On Translating Ye Hui

I got to know the Chinese poet Ye Hui when I stayed with him at his house in a village near Nanjing. He built the house himself and called it “the villa of showers.” I thought the brief fall of soft rain might indicate his poetic ideal. As I buried my eyes in his three slim volumes of poems on the open terrace overlooking the Gucheng Lake, I realized it was the hushed intensity before the showers and the long aftertaste of their release that seemed a better description for his poetic inclination. Then I shivered and looked up. The lake had turned into a fog. And my clothes were already wet.

I have come to see Ye Hui as a metaphysical poet of myths and mysteries. An architect by day, he builds houses that keep an ancient Yangtze Delta culture from giving way to capitalist ambitions and ruins. Each beam has a story to tell; every brick is memory itself. A poet by night, he weaves fine filaments out of his architectural vision into potent poems that exude mythical ambiguities and become portals for transformation. In the poem “The Connection,” “Lentils and morning glories/Emit a faint smell of rain,” suggestive of their shared provenance, which Ye Hui further projects into “a prophecy/On life in the days to come.” Inside his poetic constructions, concentric elements are made contemporaneous in their crossings. In the poem “The Witch,” a brief line from the village witch opens up a meditation on seeing, as the singular addressee “you” multiplies to the plural “all your eyes” where “[a] fog gathers generations.” Beam by beam, brick on brick, between remembrance and oblivion, Ye Hui bridges the fundamental separation of all things. Here we have a witch poet of the metaphysical kind that walks backward into the future, an architect of poetic spaces that enlarge our perception, a poetry in a uniquely Chinese sensibility that stays resolutely open, contemporary, and prophetic. Here’s a poetics that collects and connects and ultimately reveals the recurring reality of being one and mysteriously everything.