By FRANCISCO FOOT HARDMAN*
Presentation of the newly released bilingual anthology
Rare and strange that only good poetry brings us, Brazilian readers now have the opportunity to discover a precious sample of contemporary poetic production in China.
This bilingual edition in Portuguese and Chinese was only possible thanks to the work of a very well-tuned team. In the translation, the care and competence of Inez Zhou and Dora Ribeiro. And in the organization, the productive work of Hu Xudong, which was suddenly suspended with the tragic death of our great friend and poet Hu, in 2021. This is the saddest irony: of the 2 female poets and 8 male poets selected here, born between 1968 and 1991, only Hu is no longer with us. He, one of the greatest animators of the contemporary Chinese poetry scene…
Furthermore, this anthology is enriched by the introductory note by translators Inez Zhou and Dora Ribeiro, whose partnership, as you will soon read, was a great success.
There are 10 poets and 52 poems of the most diverse kind, with bio-bibliographical notes that introduce us very well to the necessary reading of this production. Whose greatest mark seems to contain no marks, that is: several spaces-times pass through the voice of this young poetry, in accordance with that outline suggested by the erudite professor Zhang Longxi, in his monumental synthesis A History of Chinese Literature (2023). This, when he suggests, by the way, this thematic opening and breaking of paradigms in contemporary Chinese literary production, that is, that made since the 1980s, in its most different genres.
Thus, the voices that alternate here remind us of classic novels such as the masterful Water's Edge (14th century), or the splendid era of ancient Tang poetry (7th to 10th centuries), interspersed with everyday, prosaic scenes, which sometimes border on the fantastic and the surreal, other times the melancholic contemplation of beautiful and distant landscapes of accelerated hyper-urbanization, with its notable and, at the same time, very complex effects on people's everyday lives.
Just as a sample of this poetic experience made of images that are at once close and strange, I transcribe an excerpt from Jiang Hao's prose poem[I], “The Shape of the Sea”, written in the southernmost island province of China, Hainan, in October 2003, and which certainly inspired the title of the book that Jabuticaba now offers us:
The shape of the sea
Every time you ask me about the shape of the sea,
I'll get two bags of sea water.
This is the shape of the sea, like a pair of eyes;
Or the shape of the sea seen through the eyes.
If you touch them, it feels like you are cleaning them
Two scalding tears.
[...]
How many routes can be followed in this wonderful and unpredictable country? Readers can now try out their own journeys through poems that invite both exile and meditation. Because here in this anthology, the succession of different places is very impressive, whether in the texts of the 10 poets or in their own personal destinations.
And on this spring evening, here in Beijing, where I am writing these introductory lines, the memory of Hu Xudong and his contagious joy comes alive. On an afternoon in August 2018, he was returning to São Paulo from a trip that had moved him so much. He had visited Alagoinhas, and from there Canudos, at the invitation of the Postgraduate Program in Cultural Criticism at the State University of Bahia, and he was happy to have stepped on a thorn of the mandacaru cactus while walking through the caatinga of the Bahian backlands.
Later, in Campinas, at the IEL of Unicamp, he recited some of his poems as a fierce militant. In the exquisite and simultaneous translations of Ma Lin, then our postgraduate student, we had a journey of Poetry, Modernity and Revolution one of the most lively and moving there. It was also there that Hu and Marcelo met in person.
The volume published here is therefore also the result of that journey. Whoever can read it now should make the best choice for their own path.
*Francisco Foot Hardman He is a professor at the Institute of Language Studies at Unicamp. Author, among other books, of São Paulo ideology and the eternal modernists (Unesp). [https://amzn.to/45Qwcvu].
Reference
Hu Xudong (ed.). The Shapes of the Sea: Contemporary Chinese Poetry. Bilingual anthology. Translation: Inez Zhou and Dora Ribeiro. New York, New York Times, 2024, 176 pages. [https://shre.ink/gcrK]
Note
[I][i] Jiang Hao was born in 1971 in Chongqing, in southwest China, one of the largest cities in the world (about 32 million inhabitants), close to the Yangtze River and the giant Three Gorges hydroelectric dam. He is a poet, critic and editor. His work has been translated into English, German and French, among other languages. He has lived for a long time in the island province of Hainan, in the extreme south of China.
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