On the poet Nan Ren

Dear poetry fans,

Two weeks ago, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung published my article on the poet Nan Ren 南人 (scroll to p. 5; there are a few minor mistakes in the German article, I couldn’t see the final print version before it came out: the first poem has one line added; and Shaanxi became Shanxi). I have decided to write a version in English to post here. This is a newspaper article, so there are no footnotes. The reference to Maghiel van Crevel was not included in the print version. I have thought about many names of other poets I should have mentioned, and other things I should have said. Anyway, such a publication in a major daily in Germany is a big success, a big deal in international exposure for current Chinese poetry. I hope you like it. Please send feedback via email, thank you!

Martin Winter <dujuan99@gmail.com>

Sources: Here is a link to the poems in the article including the original Chinese versions. And here are the paintings by Huang Li 黄丽 that accompany the poems in the book. The pictures look much better in the book. Nan Ren has sent them to me in high resolution. He and Xiron have authorized me to look for publishers in Europe and beyond. I hope to find publishers for the German speaking and for the English speaking Pawnshop. Here is a link to about 50 poems in Chinese with some translations in English or German. Here is a link to the announcement from last May, when the book was published in China. The publisher is Xiron Poetry Club, 磨铁读诗会. Xiron is a big publisher, led by the poet Shen Haobo 沈浩波. But Xiron is private and has to purchase an ISBN for each book from a state publisher. The state publisher is on the cover, Xiron Poetry Club is on the first page. Both have to avoid publishing anything that could get the book pulled or forbidden.

IN A PAWNSHOP OF PAIN
By Martin Winter

Nan Ren is a legend. He doesn’t like to say when he was born. 1970, found that somewhere. Not important. Nan Ren is a pen name. The nán of ‘south‘ and the rén of ‘person‘. What does that mean? His family comes from the south, somewhere south of the Long River, the Yangtse. Nanren, southern people, was the lowest stratum in the Mongol empire. The Mongols captured the south last, all the better jobs had been assigned to other people already. Almost every poet writing in Chinese has a pen name. People have more than one name in Chinese, even non-artists. It was that way in Confucius‘ times. And in the occident, in the antique, people also had several names, at least prominent people, all the way from Homer.

Nan Ren founded a legendary poetry platform on the Internet in the year 2000, wenxue2000.com. It is still online. The Chinese name is Shi Jianghu 诗江湖, i.e. poetry Jianghu, or rivers and lakes of poetry. Rivers and lakes, that means a knight-errant realm. Knight-errant kingdom of poetry. Doesn’t sound very outlandish in Chinese, not for poetry lovers. Shi Jianghu was a major haven for the budding Lower Body poetry scene. Shen Haobo 沈浩波 was there, now he is also a major publisher. The female poets Yin Lichuan 尹丽川 and Chun Sue 椿树, among others. Aside from the Lower Body group, there were many kou yu shi 口语诗 poets, adherents of co-called colloquial poetry. Yi Sha 伊沙 from Xi’an. Zhu Jian 朱剑 and Xidu Heshang 西毒何殇, then very young poets from Xi’an.

Maghiel van Crevel of Leiden University and other scholars can direct you further into current Chinese poetry. This is just a newspaper article.

Lower Body poetry, xia ban shen shi 下半身诗. Xia ban shen is the lower half of the body. The group came into prominence around the year 2000. Shen Haobo and Yin Lichuan were the most famous male and female members. It wasn’t just about sex and related diseases. But a famous poem by Shen Haobo from that time, for example, was Yi Ba Hao Ru 一把好乳, literally ‘a good handful of breast‘. You couldn’t publish that just anywhere, and the internet wasn’t as developed and rigidly controlled asnowadays. Maybe this state of affars was the main reason that so many different voices came together on Nan Ren’s platform wenxue2000.com.

Pawnshop of Pain 痛苦典当行 is the new book of poetry by Nan Ren, illustrated with paintings by Huang Li 黄丽. The book came out last May from Xiron, 磨铁 in Chinese, the publishing company led by Shen Haobo in Beijing. Some of Huang Li’s pictures remind me of Magritte. A few are rather scary. Not all of them could be included in print.

Nan Ren
SHEPHERD

I am a wolf leading a flock of sheep.
Long ago I ate up their forebears,
because of that sin
I have to adopt this poor flock.
On the green grassland, eyes getting feeble,
I hold on to my staff,
walking into the setting sun.

Tr. MW in 2024

The hero walks into the sunset. Is it a hero? Yes and no, I guess. A wold leading a flock of sheep. What does it mean? Ich weiß nicht, was soll es bedeuten, dass ich so traurig bin. I am so sad, I don’t know what it means. Loreley, a famous song by Heinrich Heine. I don’t know what the wolf means in Nan Ren’s poem. It’s just a song. A simple, rather uncanny song. Most of Nan Ren’s poems are short, just a few lines. Pawnshop of Pain, the title song, is a bit longer.

Nan Ren
THOSE CHILDREN WHO DIED

Their graves are too small,
so small,
the wind blows a few times, they are gone.
So small,
grown-ups mumble a little until they forget.

These
short, short lives.
These
small, small ghosts.

Tr. MW in 2024

These small, small ghosts. Also a rather simple poem. It could make you think of one or another disaster when children died. Are there memorial days for them? Manypoems in this book are concerned with death, sickness and pain. Once there is a concrete number, 20 billion yuan. Airline tickets for 20 billion yuan had been canceled already in the first half of 2020, at the beginning of the pandemic.

Nan Ren
20 BILLION YUAN

An official from the civil aviation board said,
because of the virus,
they reimbursed tickets
for over 20 billion yuan.

All these banknotes should fly in the sky,
now they are down in the dust,
they change into rice, pasta and oil,
change into water fee, electricity fee, gas fee,
change into masks, toilet paper, 84-disinfectant

Some even change into
hospital admittance fee, medicine expense, funeral costs.
From now on they’ll never fly anymore.

Tr. MW, 2020-2024

Hospital costs, medicine costs. Daily worries. No grand pathos. Typical for kouyu shi, colloquial poetry. It has been around since the early 1980s. Han Dong 韩东 and Yu Jian 于are the most prominent early adherents. Yi Sha and the other poets from Xi’an mentioned before also belong to this camp. Lower Body poetry came out of it. Chun Sue, who lives in Berlin now, knows Nan Ren since the year 2000, when he founded wenxue2000.com. But she says she doesn’t know his real name. Or where heworks for a living. It is a company that has nothing to do with art and culture. Something technical. Maybe computers.

The title poem comes only in the third part of the book. This part is called Digital Twin. Something with technology alright! There is a poem called Digital Twin. But before that comes the history of mankind.

Nan Ren
HUMAN HISTORY

Human evolution
begins with walking upright, chest puffed up.

Human civilization
begins with a few fig leaves.

Human history
is nothing more than
a few people tearing off other people’s fig leaves,
a few people pushing other people back down in the dirt.

Tr. MW in 2023

Why pay the hospital’s registration fee in this scenario? Maybe because concrete living details are rather sparse in many history books. But I don’t want to interpret these poems, maybe just associate something here or there.

Nan Ren
PAWNSHOP OF PAIN

I open a pawnshop
that takes only pain,
because I believe
pain is worth money.

I open up,
people crowd in like on a market.
They put down their pain,
to go out the door with white gleaming silver.

On the second day,
people discover a secret.
Once they have pawned all of their pain
and go out the door, they fly up in the air.
They float and cannot come down to earth,
because they have no shadow down there.

Those who have pawned half of their pain
cannot walk straight anymore.
They cannot stand on their heels,
their shadows are not always there.
And so people mistake them for ghosts.

Those who pawned a little bit of pain
have sometimes a headache,
sometimes a fast heart.
They often fall down,
their shadows change between bright and dark.

On the third day
my shop is a crowded market again.
The people who pawned their pain
and then felt double the pain from before
they now pay me double
to take it back
to get back the pain
they felt in the first place.

Tr. MW in May 2023

The city of Huangshan in Anhui province shows in its main museum a rebuilt pawnshop from the Song dynasty. Merchants from this province were a well-known presence all over the country back then, about a thousand years ago from now, even before the Mongol empire. The merchants moved along the rivers, lakes and canals, and whereever they came to, they established pawnshops.

Pain is worth money, who would say that? Someone from a pharma company? Here it is in a poem, at the beginning. And at the end, profits have doubled: “ The people who pawned their pain and then felt double the pain from before, they now pay me double

to take it back, to get back the pain they felt in the first place.” What kind of reality is this? Song dynasty or now? The poem doesn’t say.

Nan Ren
ON THE LAKE IN SPRING, TOMB SWEEPING DAY

What you see
are those tourist boats on the lake.

What I see
are floating shoes.

All those lives that drowned in summer,
they stand on their heads,
body under water,
feet raised up high.

Tr. MW in 2024

Who can publish, what gets published? Xiron is a big publisher, not just for poetry. Shen Haobo is the CEO. He also stands for the emphasis on poetry, which is a big deal in China. In the 1980s, poetry used to be more prestigous than novels. Poetry played a prominent role in the protests of 1989. Over 40 years ago, after the Cultural Revolution, there was a Democracy Wall in Beijing. It was tolerated for about one year, 1978-1979.

Nan Ren
TIME IS A TRANSPARENT WALL

Time is a transparent wall.
Dead people are on the other side,
regarding us very carefully,
regarding the photos they left in their years.
The photos are yellowed, faded, stained,
because they have touched them countless times.

These photos they touched countless times,
we also touch them, till they get
yellowed, faded, stained.
Touching, touching
until they suddenly touch our hands,
and in a moment
they pull us across.

Tr. by MW in August 2023

For about one year, the Democracy Wall enabled free expression, independent voices, also in art and literature. The poet Huang Xiang 黄翔 and his friends came from Guizhou in the far south, they stuck up 60 metres of posters. Huang Xiang lives in exile now, in the US. The most famous group of poets and artists from the time of Democracy Wall founded the magazine Jintian 今天 (Today). One of them was Yang Lian 杨炼, who lives in Berlin now.

I spoke with Yang Lian in Vienna in November after a reading. He said he wanted to publish a book with Xiron in China. But it didn’t come out, mainly for censorship reasons. In late February 2022, after Russia’s invasion in Ukraine, Yang Lian wrote a poem that spoke of this war, and also about women sold and enslaved in China. In late January 2022, a woman who had been held on a chain was discovered on the Internet. She had been raped over years to produce at least eight children.

This chained woman and the war in Ukraine were among the topics discussed most often and widely in China in the first half of 2022, despite censorship. Aside from the war and enslaved women, the biggest topic was the ongoing lockdowns, at a time when the pandemic was over in most other countries. Shanghai was a huge prison in the middle of 2022.

How can you speak of such things? Yang Lian published a book in Germany. Unfortunately it’s only in German, I think it should be bilingual, like many other books of Chinese poetry that have been published abroad. Some poems in the book were translated from Chinese. The poem about the war in Ukraine and the chained woman in China was translated by Jan Wagner, maybe Germany’s most famous poet, from English.

Nan Ren
WHAT POETS WRITE

You can write about wounds for a long time.
Once wounds are healing, you write about scars.

But pain
Is right now.

Tr. MW in 2024

This poem was written in late June in 2019, before the pandemic. 1979, 40 years before, wounds and scars were buzzwords for literature and reportage in China. In 1979, in the early 1980s and later, people held high hopes for art and literature affecting society. Such hopes were expressed both officially and unofficially, in many kinds of cultural circles.

Nan Ren
SHAANXI OPERA

A woman from Xianyang who works in Beijing,
says many singers of Shaanxi opera in her village
have all died these past few years.
Some in road accidents,
some hanged themselves.
They sing about people who die,
they go on singing and grow shadows clinging,
until no-one is left,
nobody there dares to sing anymore.

I say,
maybe it is that they sing so well,
people love it,
ghosts love it too.

She nods forcefully,
goes on to exclaim,
the woman who was the best singer,
she was the most beautiful one in the village.
We often heard them fighting at home.
In the end she also sang herself to death.
What she sang was real,
her tears were real too.

Tr. MW, Feb. 2024

What is poetry? Shen Haobo gave a speech on this topic in late January 2024 at a big anual gathering of Xiron Poetry Club in Beijing. He quoted three poems. The first one was written by the young female author Fang Miaohong. A phone call, the end of a relationship, a body or the ashes are mourned. Colloquial poetry talks about such things in a very direct way. The second poem is by Shen Haobo himself. It is about killing hogs and cooking pork in Canton or Guangzhou, the big southern province capital near Hong Kong. The third poem in Shen Haobo’s speech is from the Book of Songs, the Shi Jing 诗经. The Shi Jing is the oldest book of poetry in China, many songs in there are thought to be about 3000 years old. Shen Haobo quotes a poem about collecting herbs. A work song. What is poetry? Maybe there are as many answers as there are people who read and write. Probably more. Nan Ren has a few  profitable answers in his Pawnshop.