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Xi Chuan (author), Lucas Klein (translator), Bloom & Other Poems, New Directions. 2022. 204 pgs.

The bewitching voice that sears through this collection of Xi Chuan’s poems is bound to leave the reader both unsettled and exhilarated. At times, the sheer energy left me gasping for air. At others, it took me into a deep reflective mood. “Bloom”, the title poem, sets the tone with these opening lines:

if you are going to bloom then bloom to my rhythm
close your eyes for one second breathe for two be silent for three then bloom

to bloom is liberation to bloom is revolution
the universe did not start with a bang but with a bloom

Later, striking imagery pits stone against life, making the exhortation to bloom almost irresistible:

if stones keep you from blooming then smash them open
there must be a small flower in the atriums of their hearts

How could I turn down such a proposition? The words seem to have gushed out and been funnelled into poetry with unstoppable urgency. Now I want to dance along and bloom too. Not toward self-realisation—such a Western concept!—but to participate fully in the generous flow of the world. Blooming has taken an essential and seductive meaning. Then, I also wonder about the origin of this singular voice that becomes, all at the same time, an incantation and an ineluctability, a metaphor and a remembrance, an injunction and an imploration.

Bloom & Other Poems expands on the previous volume Notes on the Mosquito by the same author—with the same translator Lucas Klein and publisher New Directions—presenting in English the work of one of China’s most prominent contemporary poets. Born in 1963, Xi Chuan started publishing poetry while a student at Beijing University in the early 1980s and continues, four decades later, to exert a considerable influence on his country’s literary landscape. As he suggests in an interview reproduced in the collection, the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976, and the sense of freedom that came with it, partly moulded his thinking and his art.

Xi Chuan’s generation reeled from the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square events of 1989. In fact, the 1990s marked a break away from the earlier, more lyrical style for which the poet was known. Today, the unpredictability and versatility of his writings defy easy categorisation. All the texts included in the present volume are dated post-2000 and attest to this vibrant new perspective. Moreover, as translator Lucas Klein explains in the foreword, Xi Chuan is an intellectual and a man of considerable erudition—a quality demonstrated by the numerous cultural and historical references in the texts—but also someone whose work communicates the physicality of everyday life.

How else, indeed, could the poet probe the meaning of being Chinese in the early twenty-first century? The poems see him travelling around the country, preoccupied with the daily routines of urban, globalised, and ever materially richer China with all its paradoxes, taking in traces of its extraordinary cultural heritage along with the prosaic expression of humanity’s vulgarity.

Xi Chuan perceives the past—the immense and ancient past—through the artefacts of the modern—the hurriedly assembled and half-borrowed modern. He juxtaposes the lofty and the mundane, the rusted and the shiny, and plays with the true, the untrue, and the not-so-true, all along calling attention to the incongruities of the present. And as I follow in his words, I become privy to the rhythms that punctuate life in a country of which I know so little. 

Thus, in “Awake in Nanjing”, Xi Chuan invites us to gaze at the city and,      

imagine raindrops hitting the ground umbrellas raincoat scenery soaked
one two three four five six construction sites of silent scaffoldings no
                        workers climbing up or down or all around
a bodega owner hopes that raincoats and umbrellas will sell in weather like this

He also intimates that there are so many layers to China, never entirely buried by the redefined urban landscape, and somehow resurfacing at opportune moments:

the river flows by the door of my inn in Nanjing or Jinling or the Ancient Capital
                      of the Six Dynasties
this is an inn or this is a guesthouse or this is a hotel or this is a resort
to friends on the phone it’s a resort it’s an inn to me

That China’s extraordinary surge into modernity also happened in confrontation and dialogue with the West is, of course, part of the story. The country’s “hundred years of national humiliation” started with a long period of subjugation by Western powers, and later by Japan, and belong to the collective consciousness. Modernisation developed along a process of both emulation and rejection of foreign ideas, but interaction with the once dominating West could never be avoided. The China of today has come a long way, but the reality of East-West cross-cultural tensions and exchanges remains ever present, and seeps into the poems in many interesting guises.

In “Awake in Nanjing”, Shakespeare and Baudrillard engage in a discussion about the Tang dynasty poet Meng Haoran. Likewise, the poetic variations of “Golden” refer to Confucius in parallel with Thomas More, giving some ironic weight to the commercial excesses of the present times. In other texts, Heidegger and Foucault, then Keats and Schiller, make an appearance. Xi Chuan’s use of such references seems eclectic but is never strained. Witty and playful, the detour via Western culture participates in a fuller exploration of the essence of Chinese-ness. As the poet ambiguously declares in “Annoyances”,

You can’t cast off the fate of being Chinese even if you stand beneath the
                      Western moon and recite the Declaration of Independence at the top of
                      your lungs

I am a stranger to Chinese-ness. Yet, I too ponder about some essential questions asked by the poems: What is real? What is fake? And how should we trace the line in between? In the stunning “Abstruse Thoughts at the Panjiayuan Antiques Market”, I join in a long perambulation through the alleys of the gigantic Beijing emporium, where these interrogations and others become unavoidable:

Is a beautiful fake antique beautiful? Beautiful fake people can be beautiful but
                      they’re fake.
Fake people are devoid of souls. A sea of fake people wouldn’t yield a lake of souls!
Then can beauty be divorced from soul?

I think not. But as I vicariously stroll through Panjiayuan, as I marvel at imagined relics of the Han, the Tang and the Warring States periods, I also come across the peddlers, the liars, the fraudsters, the grave robbers and other sellers. I am made to reflect on what is counterfeit and what is genuine “in this crass age”, and I no longer know what to believe. “The construction site of the socialist market economy consumes six thousand years like a plate of appetizers,” says Xi Chuan. If the rampant commercialism of post-Mao China comes in for its share of criticism, the obsession with falsity and truthfulness also constitutes a conscious engagement with the country’s history—both the distant past and the tumultuous twentieth century. In cunning fashion, the poems investigate how the past is created and remembered, used and forgotten.

Xi Chuan states that he sees himself as an artist whose medium happens to be language. To me, he is a poet of lucidity, whose experimentation with words regenerates the swirling everydayness of the world in its complexity and power of astonishment. In Bloom & Other Poems, the language often takes the dislocated and jagged form of the reality that inspires it—for example bringing in breaks, repetitions, parallelisms, and fragmented sentences as a reflection of the jagged rhythms of life in China. The lay-out of the text itself eschews uniformity, with italicised words, unequal spacing, and other effects that make reading a slightly halting process. The poet also indulges in unexpected choices of words or turns of phrase, being so skilled at displacing elevated thoughts by the crudity and ordinariness of human actions. “Do people who have achieved nirvana still take a shit?”, Xi Chuan muses in “Loquaciousness, or: Thought Report”. As cringe-making as references to bodily functions may sometimes be, they do the trick of striking a jarring and thought-provoking note in the otherwise lofty atmosphere that infuses some of the poems.

Lucas Klein, the translator, must be credited for rendering with perceptiveness and skill the rhythms of Bloom & Other Poems into English. It was definitely no easy task, and the result attests to his enthusiasm for, and deep affinity with Xi Chuan’s work. Although I cannot pretend to have grasped all the referents and cultural allusions of the text, I am hooked by this initiation to Chinese contemporary poetry and grateful that it is accessible in such a vivid translation. Still, I wonder who Xi Chuan really is and for whom he is writing. Is he a poets’ poet, whose love for the Greats of China’s past—Du Fu, Li Bai, Meng Haoran, Wang Wei—and the West’s Greats—Schiller, T.S. Eliot, Yeats, Rimbaud—produces a language of its own? Is he a shrewd observer of China, who admonishes his contemporaries for neglecting their roots? Practising his trade as a verbal high-wire performer? Or rather chuckling in the background, mocking the very seriousness and “truth” he seems to lament? Perhaps, he is all that, and it is a treat to tune into Xi Chuan’s blooming world.

How to cite: Willems, Nadine. “Xi Chuan’s Jagged Rhythms of Life: Bloom.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 22 Jul. 2023, chajournal.blog/2023/07/22/bloom.

Nadine Willems received a PhD from the University of Oxford in 2015 and is now Associate Professor of History at the University of East Anglia in the UK. She is an intellectual and cultural historian of modern Japan who has looked at transnational political activism, ideas in human geography, farmers’ movements, and the literature of dissent. Her first monograph, Ishikawa Sanshirō’s Geographical Imagination: Transnational Anarchism and the Reconfiguration of Everyday Life in Early Twentieth Century Japan, was published by Leiden University Press in 2020. Nadine has a keen interest in poetry and has explored the works of writers native to Japan’s northern regions of Hokkaido and Tōhoku. In 2017 she published Kotan Chronicles: Selected Poems, 1928-1943 with Isobar Press, a book of poetry in translation by Hokkaido writer and ethnographer Sarashina Genzō. Her current project examines the experience of ordinary soldiers in Japan’s Siberian Intervention of 1918-1922. Prior to returning to academia, she was based in Tokyo where she worked for several years in business and as a foreign correspondent and journalist. [All contributions by Nadine Willems.]

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