Book Review: Grass Roots by Xiang Yang, translated by John Balcom

Grass Roots
Poems by Xiang Yang, translated by John Balcom
Zephyr Press, December 2014
ISBN-13: 978-1938890079
$15.00, 144 pp.
Reviewed by Tim Lantz

Grass Roots, Xiang Yang’s first poetry collection in English, is a selection ranging nearly thirty years. In his work lie the influences of classical Chinese verse. The final quintet in “Mountain Moon,” for instance, reads like Qu Yuan’s “Li sao” (“Sorrow at Parting”):

There is a sadness that has nothing to do with departure
I quietly comb my hair disheveled by the wind
And can only say
Since I entered the wilds alone on the wing
You have been the overarching sky, dissipating

John Balcom’s translations show risk and pay off. We can see such success in “Nine to Five,” a complaint about a tough job with a capricious boss. Where Xiang Yang narrates in third person, Balcom uses first and the general “you,” making the poem even more conversational. Xiang Yang’s last line could be translated more or less as “The sun sees people whose feet and hands are already lazy.” But Balcom breaks the line, smoothing the English into heart-to-heart: “When the sun comes up / you’re ready for bed.”

These changes, although seemingly drastic, actually adhere to the collection’s modern vernacular. After all, Xiang Yang writes not in mainland Mandarin but in Min Chinese. The resulting combination of everyday language with formal rules underlies the palimpsestic place and time within these poems: Taiwan throughout its development. Take, for example, “Discovering ◻◻”:

◻◻ The Portuguese sailors called her Formosa
◻◻ the Dutch bestowed the name Zeelandia on her
◻◻ Zheng Chenggong filled in “Peace, the capital of Ming”
◻◻ the Qing established a prefecture subordinate to Fujian Province
◻◻ a people abandoned established a republic
◻◻ Japan transplanted “Great Japan” here
◻◻ now she is said to be an inseparable part of China
Among so many signifiers

Here empty boxes replace Taiwan, as though its identity were always up to whoever named the island last. It’s tempting to read the boxes as Unicode stand-ins for missing characters. “◻◻ waits quietly to be filled in.” Considering recent news of Taiwan’s relationship with China and the election of Tsai Ing-wen, Grass Roots serves as an important view of life in Taiwan.

Tim Lantz is the nonfiction editor for Beecher’s. His website is timlantz.com.