A Phone Call From Dalian: Selected Poetry of Han Dong

A Phone Call from Dalian

xv A Phone Call from Dalian Nicky Harman I was struck when reading Maghiel’s excellent essay on Han Dong that while we share an admiration for Han Dong’s poetry, we take very different things from his work. What follows are my personal impressions, as a reader and as a translator, of the work of one of my favorite poets. As Maghiel explains, Han Dong in the 1980s was known for being inyour -face iconoclastic, a poet who robustly avoided high-flown poetic sentiment and metaphor, and looked into himself and those around him for inspiration. While that is still true of his work, he has developed a varied poetic voice over the last three decades, and this collection is representative of that variety. In much of his love poetry, there is an emotional directness and a simplicity which is beguiling. In “The Days of Our Lives,” love becomes a bumpy train ride: “Life rocks and shakes us/Hold me tighter!” Poems such as “Under the Streetlights of Shenzhen,” on the other hand, contain complex, multi-layered images of water, color and light: “infernal river . . . black waves”, bright lights “like piled-up glass.” Then there are the raunchy ones, “The Worker’s Hand,” for instance, with its “A woman should fall in love with that hand/Should receive its caresses/A man should have a hand like this/Strong, grimy, like a fleshy sucker pad” as well as its sly humor. Bust-ups and bereavement are themes of some of the tenderest poems in this collection. “News” is bittersweet, “The last time we made love/ No one knew it was the last time.” So is “So Dispassionate”: “Someone’s distance/Another’s death/Two ways of leaving us.” There is an implicit warmth towards women which is by turns ironic and sympathetic. (This is not a characteristic universally shared by contemporary male writers in China.) So we read about his elderly neighbors in “Summertime Window”: “A cluster of old women/Exercise in the courtyard/Bending and stretching/Waving their arms/All moving to a xvi different beat.” And the widowed countrywoman in “Visiting Shandong,” whose dignity is contrasted with the narrator’s foolish grin. Then there is the girl who may or may not sell her body as well as noodles, in “Waitress” (the word waitress in Chinese can also mean prostitute) and the prostitute in “Under the Streetlights.” This sympathy runs all through his work, for example in the apparently throwaway line in “Night Flight,” “Those who became our faithful wives/Are still subjected to our arrogant gaze” and in the outcome of “A and B” when B, who sees only the unwashed dishes, is finally revealed to be a woman. Certain poems have a strong sense of stillness which demands an equal stillness in the reader. Han Dong paints a picture (often precisely descriptive) and then presents us with a freeze-frame: the chopping board and broken cup in “A Loud Noise,” the settling oil in “A Calm.” One of our translators, Yu Yan Chen, calls this quality “very Zen” but, although there are Buddhist references, for example to the “world of nothingness” in “Making a Note,” Han Dong’s poetry is not explicitly Buddhist. Then there are the frankly surreal poems, which depart from his usual apparent simplicity of image and language, and are full of shifting perspectives. In “Absurd Winter Scene,” for instance, the perspective shifts between the scene itself and its representation on paper, or between the “tree branch drawn in charcoal” and its burning “once again into a stick of charcoal.” When Han Dong breaks taboos, the result can be startlingly intimate. In “Pain,” he graphically describes a young woman dying: “Pain gives this once sweet compliant girl/The stubborn rigidity of a corpse.” The tone here is not ironic and detached, as in “Of the Wild Goose Pagoda,” but one of deeply felt emotion. He has written a poem on menstruation (not included) and one on defecation—“In White-tiled Brightness”—which describes the comings and goings in a monastery toilet with tongue-incheek gravity. (Not perhaps obviously offensive, but my translation was turned down by the publication which originally commissioned it on the grounds that it was inappropriate to associate crapping and childbirth!) xvii Han Dong lived in the Chinese countryside as a boy. It was the time of the Cultural Revolution (the subject of his...