Same Difference: Xi Chuan’s Notes on the Mosquito and the Translation of Poetry, Prose Poetry, and Prose

Abstract

As Jade Green as Bok Choy: there is a crowd of commoners as purple as red cabbage—the line epitomizes something of my translation of the selected poems of contemporary Chinese poet Xi Chuan 西川 (b. 1963, penname of Liu Jun 刘军), which we titled Notes on the Mosquito (New Directions, 2012). The line comes from my version of 'The Distance' 远方, a poem dedicated to Anna Akhmtova, and like her writing on someone else’s draft, where 'a word which is not mine / Occasionally shows through' (D.M. Thomas’s translation), Xi Chuan is often in dialogue with other currents of world poetry. As he wrote them, though, these purple commoners are perhaps paradigmatically Chinese, which is to say their description speaks to Chinese conceptions of reality in colloquially Chinese idioms:有一群百姓像白菜一样翠绿.