Kejia Wang
on translating Zhang Ergun
Zhang is not an erudite poet even in the Chinese language, and his poems run directly counter to several ideas, trends, and styles that are currently popular and celebrated in modern English language poetry. To translate him too directly risks the translation likely not being considered a poem at all in English; yet to translate him in too cultivated a fashion risks losing the famed sincerity and grounded nature of his works. I ended up embellishing several of his more colorful images (“the vermillion realm of men,” “spectating souls on the embarkment”) while keeping some of his more starkly crude ones (the “dripping wet young girl”). I agonized over several words that do not have direct equivalents in English; 噩耗 (“grave news”) is typically used to refer to news of death, especially deaths in the family, while 捷报 (“great tidings”) is usually used to refer to news of victories, especially in the context of war or economic development. The original poem’s juxtaposition of these two terms in the title at the end draws attention to the false equivalence between “good” and “bad” news — the irony that the joy in the successful recovery can somehow offset the pain of a loss of life. In maintaining that juxtaposition and choosing terms that I hope have similar connotations in English, I hope I have conveyed some of the same sentiments in my translation.
about the author
Zhang Ergun (张二棍, lit. “Zhang second stick/rod”) is a Chinese poet from Shanxi province. Born in 1982 to a family of modest means, Zhang attended vocational school for only a year after graduating from middle school. Working as a member of a provincial geologic surveying team, Zhang spent decades of his life traveling in remote areas and living among the poor. His poems are famed for their simplicity, sincerity, social criticism, and compassion for the powerless and the poor. He has published one collection of poems, 旷野 (lit. Open Wilderness), and is now a contracted writer with the Shanxi Academy of Literature.
Critic and fellow poet Liu Nian (刘年) noted that Zhang’s poetry is representative of what he considers to be the “Chinese school” of contemporary Chinese poetry. According to Liu, the school – and Zhang’s works – follows the literary tradition of classical Chinese poetry while drawing inspiration from Western philosophy. Poems from the school feature simple prose, grounded realism, and compassion for all.
about the translator
Kejia Wang graduated from Penn in 2016 with a BSE in bioengineering and a minor in English. She has since also received an MA degree in English literature and Science and Technology Studies from the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. Her poem “Disorientation” was published in the Penn Review in 2015, and she’s contributed Chinese-to-English translations to DoubleSpeak Magazine since 2014.
