REFUSING TO LET THIS POEM SINK INTO DEAD INDIFFERENT BEAUTY
A poem is a point of convergence between cultures, ancient and modern, Chinese and non-Chinese.
When a poem is written, the image of the questioner Qu Yuan two thousand three hundred years ago is resurrected: Who passed down the story of the far-off, ancient beginning of things?How can we be sure what it was like before the sky above and the earth below had taken shape? The exile’s fate visited on Ovid two thousand years ago continues and spreads; the serene and magnificent vigour of Du Fu’s style twelve hundred years ago still shapes how we write; Dante’s vision of judgment of history seven hundred years ago has been transplanted into how we see. A poem is rooted in a particular moment in time, but also subsumes all time in that moment, for to live once is to live forever. Between the lines there is only the depth of humanity.
The age we are living in may be said to be the age of the most profound spiritual dilemma in human history. The end of the Cold War brought an end to ideological polarization. All the sharply antagonistic Cold War slogans became invalid overnight, and were replaced by a so-called Globalized World, as bizarre and twisted as a version of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Like characters in amyth, we took the Apple from the American Eve, but few realise that one little Apple phone connects the blood and sweat of low paid rural migrants in China, factory bosses from Taiwan, and the vast global profits of the American brand.This pocket-sized worldwide reality became so familiar to each individual thatit challenged, then shattered, all the empty phrases and formulas: Socialism, Capitalism, East, West, Dictatorship, Democracy – is there any limit to the stealthy blurring of concepts in these, our modern Metamorphoses? Does there need to be a limit to the pursuit of profit? A terrifying logic pervades this world: the worth of thought is in the utmost confusion, leaving a total vacuum in the human mind, where all that is left in the end is a single reality of selfishness and cynicism. The insane scramble for immediate interest we see around us is in contrast to the spiritual impasse in which we find ourselves today. We fall and fall, but don’t know where the point of final impact is. Each one of us lives in an omnipresent nightmare we cannot shake off.
So what about poetry, then? Poetry is no exception. The world isn’t short of poetry: on the contrary, we are inundated by it, via the all-pervading Internet. Poets of little intelligence can turn their halting verses into a shortcut to advertising copy. Endless grace, melody and refinement - now gratuitously empty phrases that decorate the nightmare with agaudy skin. The market knows this well. Cold War slogans and tags like‘political correctness’ are all recorded in dictionaries for commercial exploitation. But what has that to do with poetry? Rather, what has it to do with the reality of human beings today? If a deep concern for the real humanpredicament is disconnected from the shell of poetry, all that is left is a dead, indifferent beauty. Saying that the Berlin Wall ‘opened’ in 1989 marks the endof the Cold War era, but in today’s world countless Berlin Walls are shutting people in everywhere, showing that a new Dark Age is beginning. How can a poet turn a blind eye to this? How can poetry remain indifferent?
In this world there is only one ocean. A poet today must descend to the seabed in every part of the world, to enter into the cold and dark beyond all our memory and draw from it the real power of thought. Inshort, from all kinds of contradictory mass lying that groups produce, the poet must attest one thing: this is in fact the era of the return of the individual. Humanity and individuality are poetry’s original source, and the common sourceof all civilization. A genuine poem is not a word game, but a culture being reinvented in an individual’s heart and mind. I wrote Reach your hand into the earth and touch death and became a part of the long-suffering and enduring yellow earth of China; I wrote Blue is always higher, and looked outover every departed soul from antiquity to the present day; I wrote This shore is where we see ourselves setsail, and summed up all external exile as the individual’s (every individual’s) internal journey; in my Venice Elegy, I wrote Ponte di Rialto a snow-white grandstand, and sang the human refugees who, from antiquity to the present day, are Never arriving came here long ago… A poetic image is the uniting of thought with the power of creation. A poem’s structure is the simultaneous construction of a form of language and life. Yet the life of apoet is a marathon taken at the speed of a 100-metre sprint. It’s a one-person tradition that endlessly rewrites all traditions. A poem is steeped inmetaphor, yet is itself again an original metaphor, to defend humanity with itscreative vitality. The more subtle, elegant, and refined the poetic inspiration, the more circuitously it shows the revelation of humanity. Poetry plays no surrealist games, for its aim is to discover Deep Reality. In this way my poetry is able to gain the necessity of writing, beginning as it does with a negative sentence: refusing to let this poem sink into dead indifferent beauty.
Starting from here, my philosophical proposition to a Chinastill undergoing a difficult transformation would be this: Independent thought as the essential root; ancient and modern, Chinese ornon-Chinese as selectively useful in practice. My poetry, I hope, can express to a world engaged in scrutinizing itself how History is entwined with individual destiny, and how the individual mind is shaped out of the depths of History, thereby becoming both witness and inspiration. Yes, we have reached a fateful point where impasse and opportunity, the most profound confusion and the most powerful capabilities, impossibility and a fresh start, are allconverging. Can we survive? Can civilization survive? Best to ask the probethat is poetry, for it plumbs the depths of the human heart, listens with respect, and inspects us all for quality.
After Nine Eleven in 2001, a poet friend who lives in NewYork told me how strange it was that poetry readings were attracting surprisingly full houses. I thought to myself, Of course, that’s right! A terrible disaster, huge uncertainty, these had suddenly made people realise the strange power of poetry: it doesn’t just repeat simplified answers, but follows the winding path of metaphor to explore where the questions are hidden in our hearts. That’s why contemporary poetry is teeming with beauty of thought, which takes us back to our eternally living roots in Qu Yuan, Ovid, and the Renaissance.
Yang Lian, May 2, 2018, Berlin
NOTES
Qu Yuan (340 BC - c. June 6th, 278 BC) is the first named poet in Chinese history. The quotation is from his Heavenly Questions, in David Hawkes’ Penguin Classics translation of Songs of the South.
Du Fu (2nd December 712– 770 AD) the great Tang Dynasty poet, particularly celebrated for his exquisite use of poetic form in depicting his wandering life.
Venice Elegy: Poem cycle completed by Yang Lian in June andJuly 2017, when he stayed in Venice, courtesy of the Emily Harvey Foundation.
(Translated by Brian Holton)
附：授奖词（意大利文、中文、英文）
Motivazione Yang Lian
La biografia di Yang Lian ha avuto a che fare con diversi luoghi e terre, e la sua lingua poetica si è adattata a tutte le forme di vita e agli stati d’animo, conservando l’autonomia e la sovranità impareggiabili. Nella raccolta Dove si ferma il mare (Damocle, 2016), traduzione di Claudia Pozzana, il poeta si pone di fronte al mare della lingua, riconosce il naufragio scampato e decide di fermare il mare. Yang Lian elabora la parola nelle sue forme essenziali - sentimenti e razionalità, per affermare che il nome del poeta deve rimanere assente. Il codice poetico riconosciuto si rifà alla tradizione, lo ripete e lo rende universale. E’ la forma più alta di un poeta che chiede l’oblio. Lo hanno invocato i più grandi dell’umanità, come Ivo Andrić, premio Nobel, che chiede una “stilla di oblio”, una forma di pudore che affida alle sue metafore per fronteggiare le ostilità della vita. La poesia di Yang Lian, composta in cinese che ha il verbo uguale al presente, al passato e al futuro, chiede l’oblio e consegna ai posteri un valore temporale infinito.
2018 NordSud Internationale Prize Foundation Pescarabruzzo
(Premio Internazionale NordSud)
Yang Lian has been connected with numerous countries and although his poetic language has adapted to all forms of life and moods it has always preserved its incomparable autonomy and sovereignty. In the collection Dove si ferma il mare (Damocle, 2016), translated by Claudia Pozzana, the poet faces the sea of language, recognises the cast away who has escaped and decides to stop the sea. Yang Lian uses language in its essential forms. The emphasis is on feelings and rationality in order to assert that the poet’s name must remain absent. His distinctive poetic style takes its inspiration from tradition, it repeats it and makes it universal. It is the most noble form for a poet who seeks oblivion. The greatest figures in human history have invoked it, such as the Nobel Prize author, Ivo Andrić, who sought a “drop of oblivion”, as a form of modesty that he entrusts to his metaphors in order to face life’s hostilities. Yang Lian’s poetry, composed in Chinese, whose verbs have the same form for the present, past and future, seeks oblivion and gives an infinite temporal value to posterity.