A Summer Day in the Company of Ghosts

Written between 1981 (when the poet was 19) and 2021, the poems in A Summer Day in the Company of Ghosts, by Wang Yin, translated by Andrea Lingenfelter, reflect 40 years of the Shanghai poet’s commitment to the always fragile power that poetry possesses to tell one’s truth in modern China. The speaker in “Paper Man” (1987) is clearly a writer, someone who can say, “What I have is paper / to make anything I want,” but whose list of creations quickly outstrips reality—“my wife,” “our prosperity”—until he arrives at the problematic ability to fashion “expressions / easily ripped to shreds.” 

In contemporary Chinese poetry the emphasis on personal expression has been a mark of artistic integrity, a way of granting power to subjective realms that the state can’t or shouldn’t control. If Wang learned from the previous generation of Chinese poets, 朦胧诗人 or “Misty Poets,” the importance of moving away from the stilted public face of art during the Cultural Revolution, his poetry didn’t avoid grim political truths after the Tian’anmen Square Massacre, as in “To Say More Would Be Risky”:

Speak, hold onto your irreplaceable hatred 
Use this hand to conquer
the other equally fierce one

A coin tossed into the air must have two sides 
Dear friend, to say more would be risky
To speak the truth, that would be death

Wang’s recent work shows an even deeper commitment to uncovering paradoxical aspects of consciousness and experience, finding something tonic by embracing “the beauty of frozen days / the blight of mild climes.” Variously contemplative, satirical, cosmopolitan, and melancholy, Wang is alert to the gainful surprise of contradiction, as in “A Brief History of Love”:

You need to like it when sadness prevails over joy 
and when you’re not in Shanghai you have to return 
You need to forget to take your medications
It’s only forgetting that lets you remember

It’s like being face to face
with a lighthouse that flashes without warning