June Fourth Elegies
by Liu Xiaobo
Jonathan Cape
Most poetry is to some degree about experience. Much of it, however, filters experience in such a way as to partially or wholly uncouple itself from events. Often, as a result, 'what' it may be about seems secondary to the 'how' it goes about providing meaning.
Liu Xiaobo is not beyond using metaphor or (nightmarish) dream-reality to say things pointedly, but his work is not of an abstract mould. There can be no misapprehension about the subject matter in his collected June Fourth Elegies. These poems, written every year since 1990 to mark the anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests in Beijing and the bloody crackdown on hundreds if not thousands of civilians under martial law, are an act of remembrance and an explicit response to events which have left a dark shadow on Liu's life and on China as a whole.
'Of such poetry it is profoundly apparent how impossible it is to contrive the live sparks of experience through which an aesthetic arises.' This is how, in his afterword, Jeffrey Yang - the translator of Liu's poetry into English for the first time - assesses the poet's sensibilities as a writer. And in his 1992 offering, Suffocating City Square, in which he describes an unnamed woman being mown down by gunfire, Liu seems to acknowledge that the poetic form is unequal to the task of rendering events whose horror, scarred in his memory, speak for themselves. 'The death-cast girl', he concludes, 'has become a line of pure poetry/That surrenders all ideograms'.
The translations come somewhat late in the day. Better known as a literary critic and campaigner for human rights, Liu has long railed against the nation's collective amnesia about 1989, but he too is a victim of the government's efforts at forgetting and containing the legacy of the crackdown. It is said most people on the mainland have not heard of him, even after he became the only Chinese to have won a Nobel Prize, in 2010, for 'his long and non-violent struggle for fundamental human rights'.
Yang, a US-based poet, publisher and editor, only read these 'elegies' for the first time in 2009. His work, he says, was made all the harder for not being able to consult with Liu, who is serving an 11-year prison sentence for 'inciting subversion of state power', having been involved in drafting the 2008 'Charter 08' manifesto, a blueprint for democracy and basic freedoms. He couldn't even contact Liu's wife, Liu Xia, who is under house arrest.