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PARTISAN REVIEW
state, most adopt the voice of the half-heartedly patriotic citizen caught
up in the dehumanizing machinery of the Cultural Revolution. That
voice is given surprising range, yet finally it cannot rise above historical
irony. To complain of this limitation is to complain of the history that
forced it on Ha Jin. Clearly he knows that his poetry is being constrained
by its subject; yet he also knows that to speak at all is a privilege to be
used wisely. A poem forebodingly entitled "Because I Will Be Silenced"
ends with a poignant question: "How can I speak about coffee and
flowers?" Still tied to his own country emotionally and politically, Jin
cannot afford to waste the opportunity his stay in American affords. To
write about coffee and flowers, pleasure and beauty, might better please
the authorities in Beijing but would not fulfill his avowed purpose, to
speak for those who cannot, like the person addressed in "A Photograph
from China":
At our last dinner you told me
you had delayed so long to go back
because you could not shut your mouth.
The photograph you sent me
shows how happy you are back
with your wife and kids.
Behind you the winding paths
look the same on the Small-Monk Mountain.
It
is so tranquil.
Still, I am worried
about your smiling mouth.
Of the three poets, Jin is most fully immersed in the history of which
he writes, hence he is most willing to make his art subservient to the de–
mands of that history. But in their clarity, restraint, mingled empathy and
ironic distance, his poems find ways to be true to the demands of art as
well. The negotiation is a complex,
ad hoc
one for each of these poets, all
of whom try to reconcile the aesthetic dimensions oflyric poetry with the
ethical stances history forces on them. Espada's fierce gesturing, Mura's
obsessive descriptions, Jin's calm, steady speech represent alternative an–
swers to a question poetry asks itself over and over, the question of human
pain and how it can be addressed in an art so intimately linked with
pleasure.
ROGER GILBERT
