Song Lin is one of the most distinctive poets from the People’s Republic of China. Translator Dong Li keeps the language of these poems surprising, felt, and unprecious." -Jennifer Kronovet, The Wug Test Biographical Note He writes through the pain of dislocation, without easy generalizations or flattery, but with deep seeing. ".Song makes places known to us, connecting lands and lives-Borges, Celan, Ernst, Mandelstam, CD Wright-into a web of specificity. Wright, Paul Celan, and Anselm Kiefer.” –Don Mee Choi, DMZ Colony The gifted, multilingual poet Dong Li has attentively translated and tracked Song’s language that paints ‘the true picture of the earth’ as it orbits history, memory, distance, and nearness as well as clusters of stars such as C.D. "The Gleaner Song, is a deeply moving ‘letter from elsewhere,’ shaped by Song Lin’s exiled life and existential restlessness. It is a translation worthy of their persuasive, bizarre edge, elusive in their tortured gadgets, and has a birch-bark way of leaving a faintly invisible, familiar, expatriated ink in the reader’s soul after a short time sitting still with a fugacious blueberry." -Vi Khi Nao, A Bell Curve is Pregnant Straight Line Here, Li has turned translation into a pagoda, an empire, where his imagination and his high aptitude for polyglottal share the same thunderbolt as a hot spring. "Dong Li is a poet’s ideal translator: he dexterously and comfortably teleports himself across all elegiac portals of reality. We’re so fortunate that these remarkable poems break into English for us through Dong Li, himself an exceptional poet and multi-lingual translator." -Forrest Gander, Be With
Thematic and grammatical shifts, temporal instabilities, and disconcerting image and tonal repertoires juxtaposing the fantastic ('a word strangled by the umbilical cord') with the quotidian ('a girl by the window'), the violent (executions) with the mundane (pimples) convey the profound unsettlement at the heart of Song Lin’s work and world. Because his poetry is influenced by, but independent of Western poetries, you may want to abandon your expectations in order to encounter it. “'Should our homeland be not barbaric?' Song Lin asks, I think, for all of us. "Formed by his personal travails and layered experimentation, Song Lin's work explores a freer and wider spectrum of poetry." - Bei Dao, The Rose of Time: New and Selected Poems “Throughout his career, as The Gleaner Song attests, Song Lin has sustained a courageous clarity about poetry.” -David Woo, Harriet Books (Poetry Foundation) From the experience of displacement and exile, his poetry continues to open and expand its horizons. His influences are the modernists, the surrealists, the romantics, the deep imagists and the objectivists-but what distinguishes Song is his ability to absorb them all, and make them his own. This selection of poems, made by the translator Dong Li and the poet himself, spans four decades of poetic exploration, with a focus on poems written during the poet’s long stay in France, Singapore, Argentina, and more recently, his return to China.Īs a result of his wanderings, Song Lin may be thought of as an international poet, open to an unusual extent to influences – though informed by the classics and a thorough study of the Chinese language, his poetry weaves through American, French, and Latin-American traditions.
When the Tiananmen protest exploded in Beijing in June 1989, Song led student demonstrations in Shanghai and was imprisoned for almost a year before leaving China soon afterwards. Song Lin is one of China’s most innovative poets. The landscape of his travels becomes a map of his poetry, which, in turn, amounts to a sensitive anthropology of our migratory world." - Dong Li, The World Migrating: On Translating Song Lin His songs migrate from one word to another, from one language to another.
"This is a curious poet who opens himself to the world around him. In The Gleaner Song, the lauded poet brings joy and contemplation of poetic expression.
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