Notes on the Mosquito: Selected Poems

by Xi Chuan, Lucas Klein (translator)

“In the crevices of history, mosquitoes are everywhere,” Xi Chuan writes. Notes on the Mosquito introduces English readers to one of the most revered poets of contemporary China. Gaining recognition as a post-Misty poet in the late ’80s, Xi Chuan was famous for his condensed, numinous lyricism, and for radiating classical Chinese influences as much as Western modernist traditions. After the crushing failure of Tiananmen Square and the death of two of his closest friends, he stopped writing for three years. He re-emerged transformed: he began writing meditative, expansive prose poems that dismantled the aestheticism and musicality of his previous self. Divided into two sections that hinge around this formal break, Notes on the Mosquito offers the greatest hits of a deeply engaging poet, whose work intertwines the mountains and roads of Xinjiang with insects and mythical beasts, ghosts and sacred spirits with chess and a Sanskrit inscription.

Genres: Poetry, China

208 pages, Paperback

First published April 12, 2012

About the author

Xi Chuan (official name Liu Jun), poet, essayist, translator, was born in the City of Xuzhou, Jiangsu province, in 1963. He studied English literature at the Peking University from 1981 to 1985, and later worked as an editor for the magazine Huangqiu (Globe Monthly) for eight years. He was a visiting scholar to the International Writing Program of the University of Iowa, in 2002, and a visiting adjunct professor to New York University in 2007, the Orion Scholar to the University of Victoria, Canada in 2009. He is currently teaching Classical Chinese Literature at the School of Liberal Arts, Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing.

Xi Chuan is one of the most influential poets in contemporary China. He has been well known in the Chinese literary scene since his student days. In 1988, he founded, with friends, the unofficial poetry journal Qingxiang (Tendency), which was, however, banned after three issues. From 1990 to 1995 he worked as an editor for the unofficial magazine Xiandai Hanshi (Modern Chinese Poetry). He is now one of the two chief-editors of the magazine Dangdai Gouji Shitan (Contemporary World Poetry).

He has published five collections of poems to date. His series of poems Jinghua Shuiyue (Flowers in the Mirror and the Moon on the Water) was adapted into an experimental play directed by Meng Jinghui and was well accepted at the 35th Festival Internacional Cervantino, Mexico, 2007. In 2005, the Italian visual Artist Marco Mereo Rotelli made a giant installation named Poetry Island with 12 poems from 12 poets (including Adonis, Yves Bonnefoy, Charles Tomlinson, Tadeusz Rozewicz and Xi Chuan) and exhibited it at the 51st La Biennale di Venezia. The composer Guo Wenjing turned Xi Chuan’s poem ‘Yuanyou’ (Long Journey) into a piece of music and was performed in 2004 by the Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Edo de Waart.

In 1997 he edited the collected works of the poet-hero Hai Zhi, who committed suicide in 1989. He also works as a translator, mainly of poetry. In addition to African and English poetry, he has translated works by Ezra Pound, Jorge Luis Borges, Czesław Miłosz and Olav. H. Hauge into Chinese. The translations of his poems and essays appeared in American, Canadian, French, British, Dutch, Belgian, Spanish, Danish, Italian, Russian, Bulgarian, Hungarian, Indian, Korean, Brazilian, Venezuelan anthologies, magazines and journals, including the London Times Literary Supplement and the Boston Review.

Xi Chuan has been awarded numerous prizes, including: in 1994, the Modern Chinese Poetry Prize; in 1999, one of the top ten winners at the Weimar International Essay Prize Contest; in 2001, the national Lu Xun Prize. A series of grants made his long visits abroad possible, in various places, including India (UNESCO-ASCHBERG bursaries of artists), the United States (Freeman Foundation fellowship), Italy (Civitella Ranieri Foundation Fellowship), and Germany (Kulturstiftung des Bundes fellowship). He attended the 1995 Poetry International Festival in Rotterdam, the 1997 Biennale Internationale des Poètes en Val-de-Marne in Paris, the 2002 Chicago Humanities Festival, USA, and the 2004 and 2008 Berlin International Literature Festival, Germany. He was the Curator for Chinese Poetry Posters Exhibition of the 2009 Frankfurt Book Fair. Xi Chuan lives in Beijing.

Reviews

[Fin · Rating 4 out of 5]

He's so good - so conversational and strange, a master of the modern prose poem (or sanwen? maybe?). Wonderfully translated, very generous selection across his career, sick essay at the back engaging with poetry vis a vis tradition and modernity in China (and v much of a piece with Laszlo K's Destruction & Sorrow) but I needed more!! All of the big prose poetic cycles are just excerpted here I wanna see that shit unfurl in full! Hopefully Bloom does that for me....

[Caroline · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another wonderful book to close the year with. This will be worth reading several times. Xi Chuan and his translator Lucas Klein have collected poems from throughout Xi’s development as a poet, so the book offers many forms, styles, subjects, and mindsets. I was not very interested in the first part, his short lyric poems. But the works he has written since his return to poetry after Tienneman Square are entirely different.

For one thing, he engages more directly (for a Western reader) with the past. (There was certainly much allusion to the past poetry in the lyric works but I am unable to identify the references and thus to deepen my readings of them.) He also writes now, for the most part, in prose poetry, a form that suits his method of collecting related meditations on objects or places: skin, the mosquito, poison, the beast in us. He also brings humor and a certain engaged but mature distance to these pieces, unlike what seems like self-conscious art in many of the early lyrics.

But the biggest change is the depth and nuance of the images and thoughts in these later poems. He challenges his compatriots to think about what their traditions and history, from dragons to socialism, mean in their modernity. He recognizes change, aging, the less-than-admiroable aspects of outselves, our dreams.

My favorite poem is a long and eloquent report of his impressions of the high desert and mountains: South Xinjang Notes. The very last poems about tradition and folk tales are very nice, and other pieces on drizzle/mold, skin, the beast, and exhortations worked for me.

A couple of short quotes:

'The extremes of the earth’s existence: the desert. Fundamentalism across the land as far as the eye can see, besieging me, demanding I accept it, demanding that I perish. When the earth dies, this is how it will be.' [from 'South Xinjang Notes’]

'In the Six Dynasties, ghosts were educated, and could discuss The Five Classics with humans and debate atheists about the existence of ghosts ' [from ‘Six Dynasties Ghosts’]

[Margaryta · Rating 4 out of 5]

I stumbled upon this book completely by accident while passing by the poetry section of my local bookstore. The title had caught my attention, to say the least, and I decided it would be an interesting book to read. So, as usual, I looked it up in the library, found it, and took it out.

I'm very pleased with my decision. This book was quite the refreshing thing, something I really needed after concentrating a lot in a specific area of writing for the last while and feeling like I needed something new and unexpected. This book gave me that and more. There are so many beautiful lines one may quote from this book, such as the poem that was in the format of 45 fragments, each one telling its own story. The writing style is something one doesn't come across quite often and is very raw, emotional, and real. Chuan doesn't sugarcoat nor does he exaggerate. He presents his thoughts in a very clear manner that transfers a lot of emotion to the reader. I liked a lot of the analogies he used, more specifically the large amount of Chinese cultural details that he incorporated into the book. I learned quite a bit that I didn't know about before and also had my mind open to new ideas and perspectives on several things.

I recommend this book really to anyone. Sure, it may seem like it's a little eccentric in some parts and maybe even a little too raw at others, but this kind of writing is very difficult to find in our time and once you find it it will stick with you forever. It has a charm that will captivate you if only you let it do so.

[James · Rating 5 out of 5]

Accidental discovery of a stunning collection of writing. Must read

[meadow · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked the first half more than the second half.