Chinese poetry, Michael Day writes interestingly here, and you can read more of Zeng Di and other Chinese poets in PN Review 187. Thanks to the editor for permission to reproduce this poem.






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Posted by Carol Rumens
Monday 18 May 2009 10.51 BST
guardian.co.uk

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