Interview with Wang Jiaxin
Wang Jiaxin’s book, At the Same Time, New and Selected Poems, translated from Chinese by John Balcom, will be published by Arrowsmith books in Autumn 2025. It has received high praise from poets Arthur Sze, Jane Hirshfield, Rosanna Warren and Forrest Gander. Reading his original writing and translations is both a learning experience and a literary pleasure.” John Crespi, Director of Asian Studies at Colgate University says “Wang Jiaxin has exerted a far-reaching influence over contemporary Chinese poetry not just as a poet but also for his role as a critic and translator. Wang’s poetic voice stands out for the gravity, clarity, and resolve with which it explores the individual’s relation to history, destiny, cultural inheritance, and humanity.” Please join us on March 9, 2025 when the Katonah Poetry Series presents Wang Jiaxin’s work at 4pm in the Katonah Village Library.
Ann van Buren: Your poetry alludes to many literary and historical figures. Among them are Auden, Celan, Du Fu, Brodsky, Akhmatova, Duo Duo, Milosz— but the list goes on. (Find poems in this link.) You also pay homage to the international literary community in your work as a translator of poetry into Chinese—poetry by Yeats, Mandelstam, Paul Celan and others. What drew you to these poets in particular? Are they part of the literary canon in China, as they are here in the US?
Wang Jiaxin: Thank you, Ann. In the history of Chinese literature, poets such as Du Fu and Li Bai have always looked for each other, but in modern times, the search has crossed traditional linguistic and cultural boundaries. What draws me particularly to these poets? Well, I am reminded of the great Russian poet Akhmatova, whose Guardian angel, at the most difficult time of her life, was none other than Dante. Here is a fragment of Akhmatova：
Ah, for you Russian is not enough,
And in all the other languages you want
To know how steep are the ascents and descents
And how much fear costs us, and conscience.*
So, I think you can understand, apart from the art of poetry, it is the “steep” fate between “ascents and descents” of life that draws me to these poets in particular. I once said that before I translated Paul Celan, I might have carried Celan inside me. I’m not a professional translator. For me, translation is the beginning of a dialogue with other poets who then become part of my life. The encounter with them comes first from “recognition” in the deepest sense. In a way, they are our “other selves,” and I can even say that I love them more than I love myself, otherwise I would not put down my own poems to translate them. In China, people say that I have created a “spiritual family” of my own through this selective translation, and I think this is true. If these poets were stars, through my translation, they rose into my night sky— though I was not the only one they illuminated.
It is through this kind of translation in the deepest sense that Auden in Chinese, Celan in Chinese, Akhmatova in Chinese, etc., have become part of modern Chinese literature, just as Pound’s translation of Chinese poetry a hundred years ago became the beginning of modern American poetry. Poets who translate other poets have created a modern tradition of the Poet as Translator. I think this is important not only for China, but for the poetry and culture of any country. We live in a “post-Babel” era, and it is only through unremitting mutual translation that we can turn the “curse of Babel” into a blessing for us.
Ann van Buren: Elisa Gabbert applauds the use of allusion in her January 2025 essay in the NY Times. (“Masters of Allusion: The Art of Poetic Reference.”) Can you talk about allusion in your poetry and your choice of naming the poets you reference either in the title or within the text? When you mention Jane Hirshfield and Arthur Sze—both contemporary poets— as well as poets from the past such as Osip Mandelstam, I get the impression that you are referencing old friends. The American Beat poets had this practice. Is this naming a practice that appears in the Chinese poetic tradition as well?
Wang Jiaxin: Many classical Chinese poets are indeed “Masters of Allusion” such as Du Fu or Li Shangyin. Like T.S. Eliot, they were poets who “spoke with the historical tongue of literature” (Conrad Aiken on “The Waste Land.”) Not only do Contemporary writers from China invoke Chinese traditions in the present, we are also writing in the context of a “world literature” in a broad and far-reaching literary historical space and time. For example, in one of my poems, For Paul Celan: Kiefer’s Exhibition in Paris, I use a kind of time-space overlay and the juxtaposition of images: the shadow of Auschwitz, the crisis of climate change, the brutal war still going on in Ukraine, and so on. The poem ends with “The black suns that we cannot see burning above us.” The image of the “black suns” is one that I think people will immediately recognize as coming from Celan. (Note that Celan’s “black suns” makes use of the plural form, which is more frightening.)
This use of allusion is different from the kind of show-off that people hate. I used the exhibition by the German artist Anselm Kiefer and Celan’s imagery to witness our present existence. The same is true of my poem “In Lao Tzu’s Native Land.” At the end of it, the figure of Lao Tzu merges with the German poet Bertolt Brecht, who lived in exile in Denmark:
Like Brecht, listening to the howl
Of his old country over the radio
While using a pen of no use to write
In his fortunate journal of exile.
In general, my use of allusion in poetry is a kind of expropriation of various literary resources based on our own existence. Its purpose is to refract or jointly form a poetic present. The poet Forrest Gander saw this very well when he began his recommendation for At the Same Time by saying: “Ezra Pound wrote that ‘all times are contemporaneous.’ Wang Jiaxin, one of the leading poets of his generation, agrees. ” Gander continues by saying “And yet, despite the expansive internationality of Wang Jiaxin’s perspectives, his poems are deeply personal, vividly particular, and formally adventurous.”
Jane Hirshfield said something similar about my writing. This is crucial. We refer to others in order to establish our own presence, and invoke history in order to return to reality. Whether I quote Du Fu or Celan, it is to make them come to us and become our “contemporaries.”
As for the poets of present and past times who appear in my poems, you mention that it seems as though they are like old friends. Indeed, there is a deep spiritual intimacy between us. It has long been a tradition in Chinese poetry to present a poem to a friend (such as Du Fu’s “To Wei Ba, a Retired Scholar,”) or to have a dialogue with another poet in the poem. I certainly carry on this tradition. For example, I wrote a poem “Breaking Bread,” for Ilya Kaminsky and his poet wife Katie Farris. It is based on our experience at a Chinese restaurant in New York, after which Ilya wrote to me and said: “It is so good to have had the chance to break bread together.” This ignited my inspiration. Not only did I learn the expression “break bread,” I also developed it as a metaphor: “We broke bread from Celan /We broke bread from Tsvetaeva…” Obviously, this is not the same as in reality; it has become a metaphor for literary sharing and mutual transmission. For such a poem, I must thank Ilya. We are inspired by the poetry of others, but as the French poet, René Char said, “We borrow only what we can double back.”
Ann van Buren: What effect do you think this style of allusion (direct address, including references within the text) has on a poem, as opposed to the use of end notes or an epigraph?
Wang Jiaxin: To this question, I would like to cite “Breaking Bread” again. At the end of the poem, I quote Ilya Kaminsky’s “Deaf Republic” as a metaphor. The Deaf Republic is one of his widely noticed lyrical poems with the nature of poetic drama. I have translated it into Chinese. Such a “Deaf Republic,” that is, a “Republic of conscience,” in the words of one poet, “illuminates our common deafness.” This quote enhances and expands the meaning of the whole poem:
At the same table
Under the watchful eyes of the spirits drawn around us
In a ‘Deaf Republic’
Under red lanterns amid a hubbub of voices…
Through the use of this quote, my poem becomes what critics call a “mutual text,” but it is also self-contained. In fact, we expropriate other textual resources in a poem, just as we write in a tree or a scene of life, in order to achieve a poem. Perhaps one poem exists in order to enter another.
To quote well might be what the Chinese call “A stroke of genius.” The poem “Flight Path – for Jane Hirshfield,” which I recently wrote and will read for the Katonah Poetry series, begins with a trip I took: a transfer from Tokyo to New York. After crossing the Bering Sea and entering the skies over North America, “I looked down and saw vast snow-covered mountains and glaciers…”
The poem continues with my imaginary conversation with Jane Hirshfield, which is based on an email exchange we had:
‘You’re lucky, you took the polar route,
Otherwise you’d only see smoke filled sky.’
One can imagine the smoke, the nightmarish wildfires in Southern California：
‘The residents of Santa Monica have been evacuated,
Not far from where Brecht lived in exile, you know…’
At this point in the poem, the counterpoint between ice and fire appears
O, Brecht!
Fleeing from smoke to smoke.
If one knew Bertolt Brecht’s escape after Hitler came to power, one can understand more about the meaning of “smoke.” The poem goes on:
As you anxiously gauged the blaze and wind direction,
We flew over Hokkaido to Alaska
As if returning to the ice age.
This was my thought process. As I took a can of Sapporo beer from a Japanese stewardess, I thought of Yasunari Kawabata’s novel Snow Country, “ It ends in a conflagration.” In one small moment during a plane ride my mind went through the ice and fire of this world. In her email about the fires in Southern California Jane Hirshfield mentioned, “We live in a burning house.” This is a reference to a Buddhist sutra (Chapter 3 of the Lotus Sutra) and as fate would have it, I came to understand the relevance of this sutra to this moment in time. The burning house, burning history and reality— fire illuminates the existence and nothingness of each of us.
The poem has multiple threads— a counterpoint between ice and fire, a poet on the move through time and history. It is in the second half of the poem that perhaps the most unexpected detail emerges: “The wild hare with a burned ear hopped into/A poem by Elizabeth Bishop.”
This detail comes from Elizabeth Bishop’s poem, “The Armadillo — To Robert Lowell.” I translated this poem into Chinese. American poets know its provenance as soon as they read it, and perhaps they are even surprised by it, as poet and translator Rosanna Warren wrote to me: “This new poem of yours is magnificent,… And that fantastic, witty leap of the hare into Bishop’s poem!”
This quote is probably what the Chinese call “A stroke of genius,”（Not that I’m a genius myself!）I did not think of it when I began to write this poem. The hare with an ear burned off is just a catastrophic detail in Bishop’s poem, and I quote it; but its meaning is altered in its new context, perhaps with hints of healing and refuge in the art of poetry. That is to say, even when the poem witnesses this terrible world, it still contains elements of what people call “meta-poetry.” It is a poem that tells us about its own birth, but also about the relationship between poetry and reality, between the poet and the world.
Other allusions appear in this poem. I refer to Greenland, “on the edge of an imperial dream.” The line “Are your eyes also a conflagration” references the poem “Your Eyes Have Seen this Conflagration” by Mu Dan, a modern Chinese poet who is very influential in China today. In the context of the world today, my quotes mean to pull from the past, but it is my hope that they also bring us closer to what we are facing.
I have explained the poem in this way in order to answer your question and to show how a poem, a mind, in its complex workings, can effectively incorporate the material of the poem, including some other sources of text, into its structure. But there are other poets who refuse to explain their poems. For example, some of Celan’s poems, even very short ones, have multiple hidden references, but he does not mention them, and researchers can only find their sources from Celan’s personal experiences, correspondence, books, and historical documents. He left only the text of the poem itself. He simply said to the reader, “Read it,” and read it as far as you can.
Ann van Buren: Are you suggesting that the poem depends heavily upon its reader?
Wang Jiaxin: Yes, a poem depends on the reader. One poem may lead to many poems. Rosanna Warren thought of Robert Frost when she read the poem I have been describing. : “It has tremendous sweep, geographically and morally– the smoke from the planes, wings and snow, the smoke of the fires in LA, the Buddhist smoke, the apocalyptic fire and ice. (Robert Frost‘Some say the world will end in fire,/ some say in ice…’)”
I had read the line of Frost before, but it had not occurred to me when I wrote this poem. This may be because in China, in the so-called “Old East” there are similar sayings— in Buddhist thought, in Kawabata Yasunari’s Snow Country— all contain such revelations. Perhaps more importantly, ice and fire have always been two elements of my poetry, not only as a poetic image and metaphor, but they constitute my true destiny. That’s why I end the poem by saying, “My path forever seems to go/ Through fire and ice.” It is an inevitable end, and an end that will never end.
Ann van Buren: The poet and translator, W.S. Merwin, worked with native speakers of a language in order to craft translations into English. What is your process? Chinese is a tonal language. When you translate, do you focus on word for word translation or do you bend what’s literal to get a sense of rhythm and tone?
Wang Jiaxin: My translation of Celan refers to the original German text and is translated from English to Chinese. I have spent thirty years reading and translating Celan, from the first translation in 1991, to the publication, Selected Works of Paul Celan, in 2002（It’s the first Chinese translation of Celan’s works,) to the publication of a large volume, Glory of Ashes: Selected Poems of Paul Celan, in 2021 (it includes nearly 400 poems and some essays and letters). At first I did not know any German, but later I learned some and worked with friends who were fluent in German to revise my translation.
Although I value the creativity of translation, I do not agree with Robert Lowell’s translation (Lowell himself does not consider his translation to be normal translation, but “imitation.”) Faithfulness, reliability and precision are still the principles of my translation. My goal is not only to make my translation stand up in Chinese, but also to make it stand up to examination from the point of view of the original. Therefore, even when I translated according to the English version, I was very careful.
I benefited from the excellent translation of some English translators but I also corrected some mistakes and inappropriate translations in the English version. For instance, “koln, am hof,” a well-known poem by Celan, was translated by American scholar and translator John Felstiner as “Cologne, Station,” ** but it should be translated as “Cologne, Palace-Street.” The street has been a place of Jewish settlement, although it is also close to the Cologne station. Another example is the translation by British poet translator Michael Hamburger, whose significance lies in an early and comprehensive introduction to Celan’s poetry. However, his translation is sometimes too smooth and fails to fully retain Celan’s linguistic characteristics. For example, his translation of Celan’s famous poem, Corona, includes the line “our mouths speak the truth.” but the German original is “der Mund redet wahr” (“Mouth speaks truth.”) In the original poem the subject is not “We”, but “Mouth” itself. This is the unique expression of Celan, in Celan’s poems, “mouth,” “hand” and other body organs often have independent subjective metaphorical meaning.
As a Jew and an exile from Eastern Europe, Celan’s German is very special. Even to many Germans it is strange, not only in syntax but in diction. Celan made up a large number of words, taking advantage of the peculiarities of German. His later poems are filled with “language madness.” A Celan translator must have a full and deep understanding of this. The French philosopher Derrida claimed that Celan had created a “migrant language,” and Ilya Kaminsky claimed that Celan had created a language kingdom called “Celania.” Celan himself, in correspondence with his wife, doubted that the Germans would speak in his German. So when someone asks me whether I translate Celan from German or English, my answer is: I translate Celan from Celan’s own language. This is my fundamental loyalty as a translator to Celan and to the poem itself. Some Chinese poets, such as the poet Duo Duo, highly appreciated my translation because I have translated Celan’s linguistic idiosyncrasies. They are revolutionary, heterogeneous and unfamiliar in their nature, and, as a German-speaking, exiled Judean poet and Holocaust survivor, they represent his most secret and intense struggle with orthodox German.
The same is true of my “process” of translating Mandelstam, Akhmatova and Tsvetaeva. You mention W.S. Merwin’s translation, and I love his own poems and have benefited from his co-translations of Mandelstam (though he sometimes “graces” Mandelstam’s poems a little.) We all know that the common practice in the United States of translating poetry is for poets to collaborate with scholars or linguists— in fact, this was started by Pound. I also studied Stanley Kunitz’s co-translation of Akhmatova. His revisions and retranslations of his collaborators’ draft saved the poem. This is why we need good poets to participate in translation, and why Akhmatova herself said that “only a genius can translate a genius.” A translator herself, Akhmatova worked with sinologists at the most difficult time of her life to translate the works of Qu Yuan, China’s oldest great poet in exile.
As for your question about how I use Chinese, a “tonal language,” to create a rhythm and tone in my translation— my translation process is as follows: The first step is to enter the inner origin of the poem, to grasp its “pronunciation,” and then to rewrite the poem for the poet in Chinese. The goal is to also to try to achieve a “more lush bloom” (Walter Benjamin on translation) in the Chinese.
Mandelstam’s To Natalya Shtempel, for example, was the last poem of his three years in exile. Shtempel, a young local school teacher, associated with the poet despite the danger. She later preserved a large number of Mandelstam’s manuscripts. Mandelstam himself regarded the poem as his best and even as his “last words.”
My translation is basically a literal translation, but it is not a rigid translation. The Armenian poet and scholar, Robert Tsaturyan, wrote an essay analyzing my translation against the original poem and the English translation. He spoke highly of my translation, saying that it “is sharp and to the point, and even feels closer to the truth than the original,” such as the two lines in my translation: “That grasps her, drags her on, / that inspires her disability, spastic freedom.” ( Shtempel herself has a limp.) Robert says, “If we dared to go back to Stalin’s reign of terror in the Soviet Union, “spastic freedom “might be closer to reality than “restrained freedom,”（the literal meaning of the original Russian poem.）
Through this analysis, one can see how my translation strengthens the original poem. Not only in the rewriting of images, but also in the rhythm, in the translation of these two lines, I cut off the smooth sentence of the original poem and give each image and word weight so that it reads with more emotion and rhythm in Chinese. It was important that I make my translation commensurate with Mandelstam’s poem, to make it a language with tension. Celan once compared translation to a dangerous ferry. A Chinese poet used this metaphor to evaluate my translation: ” With his precise and creative translation, we hear— in the Chinese— the scrape of the boatman’s echo…”
Yes, I like the saying myself: The scratch of the boatman’s echo…
Ann van Buren: Thank you, Wang Jiaxin, for this fascinating and scholarly exploration of your poetry and poetry translation. The Katonah Poetry Series looks forward to hearing you read your poems at 4PM on March 9th, at the Katonah Village Library.
*The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova, Translated by Judith Hemschemeyer, Zephyr Press,1990, pp. 702
**Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan, Translated by John Felstiner, W. W. Norton, 2001