About a month ago I mentioned having started to read a book of extravagantly emotive poetry, and having had to put it aside, exhausted. I still meant to go back to it; and I have. It’s not like I didn’t know what I was getting into in the first place; Narrative Poem is the fourth book I’ve read by Yang Lian. It all started less than a year ago when Wystan Curnow recommended Yang’s Unreal City: A Chinese Poet in Auckland (2006) as a remarkable achievement. He was right. Full of enthusiasm, I started assiduously searching out more of Yang’s copious oeuvre—all of which I’ve found impressive if not quite as revelatory as Unreal City. Narrative Poem is an oddly generic title for a book that, moreover, can hardly be said to put an accent on storytelling, nor is it exactly a single poem. In his Preface, Yang claims “to narrate the events in the life of one person in one family”—that is, himself—as a way “to encompass all of the 20th-century China’s complex and cataclysmic changes,” but the hapless reader is hard-put to identify any of those personal events or divine the inner logic of their sequencing, let alone their relation to the vast historical transformation of the country from which Yang has been exiled since 1989. The book’s grandiosity may be its undoing. Rarely have I seen a work so perfectly exemplary of Poe’s probably untenable generalization that “what we term a long poem is, in fact, merely a succession of brief ones,” for Yang is a fundamentally expressionist poet, a lyricist of extremes, for whom “this night of heavy rain only leaves pitch-black imagination to the world” and “the petal’s annual skeletons / shatter one by one in colour-blazing calibrations.” He is a spiritual brother of August Stramm and Georg Trakl; and Poe is at least right in observing that “all intense excitements are, through a psychal necessity, brief.” The book’s overarching five-movement structure based on a series of (undescribed) photographs remains moot, but the seventy-odd individual poems that make it up are often stunning. Yet the effect is monotonous, like a symphony made only of cymbal-crashing climaxes—“I am as hard-working as a gramophone record / blaring from room to room all day,” Yang writes. (Whether or not the English/Italian pun has any equivalent in Chinese, the “rooms” beg to be read as stanzas.) Maybe it’s just me who needs more stamina. Yang’s poetry is haunted by innumerable ghosts that momentarily emerge only to evanesce. Its excitements—Poe’s word—touch on visceral truths. One example that may perhaps survive decontextualization: “the world is no more or less than a flagstone that seals up dying.” A somewhat ill-tempered Translator’s Afterword reminds me that I should acknowledge Brian Holten, who has translated more of Yang’s poetry than anyone else, and who points out that “when reviewers”—of course I am not one—“with no Chinese”—but that’s me—“praise or dispraise Yang’s poetry, what they are actually reviewing is my language, my metrics, my music, but his narrative and his images.” Fair enough. I always wonder, when I read a translation from a language distant from my own, what possible relation there could be (if any) between what I’m reading and what the poet wrote. Whatever the ultimate nature of the source and its inaccessibility to me, this translator has rendered something or other with linguistically magnetic authority.
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Yang Lian, Narrative Poem, translated by Brian Holten, is published by Bloodaxe Books, Hexham, UK, 2017.
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BARRY SCHWABSKY is art critic for The Nation and co-editor of international reviews for Artforum. Along with many books on contemporary art, he’s published three books and several chapbooks of poetry as well as a collection of mainly literary criticism, Heretics of Language (Black Square Editions, 2017). His new book of poetry, A Feeling of And, will be published next year by Black Square.