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“Empty Chairs” by Lui Xia [Why This Book Should Win]

This entry in the Why This Book Should Win series is by Jarrod Annis, BTBA judge and bookseller at Greenlight Books, We will be running two (or more!) of these posts every business day leading up to the announcement of the finalists.

 

Empty Chairs: Selected Poems by Liu Xia, translated from the Chinese by Ming Di and Jennifer Stern (China, Graywolf)

Spanning some thirty years of work, Empty Chairs presents readers with the first bilingual edition of Liu Xia’s poetry, augmented by a selection of her work as a photographer. It’s a stark volume, but illuminated by an indomitable interior light that refuses to be extinguished. Living under strict house arrest since 2009—when her husband, poet and activist Liu Xiabo, was imprisoned by the Chinese government—Liu Xia’s poems are hermetic meditations on a larger world at work, both interior and exterior, where the push and pull between absence and presence is a daily conflict. When Xia writes

I must guard these
small fragile things
as if guarding our life

 

she could very well be referencing her poetic output, while is under the continual threat of an imposed silence.

While political constraints do play a role in much of the work, it is never at the cost of the Xia’s emotional core. If anything, it lends an urgency to the work, the feeling of reading these smuggled words, these poems of disconnect. In their chronicling of Xia’s daily life and feelings, the poems feel traced though the ages to more ancient Chinese poets of the Tang and Sung dynasties. When taken with the original Chinese characters en face, the process of translation is never far from the reader’s mind, the active function of language as it makes a vital voice available.



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