Jade Ladder: Contemporary Chinese Poetry

The diversity and richness of contemporary Chinese poetry defy description. As Zang Di understatedly puts it in "Cosmo-Sceneriology", "We seem / to have come to a new place", but the place itself is multiple. In "100 Years of Solitude for the New Poetry", the same poet suggests that poetry "has dismissed language" and finds that "yes, for an instant, it was almost not written by you". To the reader coming newly to the subject, or with the competing translatorial templates of Ezra Pound and Arthur Waley in mind, these are exciting declarations, even as, or maybe because, they resist confident analysis.

There are comparable excitements to be experienced throughout Jade Ladder, which samples the work of over 50 poets – ranging from internationally well-known figures such as Bei Dao and Yang Lian to writers still in their 30s. WN Herbert's informative and witty preface rightly urges readers simply to hurl themselves into the poems, but while many will be glad of work that lives up to the bracing injunction to stop making sense, it's helpful to have some idea of what the points of departure are, and to read Yang Lian's introduction and the various accompanying essays by the poet-critic Qin Xiayou on lyric, narrative and so on, as well as Brian Holton's engagingly irascible closing essay on the opportunities and pitfalls facing the translator.

In Herbert's view, one urgent question was: "What do Chinese writers feel about their representation in translation in the west?" As far as possible, he and his colleagues have sought to work directly with the poets, treating translation as a form of dialogue rather than taking the most immediately appealing or recognisable or portable elements of the poetry into English. Only by this means, the editors suggest, can non-readers of Chinese acquire a sense of the complex relationship of contemporary poets to the long but often contested traditions of Chinese poetry, to the public world, to the frequently censorious and punitive state, and to poetry beyond China.

Much of the poetry is necessarily oblique: before the reader can be tantalised by the poems' overtones there is the challenge of basic orientation. The poet Zhang Er is cited as proposing that "each language offers a different conception of knowledge, therefore the world", yet at times, given the frequent internationalism of Chinese poets, the realities seem to intersect, as in Xiao Kaiyu's "Mao Zedong": "He sleeps in a swimming pool full of old books / in between building work, watching the air / speaking in short hermetic lines / unanalysable meaning hidden in tough briars of language, / warrior's language from an invisible battlefield, who understands it?"

A western reader is likely to be reminded here of Mandelstam's ill-fated "Stalin Epigram". Although Mao is seen posthumously by a poet born in 1960, subsequent Chinese administrations have proved just as interested in the ideological demeanour of the arts as were Kruschev and his successors in Russia. Xi Chuan's "Commandments" could be a poem from the eastern bloc of the 1950s (in this translation it recalls Zbigniew Herbert): "you shall not covet / so it's not a bad idea to crown yourself king in a dark room / and why not cut a skeleton key and carry it in your hand? / walk, stop, turn: in that capital city under the light of your sun / you will disdain to open each rusted lock".

The comedy is often of this laconic kind. Chen Xianfa's "Previous Incarnation" adapts the beautiful legend of the forbidden Butterfly Lovers united in death: "If you want to get away, all you have to do is to escape into the innards of a butterfly / no need to grind your teeth ever again, not evade your parents' ploys and potions /no need to wait till the blood is all spat out. / To be an enemy, all you have to do is be the foe of the entire human race."

As well as lyric poems (an extremely flexible category here), Jade Ladder samples narrative and neo-classical poems, sequences, experimental and longer poems. Qin Xiayou points out some common ground with US Language poets such as Charles Bernstein and Barrett Watten, and there is also an engaging appetite for mischief, as in Yu Jian's "File Zero", where a kind of Mass Observation slides from omniscience to randomness and absurd comedy.

In the section "Ideological Report", we find: "he wants wine, women and song to be dissipated and unashamed to / be a tyrant to abuse his power to ride roughshod over the people / he wants to surrender he wants to revolt he wants to confess he / wants to recant he wants to riot". And given the prevailing circumstances, who could disagree?

The jade ladder itself is an image of the link between heaven and earth, translatable as the imagination. The atmosphere given off by the anthology is a heartening one, despite the grimness of some of the material, since what we read and hear testifies to the necessity of the imaginative life as embodied in poetry, whatever the political and economic climate. Herbert and his colleagues are to be thanked for this rich sample.

Sean O'Brien's November is published by Picador.