Prominent Chinese expatriate poet Xue Di presented an array of his Chinese-language poems in his native tongue, followed by English-language translations before a small crowd at the McCormack Family Theater Wednesday evening.
Xue Di, a visiting scholar in the Department of English, came to the University as a Freedom to Write Fellow after the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre in China. He has received numerous accolades, including the Lannan Foundation Residency Fellowship.
Wednesday's reading included excerpts from his poetry collections "Another Kind of Tenderness" and "Cat's Eye in a Splintered Mirror," among others. The reading, which lasted less than an hour, featured Xue Di reciting his poetry in Chinese followed by English translations from Professor of Comparative Literature Forrest Gander.
"It almost feels like a profanity to read the English after the Chinese," Gander joked to the crowd.
Nostalgia and longing were common themes in some of his poetry. This was particularly evident in a poem titled "Best Friends." "Longing for old loves, peeling oranges ... disgusted with my sodden sex life, like someone who had lost his sweet tooth," Gander recited.
"I see my youth chasing its tail," he continued.
Xue Di provided background for many of his poems, placing them within the context of his recent experiences. He described one particular artist residency in the Santa Cruz, Calif., area, where he responded to bothersome howling coyotes by howling back.
"I did that a couple times, and the coyotes ran off," he told the audience, eliciting laughter from the group. "I possibly did something to the environment and freaked the coyotes out."
Gander also provided his view on Xue Di's poetic style, describing the poem "Which," as "sort of Xue Di as Pablo Neruda."
The poem beckoned to the audience, asking for their thoughts on the human condition: "Do you love its rigid, infinite suffering?"
Xue Di explained how he often takes up artist residencies in U.S. national parks, many of which provide support for writers.
"Generally, though, you have to bring your own food," he added.
He described one close-call in a national park in Arkansas. Walking with an off-duty park ranger one day, he saw two black bears "about 10 feet away."
"We slowly got together and made ourselves large. We were lucky the black bear wasn't looking for dinner or lunch, but dessert," he said of the experience.
Many of Xue Di's poems deal with ideas of loneliness in an alien land. One poem, "Seven Years," describes "walking on broken glass" in "a city whose dialect I don't speak," Gander recited.
His final poem, "Hotel Viking," compared his experience staying at an American hotel to the experiences of some in China. "In my homeland, some valuable persons are disappearing," recited Gander.
Before reading the final poem in Chinese, Xue Di explained the significance of hotels in his life.
When traveling in China before coming to the United States, he always stayed with friends and acquaintances in new cities, he said. "To stay in a hotel was one of my big dreams," he said.
He described his first experience in an American hotel, where he was told to remain in his room, as his English-language skills were limited. Unable to operate the thermostat or watch television, Xue Di created his own entertainment before falling asleep.
"I jumped from one bed to the other. I was jumping between the beds and screaming 'capitalism.'"
