The Wild Great Wall

by Zhu Zhu, Dong Li (Translator)

Though revered in literary circles, Chinese poet Zhu Zhu remains on the periphery, writing quietly. His work, lucidly rendered by accomplished translator Dong Li, weaves slowly through personal and larger histories to reveal an astute, painterly vision of the world. Selected from an oeuvre spanning 1990 to the present, the poems of The Wild Great Wall animate seeming minutiae and collective memory to interrogate the nature of time and the encounters that occupy it. Tight as a wound rope, they bind to the interiority of the mind and wait to be unraveled.

Genres: Poetry

143 pages, Paperback

Published June 26, 2018

Reviews

[Caroline · Rating 5 out of 5]

[from a late poem about Nalan Xingde, a Qing dynasty poet; in Zhu Zhu's poem he calls him "A Manchu man, a sharpshooter of the Chinese language,"... ]

Ah, fated witness,
rare baritone, only he could break centuries of silence--
even his journeys to border passes were not to fight battles
but to bring back vastness and desolation
to poetry. When his brush tip
fell silent from soaking in the night's icy rivers,
soldiers in a myriad of tents were snuffing out lamps
while the bugle called. For the endless third watch of the soul
nowhere was home.

I like this selection of Zhu Zhu's poetry very much, especially the later poems. The imagery is original and subtle, but not opaquely hermetic. He frequently comments on political events in China during his lifetime, but the poems are not polemical and this selection offers many of his poems on love, poetry, Chinese history and culture, and other topics. Translator Dong Li writes in his Translator's Note:

Not to serve as a loudspeaker for a certain ideology, not to exorcise for sensational effects, Zhu Zhu excavates "the forbidden grounds of memory" by clarifying the ambivalence that a simple political reading might elide. He demands that poetry return to its ancient roots, where words first emerge and find their calling in fragments and lifelines.

So we have the rural announcement of Mao's death for a child, the 'carnival' of youth in Shanghai, and an evolving view of life that studies the outcomes for friends of his early years now living around the world, and reflections on cultural icons from China's past. I read a few a day, and I can easily picture coming back to the poems over time to think about one at a time.

Kudos to Phoneme Media for another winner. David Shook and staff find and promote some terrific writers, especially poets, who would be hard to find in book form otherwise. I'm thinking of Rocio Derón's Diorama, Angélica Freitas's Rilke Shake, Ahmatjan Osman's Uyghurland: The Furthest Exile, and Mario Bellatin.

Note that Phoneme has now become an imprint of Deep Vellum, but I am confident the eagle eye for the exciting will continue.