Nianxi Chen’s poems help to humanize the grief caused in so many parts of the world due to insatiable desires for cheap raw and manufactured goods. Yet there’s no blaming capitalism and the West in these poems, just lyric descriptions of what takes place in greed’s wake.
An example of Chen’s distinctive approach is how he bears witness to the many impoverishments that have diminished winter’s joy since economic and natural climates have worsened. Unlike the expected objective correlative that often connects winter with old age, Chen’s poems are nostalgic for “snow” in childhood. They attend to intersections of the environment, indigeneity, and labor, conjuring a mixture of Wendell Berry, Joy Harjo, and Philip Levine.
In Chen’s poems, those who are honest and poor are forced to leave loved ones and the places where they were surrounded by natural beauty for difficult and dangerous work far from home. Chen is a poet inextricably connected to his natural surroundings, where poetry shelters an inner experience of awe in spite of external devastation. Like the mountains, the humans in Chen’s poems grow “skinnier” and are forced into the icy winds with an “iron sweater.” Yet, Chen’s poems are filled with reverence. He observes twilight as a “bowl of syrupy ice water.” Even train windows, taking laborers away from their families, showcase beauty as commuters are blown into “tile-blue.” Inspired by the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, Chen can bear his individual sacrifices as long as he can envision a better present and imagined future.
Approaching a Chen poem is like encountering a fragile and beautiful porcelain object whose function, at first, is not clear. Our translation process includes three living human writers, two languages, and numerous reference materials. Kuo and I met at the University of Georgia, where she pursued a master’s and doctoral degree in education that included poetry as a form of inquiry into transnational experience. As Kuo became a new professor of education, we began, on Kuo’s initiative, to collaborate on a project working with U.S. teachers of young, Latinx, bilingual children on translation as an enriched form of biliteracy even with monolingual English-speaking teachers. At the beginning of the Covid pandemic, Kuo invited me to work with her on translations of Nianxi Chen’s poetry, which she had first encountered through online WeChat groups with poets in China. Just as we’d explored how monolingual teachers could work with bilingual students on translation, I asked myself: How could I, a poet and professor fluent in Spanish and English, translate a Mandarin language poem? The answer: collaboration.
First, Kuo translates the poem from Mandarin into English, a task that relies on her bilingualism and experience as a poet in both languages. Then she shares these initial English drafts with me. I read them out loud. Like a Rubik’s Cube, I twist these first renderings and try to line up the color blocks of meaning, often getting stuck with only one or two sides complete. I send Kuo my first drafts, often with questions I hope she can answer or send to Chen, who patiently and speedily responds via WeChat. He is quite ill, and we are grateful he is still able to be a part of our revisions. His replies enrich our dialogue about what these poems could mean, the purposes of empathy, and the cross-cultural understanding they may serve.
We ponder the world of experience and thought in Chen’s verse, so full of longing and witness. What is it like to risk one’s life every day just to provide enough money for a baby’s milk and food? What is it like to see the ravages of climate change yet also observe the beauty in headscarves waving from wooden fences? We feel obliged to translate his experience of both limited resources and limitlessness as a way to enrich our own lives as we labor with the components of laptops shipped on vessels to our big-box stores and home offices.
Revision, we have learned, is an important part of translation—the tinkering and changing, going over the same line and stanza repeatedly until the right word presents itself to interpret the essence of the poet’s message, to sometimes fearlessly embrace great departure in order to come back to the kernel of truth presented. The goal is to arrive at a translation in which the music and meaning feel inevitable, seamless, and connected to the original maker’s intentions. In this batch of poems for Southern Humanities Review, we worried we could not reach quite the right translation of “As the Train Runs, the Sun Rises.” At long last, in syrupy twilight as Kuo was doing a mother’s work, she found the ending to the penultimate stanza we had long searched for that finally felt inevitable (and had been patiently nourished by SHR editor Rose McLarney’s good questions).
Understanding what Chen intends in his verse is a kind of archeology, a digging down through the original poem and first English translation to the poem’s foundational conceit, taking the raw material in its original language and passing it through the customs office of global, universal, human experience. Like the labor of nursing a child to sleep in the middle of the night, the work of translation helps us “bear the unending rush and loneliness/without a single day’s rest.”
All four poems in this selection come from Chen’s poetry book, Records of Explosion (Taibai Wenyi Press). Chen’s poems (Trans. Cahnmann-Taylor & Zhang) have appeared in Tupelo Quarterly, Rattle, Plume, Pedestal, and ANMLY magazines. Chen’s life and work were recently featured in the New York Times.
—Melisa Cahnmann-Taylor
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