The Gleaner Song

“Should our homeland be not barbaric, there would be no more wanderers,” writes Chinese poet Song Lin in “Near,” which appears in The Gleaner Song, the first book of his poetry to appear in English. Imprisoned and exiled after the Tiananmen Square massacre, Song was a wanderer on three continents before being permitted back in China. These selected poems, translated by Dong Li, are variously surreal, associative, and plain-spoken, and range from tropes reminiscent of classical Chinese poetry, like visiting a far-flung friend only to find him away, to sketches of the great poets of totalitarianism—Mandelstam, Celan, Miłosz—interpreted for Chinese audiences, to hybrid cultural experiences, as on a La Plata ferry, where Song contemplates Confucius and Heraclitus. 

Behind it all, exile is the main perspective and condition: “Dear poet, pour your exiled voice into the long-forgotten cranial cavity […].” In France, his young son says the French word for “blueberry,” but doesn’t know “the origin of his Chinese name.” In Argentina, Song turns an exile’s immersion in a foreign culture into the gift of imagining Jorge Luis Borges imagining China:

A bronze doorknob in Buenos Aires calls out to
another bronze doorknob in a Shikumen from Shanghai.

If the exile’s original crime—protesting against a cruel and corrupt state—is three decades old, the poet recounts how “[l]ightning-fast flames from the machine guns / kissed every tender face.” The horror of what happened doesn’t prevent him from being frank about present-day corruptions: “In the noise of greed, the giant dragon that symbolizes our race becomes tamed by ever-greater greed.” Throughout his career, as The Gleaner Song attests, Song Lin has sustained a courageous clarity about poetry: 

So we must watch out for the nameless, 
for the long lost, for those who belong to greater traditions 
that move at a farther place, who are covered in light – 
truth, accurate as glass, 
is suddenly handed to us.