“Poetry of Anguish, Poetry of Praise”: A Study of Wang Jiaxin’s Poetry and Translation

The representation of trauma in contemporary Chinese poetry is a complex and multilayered phenomenon that resists purely aesthetic, historical, and especially political readings. It conflates all of them. Among the poets that have exemplified remarkable perseverance in their exploration of personal and collective traumas over the past four decades, Wang Jiaxin (王家新, 1957–) is an important voice. This article studies the characteristics of Wang’s earlier and later works and the subtilities of his translation-dialogues with primarily Soviet Russian and Eastern European poets. What is the relationship between poetry and translation in working through suffering and coming to terms with the suppressed memories of the past? How does translation render the mourning voice of a poet that is cosmopolitan yet has historical particularities? Situating the poet in the sociohistorical conditions of his time, this paper explores the vicissitudes of one voice against these larger issues.