In the Native Place of Laozi

Wang Jiaxin
Translated from the Chinese by John Balcom

Legend has it that Laozi was born an old man
Laozi had no childhood

No one but Confucius, who asked him about the rites
Knew who Laozi was

We climbed to Laojuntai, high up and precipitous 
Twenty-five hundred years later

Living in troubled times, he went to Hangu Pass
Where he paid his ‘toll’ in full and left

Some say he became a crane
Others say he’s held up in Denmark to this day—

Like Bertolt Brecht, listening to the howl
Of his old country over the radio* 

While using a pen of no use to write
In his fortunate journal of exile

                                           May 2019
                                          Henan, Luyi, Zhoukou

*Bertolt Brecht was a German poet and dramatist. After the Nazi seizure of power, he went into exile. While in Denmark, he wrote the poem, “Legend of the Origin of the Book Tao Te Ching on Laotze’s Road into Exile.”

 

在老子故里 
                                                   王家新

传说老子一生下来就老了
老子没有童年

除了孔子前来问礼
无人知道老子是谁

我们登上陡峭、孤拔的老君台
已是在二千五百年之后

生逢乱世，行至函谷关
他交完他的“税”就走了

有人说他化为一只鹤
也有人说他至今仍滞留在丹麦——

像布莱希特那样，一边听着
从收音机传来的故国的嚎叫声

一边用一支无用之笔
写下他幸福的流亡日记。

                                              2019，5，河南周口鹿邑 

*布莱希特，德国诗人、戏剧家，上个世纪三十年代纳粹掌权后
流亡国外，在丹麦流亡期间曾写有《老子出关途中著<道德经>
之传奇》一诗。

Feature Date

Series

  • Translation, What Sparks Poetry

Selected By

Share This Poem

Print This Poem

Color headshot of Chines poet, Wang Jiaxin
Photo:
Hu Win

Wang Jiaxin is a Chinese poet, essayist, translator, and professor emeritus at Renmin University of China. He is the author of over forty volumes of poetry, essays and translations. His work has had an important influence on contemporary Chinese poetry and has been translated into many languages. His first collection of poems in English was Darkening Mirror (2017), translated by Diana Shi and George O’Connell, with a foreword by former US Poet Laureate Robert Hass. In recent years, following his retirement, he primarily resides in New York. Wang Jiaxin has been invited to lecture, give readings, and serve as a poet-in-residence at numerous universities, poetry festivals, and literary institutions across the United States, Canada, and Europe. His work has appeared in more than a dozen American journals, including American Poetry Review, American Poets, The Kenyon Review, Washington Square Review and The Hopkins Review. His second collection of poems in English, At the Same Time (Arrowsmith, 2025), was selected by World Literature Today as one of the 75 notable translations of 2025 and was longlisted for the 2026 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. His latest poetry collection, Marginalia: 2016–2025, was published by Phoenix Literature and Art Publishing House in China.

color headshot of translator Joh Balcom

John Balcom is Professor Emeritus at the Monterey Institute of International Studies at Monterey. He is an award-winning translator of poetry, fiction, memoir, philosophy, and children’s writing. Among his translations are individual collections of poetry by Lo Fu, Ya Hsien, Shang Qin, Wu Sheng, Xiang Yang, and Lin Hengtai. In addition to regularly teaching literary translation at Middlebury, he has also taught at the British Centre for Literary Translation Summer School and the Bread Loaf Translators’ Conference. He is a past president of the American Literary Translators Association.

Cover image for Wang Jiaxin's collection, At the SAme Time: New and Collected Poems

BOOKSHOP

PUBLISHER

At the Same Time: New and Selected Poems
Arrowsmith Press

Medford, Massachusetts

  • Featured book

Wang Jiaxin is a major voice in contemporary world poetry. Intimate, historical, and ruminative, the poems in his latest collection, At the Same Time, invite readers into a space of multiple cultural convergences as East and West engage in a luminous poetic dialogue. Weaving together themes of memory and exile, Wang’s meditations find solace in the company of such disparate literary figures as Du Fu and Anna Akhmatova, carrying readers to far flung places, from Santorini to Long Island. Nuanced and attentive to the weight of history, they celebrate the heroism of lyric resistance while marking the transient beauty of the mundane. Impeccably rendered by John Balcom, the poems both valorize and question the literary enterprise. Writing about the American poet Hart Crane, Wang asks: “But in the end, what did you save?”

“In these compressed lyric poems, in poem after poem, I felt that flash of perception, that transformation of the literal into the revealed, even the metaphysical. And the startlement of recognizing, oh! Here’s evidence of intelligent life on earth.”
— Rosanna Warren

“Wang Jiaxin’s many dialogs with the great poets and philosophers carry his own distinctive vision, perspective, compassion, and authority: a bedrock looking and saying. A world poet comes into English in these powerful poems’ translations.”
— Jane Hirshfield

Poetry Daily Depends on You

With your support, we make reading the best contemporary poetry a treasured daily experience. Consider a contribution today.

DONATE NOW