{"id":398832,"date":"2018-05-09T19:05:53","date_gmt":"2018-05-09T23:05:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/?p=398832"},"modified":"2018-05-09T19:08:59","modified_gmt":"2018-05-09T23:08:59","slug":"iron-moon-an-anthology-of-chinese-worker-poetry-why-this-book-should-win","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2018\/05\/09\/iron-moon-an-anthology-of-chinese-worker-poetry-why-this-book-should-win\/","title":{"rendered":"“Iron Moon: An Anthology of Chinese Worker Poetry” [Why This Book Should Win]"},"content":{"rendered":"

This Why This Book Should Win<\/a> entry is from Raluca Albu, BTBA judge, and editor at both <\/em>BOMB and <\/em>Guernica.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

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Iron Moon: An Anthology of Chinese Worker Poetry<\/em>, translated from the Chinese by Eleanor Goodman (China, White Pine Press)<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cIron Moon\u201d is an anthology of Chinese migrant \u00a0worker poetry that transports the reader from the comfort of the page to the complex machinations of 21st century industry.<\/p>\n

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This kind of poetry first appeared in China about three decades ago, when Deng Xiaoping\u2019s government advanced China\u2019s industrial complex and motivated a mass migration from the countryside to urban centers. Nearly 300,000 people were involved in this shift, but according to editor Qin Xiaoyu\u2019s introduction, \u201cChina leads the world in work place injuries, occupational diseases, and psychological problems . . . problems [causes by these mass migrations include] left behind and homeless children, empty-nesters, an increased divorce rate . . .\u201d<\/div>\n
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The poets in this collection include men and women who have worked as brick layers, in coal mines, on demolition sites, as stone masons, on road crews at hydroelectric stations, and in plastic factories, to name a few. Others have planted rice, assembled refrigerator parts, and put together enamel wire. Some poets, like Chen Caifeng, only have a middle school education. He wrote the poem \u201cThe Women,\u201d about his observations of female factory workers, and \u201cUnder Fluorescent Lights\u201d where he personifies mechanization, \u201cThe rotary files polished by burrs \/ follow a series of stiff motions \/ under the fluorescent lights, frantically \/ seeking out any possible happiness.\u201d Zheng Xiaoqiong graduated from nursing school and worked at a toy factory, a magnetic tape factory, and as a hole punch operator before she became an editor at a magazine. Her prose poem, \u201cLife,\u201d takes on a philosophical tone, \u201cI don\u2019t know how to protect a silent life \/ this life of a lost name and gender…\u201d \u00a0These poems critique, lament, attack, reflect, invite and expose the realities of working class realities in the new century.<\/div>\n
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The poems in this collection document the longings today\u2019s migrants have for their hometowns, the struggles of alienation that they faced in urban centers, faced with the challenge of living on the lowest rungs of society. It\u2019s truly incredible to read a collection that holds so many of these experiences and shared proclivities \u2014 to have a class not just of laborers, but of the dedicated poets amongst them, finding a shared proverbial home across provinces and experiences, in the nebulous possibility of verse. The poets here are not the archetypal literati intellectual (and that\u2019s definitely a compliment). They come from realms of society that we rarely see overlap \u2014 and to have access to both in their work opens up a world of detail and sensibility. In that, and other ways, this collection is dualistic in nature. It\u2019s about both the global forces that impinge upon the modern migrant laborer, and about the specificity of the localized roots one longs for.<\/div>\n
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The themes and symbols one would expect of labor poetry reoccur throughout the collection, especially that of the screw, an image used to ominously foreshadow poet Xu Lizhi\u2019s suicide off the Foxconn Factory roof (where many of our Apple products are made), in his poem \u201cA Screw Plunges to the Ground.\u201d The shared refrains throughout highlight the incessant reiteration of trauma across these experiences. Yet despite the fact that the collection touches on expected and familiar tropes (blatant exploitation, fatal injuries, missing appendages, metal, mothers, secret lovers, darkness, assembly lines, and railroads), these are emotionally authentic portals into worlds and experiences few of us know first hand, despite our complicity in these systems. Do you know what a Banbury Mixer is and what happens when gum, raw petroleum, and white carbon \u201croast inside its belly?\u201d Chi Moshu\u2019s poem, \u201cThe Rubber Factory,\u201d will tell you \u2014 and you have to wonder how he composed it, before he ever put a word down on paper, through the chasm-turned-art of his daily observations and sensations.<\/div>\n
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The collection has its share of surprising and playful work as well, including Xu Lizhi\u2019s \u201cObituary for a Peanut\u201d which reappropriates the food label on a peanut butter jar, and Chen Nianxi\u2019s clever yet devastating \u201cYang Sai and Yang Zai,\u201d referring both to a gold ore mine and a co worker who suffers the consequences. Xie Xiangnan\u2019s \u201cLet\u2019s Have More Poets Like Xie Xiangnan,\u201d balances a tone of self sustaining celebration with stirring imagery, \u201cwinter seized the autumn\u2019s hair, entering the body of the world from behind\u201d and his \u201cOn Sunday, We Gather in the Post Office,\u201d offers a glimpse into an internal homesick mind scape, \u201cThe post office is closest to home \/ closest to my father\u2019s stomach problems \/ closest to my brother\u2019s school \/\/ on Sunday, we gather in the post office \/ lining up in front of money orders of a month of sweat \/ listening hard talking hard.\u201d His sobering \u201cWork Accident Joint Investigative Report,\u201d recounts \u00a0what people reported about an incident where a worker\u2019s finger was accidentally cut off, \u201cpeople reported after it happened \u00a0 she \/ didn\u2019t cry \u00a0 and didn\u2019t \/ scream \u00a0she just grabbed her finger \/ and left \/\/ When it happened \u00a0 no one \/ was there \u00a0 \u00a0to see it\u201d \u2014 the range, here \u2014 from the slippery to the symbolic to the starkly literal, is a testament to the richness of voice and perspective. The \u201cmigrant laborer poet\u201d is never just that.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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In terms of the translation, the poems themselves don’t heavily play with language (or, at least, that\u2019s not their primary concern. They don\u2019t suspend themselves between cultures in a way that would necessitate experimentation and reinvention. One of the strengths of this collection is that the \u00a0stories of labor are strikingly universal and transferable and the poems in translation deliver the physical and emotional ramifications of the subjects they depict with utilitarian grace. Each poem maintains a distinct voice, a tenor specific to its mission, a testament to effectively translating intention. In Xiangnan\u2019s poem, \u201cProduction, in the Middle of Production, Is Soaked by Production,\u201d \u00a0lines like \u201ca pile of mouths, partly parched,\u201d show an obvious sonic consideration for an emphasis on the P sound, to echo the title, and repetitions of L and R sounds (\u201ca row of footprints, trampling other bodies. scratching\u201d) throughout, show the deliberate choices made in the English translations. In the same poem, lines like \u201cWhen I lightly touch my own hair \/ passing by the truncated street of midnight \/ I discuss paper airplane wings \/ with someone, some fat guy \/ along with his fear\u201d reveal a great deal in translation \u2014 the use of a word like \u201ctruncated\u201d instead of \u201cshortened,\u201d connotes a cramped, crunched feeling, with a deep and heavy sound that then gets juxtaposed with the visual of a light paper airplane (then echoes back with the image of the fat man). This anthology is peppered with resonant choices like this one, which make translators like Eleanor Goodman absolutely essential to bringing forth the humanity and nuance amongst these voices. Her careful and thoughtful translation makes visible, palpable, and distinct, the lives, minds, and hearts of those kept unseen, whose labor we global citizens encounter and engage with on a daily basis.<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This Why This Book Should Win entry is from Raluca Albu, BTBA judge, and editor at both BOMB and Guernica.\u00a0 Iron Moon: An Anthology of Chinese Worker Poetry, translated from the Chinese by Eleanor Goodman (China, White Pine Press) \u201cIron Moon\u201d is an anthology of Chinese migrant \u00a0worker poetry that transports the reader from the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":292,"featured_media":398842,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67476],"tags":[35996,66446,49386,37876],"class_list":["post-398832","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-best-translated-book-awards","tag-btba","tag-btba-2018","tag-btba-poetry","tag-why-this-book-should-win"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/398832","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/292"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=398832"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/398832\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":398892,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/398832\/revisions\/398892"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/398842"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=398832"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=398832"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=398832"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}