The poet Jenny Xie was exploring the library stacks at the Shanghai campus of N.Y.U., where she was on a fellowship, when a book with a bright red cover caught her eye. In it, she found hundreds of photos of China’s Cultural Revolution.

在上海纽约大学任教的诗人珍妮·谢在学校图书馆里搜寻着，一本鲜红色封面的书引起她的注意。她在里面找到了数百张中国文化大革命的照片。

The images, taken by Li Zhensheng during the dramatic, often violent period of upheaval that gripped China between 1966 and 1976, had been clandestinely preserved until their U.S. publication. Xie devoured the book in one sitting.

这些照片由李振盛拍摄，记录了1966年到1976年那段戏剧性的、时有暴力发生的动乱时期，照片一直被秘密保存着，直至在美国出版。珍妮·谢坐下来，一口气把整本书看完。

Born in Anhui Province, in eastern China, she had moved to the United States to join her parents when she was around 4 years old. The photographs, she said, provided a window into a past shared by generations of Chinese people, including many in her family, and of which she’d seen little visual documentation.

珍妮·谢出生于中国东部的安徽省，四岁左右前往美国与父母团聚。她说这些照片成了几代中国人共同的看向过去的窗口，其中包括她自己的家人，她很少能找到这方面的视觉文献。

“Suddenly, there is this opening into the past of people I love,” Xie said recently in a garden in Greenwich Village. The photography, she said, “made me think about how deeply strange it was that I have no visual understanding of what so many people in my family lived through.”

“突然之间，我有机会看到我爱的人的过去，”珍妮·谢近日在格林尼治村一座花园里接受采访时说道。她说照片“让我意识到，我对家族中这么多人的人生经历没有视觉上的了解，这是多么奇怪的一件事。”

The connection she felt with the images reverberated. Xie is a sight-oriented poet. Her debut collection, titled “Eye Level,” won the 2017 Walt Whitman Award and is a feast of scenery: Phnom Penh’s rain-slicked tin roofs, Corfu’s white sailboats lining up like “grains of rice.” It is also preoccupied with the ethics of seeing: a viewfinder “slices the horizon,” a camera “neuters the present” and to bestow one’s gaze is to spend “a soft currency.”

她感受到的与这些影像的联系产生了回响。珍妮·谢是一位视觉导向的诗人。她的首部诗集《视线高度》赢得了2017年沃尔特·惠特曼奖，是一部风景的盛宴：雨水冲刷的金边马口铁屋顶，像“米粒一样”排列的科孚岛帆船。同时她的诗又专注于观看的伦理：取景器会“切割地平线”，照相机“阉割当下”，献出一个人的凝视就像是在花费“一种软性货币”。

Not long after Xie returned to New York, the pandemic started. Cloistered in her apartment, she returned to Li’s photos often — her own copy of the book became a sort of a portal, she said, connecting the past to the present.

珍妮·谢回纽约后不久，疫情就开始了。她把自己关在公寓里，经常看李振盛的照片——她说，她手中的这本书就像一种传送门，把过去和现在连接起来。

Looking at scenes in which people considered “class enemies” were humiliated and sometimes tortured in front of an audience, known as “struggle sessions,” she’d focus on specific people in the crowd and wonder what had happened to them. Over time, this obsession, along with snippets of her 2019 stay in China and other memories, became fodder for a new collection, “The Rupture Tense,” to be released by Graywolf on Tuesday and already on the longlist for the National Book Award for poetry.

看着那些被认为是“阶级敌人”的人被“批斗”，也就是当众被羞辱，有时被折磨的场景，她会关注人群中的特定人物，想知道他们的遭遇。随着时间的推移，这种痴迷以及她2019年在中国逗留期间的片段和其他记忆，成为了她的新诗集《破裂时态》(The Rupture Tense)的素材。该书将于周二由格雷沃尔夫出版社出版，已进入了美国国家图书奖诗歌奖的大名单。

In the book, the poet not only peeks at her family’s past and their country’s history, but also explores the subversive power to be found in examining what has been concealed or overlooked: Li’s long-hidden archive, the older generations’ silence about the past, and the unexamined trauma that goes on shaping how family members relate to one another.

在这本书中，诗人不仅窥视了家族的过去和国家的历史，还探索了审视那些被掩盖或忽视的事物时所能发现的颠覆性力量：李振盛被长期隐藏的档案资料，老一辈人对过去的沉默，以及一直在影响家庭成员关系的那些未被审视的创伤。

Nearly half a century after the end of the Cultural Revolution, discussion of the period is still largely muffled in public and private spaces in China. Overseas, however, the works of documentarians and novelists, such as Yang Jisheng (who, like Li, was a state news reporter) and Ma Jian, preserve the records and explore the legacy of the era.

在“文革”结束近半个世纪后，在中国的公共和私人空间，对那段时期的讨论仍然很大程度上受到压制。然而，在海外，纪录片导演和小说家的作品保存了记录，探索了那个时代的遗产，比如杨继绳（他和李振盛一样，是国家媒体记者）和马建的作品。

“The Cultural Revolution was like a surreal nightmare. It’s a wake-up call today to read Jenny Xie,” the poet and novelist Qiu Xiaolong, who was a teenager in Shanghai during the Cultural Revolution, wrote in an email. “In poetics, she chooses a uniquely working form, controlled language, to mold these inhuman experiences into an organic whole.”

“文化大革命就像一场超现实的噩梦。今天读珍妮·谢的诗是一个警钟，”诗人、小说家裘小龙在电子邮件中写道。文革期间，裘小龙在上海度过了青少年时光。“在诗学上，她选择了一种独特的工作形式，克制的语言，把这些非人的经历塑造成一个有机的整体。”

Xie is not the only one who stares into this abyss, but her processing of the experience is particularly evocative. Xie’s lines have an unmooring effect: She slyly dissects images and concepts, rearranging the landmarks of the mind. Tracy K. Smith, who taught Xie more than a decade ago, appreciates her deftness.

珍妮·谢不是唯一凝视这一深渊的人，但她对这段经历的处理格外能唤起记忆。珍妮·谢的诗句有一种脱离束缚的效果：她狡黠地剖析影像和概念，重新排列思维的地标。十多年前教过她的特蕾西·史密斯很欣赏她的机敏。

“It is a marvelous and subtle use of metaphor that does the emotional or even the spiritual work in her poems,” Smith wrote in an email. “Metaphor bears witness to the feeling that the tools and terms we have been taught to rely upon are never enough.”

“在她的诗歌中，对隐喻奇妙而细微的运用发挥了情感甚至精神上的作用，”史密斯在电子邮件中写道。“隐喻见证了一种感觉：我们被教导需要依赖的工具和术语永远都是不够的。”

The four sections of “The Rupture Tense” oscillate between the past and the present. In the first section, a handful of short poems focus on Li’s photographs; the blocks of text, confined on the page, appear like epigraphs. The brutalization described varies: At a “struggle session,” “a man’s character, stripped down to what he owns, yields to plain sight”; at one winter execution, there are “eight stripped trees matching eight individuals on their knees.”

《破裂时态》的四个部分在过去和现在之间摇摆。在第一部分，几首短诗集中描述李振盛的摄影作品；被限制在页面中的文字，看起来像是碑文。描写中的残酷程度各不相同：在“批斗会”上，“一个人的人格，被简化成他所拥有之物，在众目睽睽之下屈服”；在一次冬季的处决中，有“八棵被剥光的树，搭配八个屈膝跪地的人”。

In these photos, Xie looks for such striking, small details, which, she said, “pierce us, that bruise us, that pull us into having an emotional relationship with a photograph.”

在这些照片中，珍妮·谢寻找这些引人注目的小细节，她说，这些细节“刺穿我们，伤害我们，让我们与照片产生情感关系”。

Smith wrote, “Under Jenny’s gaze, the Cultural Revolution, which has always been framed as a phenomenon contained to a specific place and a specific time, shakes free of that framework, revealing itself to be on intimate terms with this place (America) and this time (now).”

史密斯写道:“在珍妮的注视下，一直被框定在特定地点与特定时间的文化大革命挣脱了这个框架，显示出它与这个地方（美国）和这个时间（现在）的密切关系。”

Shortly after Xie was born, her father was accepted into a Ph.D. program in mathematics at Rutgers University. His wife and daughter eventually joined him in New Jersey. Around age 7, Xie became nearsighted. Eyesight has been a source of anxiety in the family, she said; many members have impaired vision and one of Xie’s grandmothers became blind after an ocular hemorrhage.

珍妮·谢出生后不久，她的父亲被罗格斯大学的数学博士项目录取。妻子和女儿最终在新泽西与他会合。珍妮·谢从七岁左右开始近视。她说，视力一直是家庭焦虑的来源；许多家人患有视力受损，珍妮·谢的一位祖母因眼部出血而失明。

“My parents always sort of instilled in me a fear that my vision was imperiled,” she said, “reading in low light, watching TV, these sources of pleasure were always bound up in the fear that I could lose my eyesight.”

“父母总是向我灌输一种恐惧，担心我的视力受损，”她说，“在昏暗的灯光下阅读，看电视，这些快乐的来源总是与我可能失明的恐惧联系在一起。”

Her fascination with physical vision extends to the interpretation of what is seen: She thinks about how a sight is “constructed and enabled and reinforced” by its context.

她对物理视觉的迷恋延伸到对所见事物的解读：她思考视觉是如何被其背景“构建、激活和强化”的。

“There are consequences to how we see, what we see, and also what we allow to remain unseen,” she said.

“我们观看的方式、我们看见的东西，以及我们主动不去看见的东西，都会产生后果，”她说。

A line in one of the opening pages explores the power inherent in seeing and the urge to avert one’s eyes: Speaking of the soon-to-be-executed figures in a pair of photographs taken of the same scene from different angles, she writes: “Close the book, they disappear. Open it and they’re upright again.”

本书开篇几页的一句诗探讨了视觉与生俱来的力量，以及人们想要转移目光的冲动。它是关于不同角度拍摄的同一场景的两张照片，上面是即将被处决的人，“合上书，他们消失了。打开书，他们又站起来。”

When she was growing up, Xie said, stories about this era were a closed book. “A lot of things remained hidden by people who became accustomed to living inside these dense silences.”

珍妮·谢说，成长过程中，关于这个时代的故事是一本不为人知的书。“很多事情都被人们隐藏起来，他们习惯于生活在这些浓郁的沉默之中。”

In 2019, she visited her parents’ hometowns, Hefei and Wuhu, in Anhui. Wuhu is also her birthplace. At 4, when she left, Xie had been too young to have formed a sense of self in this setting, she said. But some sensory impressions rushed back and felt familiar, if not familial.

2019年，她回到父母的家乡安徽省合肥和芜湖。芜湖也是她的出生地。她说，当她四岁离开时，她还太小，在这种环境中还不足以形成自我意识。但一些感觉的印象又涌了回来，即使不像回家，感觉也很熟悉。

An eponymous poem, “The Rupture Tense,” probes the conflicted feelings of a returnee. One childhood memory relived: “tin bowls of braised river snails” and “the needlehead pulls from the shell.” Another recognition: “Cab driver, pointer finger in a pot of Tiger Balm/dabbing on the temples and nasal septum for that sting of wakefulness,/cutting through the edgeless fog of wage labor.”

与书同名的诗歌《破裂时态》探讨了归来者的矛盾情感。重现了一段童年记忆：“锡碗焖田螺”以及“用针挑出螺肉”。另一段意象：“出租车司机用食指蘸了一点清凉油/在大阳穴和鼻中轻轻一抹刺激精神/划破了雇佣劳动的无尽迷惘。”

Beyond the evocative sensations and sweet reunions, Xie finds ambivalence in the experience of returning — what the poem calls “a kind of withdrawal by reentering.” Categories of identity — Chinese, American and Chinese American — are lines she tries to blur rather than solidify, she said; on that trip, however, she felt especially American.

除了唤起回忆的画面和美好的团聚，珍妮·谢还在归来的感悟中看到了矛盾——也就是诗中所写的“一种因回归而起的疏离”。她说，中国人、美国人以及美国华裔这几种身份都是她试图模糊而非固化的界限；但在那次旅途中，她觉得自己特别美国。

“Both my Chinese relatives and I lived inside a kind of sustaining fiction, in terms of how we thought of one another,” she said. “I was also interested in interrogating the ways in which I imputed certain beliefs and desires onto them and they onto me.”

“就看待彼此的眼光而言，我和我的中国亲人都活在某种持续的虚构之中，”她说。“我也很有兴趣探究自己是如何把某些信念和愿望强加给他们的，反之亦然。”

Sometimes she tried to inquire about the Cultural Revolution, she said. The fact that she is a writer and an outsider made the relatives a bit uneasy. She understands. She sees the same reticence in her parents, who have long been settled in the United States. In their reactions, she detects “the aftershocks of that era, and the ways in which they become inscribed in the behaviors of the people who lived through them.”

她说，有几次自己试图探听文革的历史。她既是作家又是外人的身份让亲戚们有些不安。对此她表示理解。她在长期定居美国的父母身上看到了同样的沉默。他们的反应让她看到了“那个时代的余震，以及它们如何铭刻在了亲身经历过的人的行为中”。

In China, the silence was still enforced. In her writing, she tries to trace it to its source.

在中国，人们仍被迫沉默。她试图在作品中对此追根溯源。

“If they’ve jotted down lines of verse, I’ll never see them,” she writes. She writes of “VPNs, coded chats” — the reality of online communication in contemporary China, haunted by “the bitten and erratic ghosts” of the past. She laments for “a kind of collective disfigurement that never goes corrected.”

“他们若已经写下诗句，我永远也看不到，”她写道。她描写了“VPN，加密聊天”——这种当代中国互联网交流的现实，正是被过去的“苦难和不得安宁的幽灵”所困。她为“一种永远无法矫正的集体扭曲”哀叹不已。

In addition to the river snails and the silences, Xie saw the decaying of the older generations in her family.

除了田螺和沉默，珍妮·谢还看到了她家族中老一辈人的衰老。

“It made me consider the passage of time, the scale of time, and also mortality,” she said.

“这让我思考了时间的流逝，时间的尺度，还有人终有一死，”她说。

Li, the photographer, died in New York in 2020. Upon hearing the news, Xie sat down and wrote a poem in his memory. In it, her description of how memories work — “coded into cells to cross-pollinate with other images in the mind” — seems to gesture to the future, where a reader might feel pierced by her words and go interrogate the past.

摄影师李振盛于2020年在纽约去世。得知此消息，珍妮·谢坐下来写了首诗纪念他。她在诗中对于记忆运作方式的描述——“编刻入细胞，与脑海中的其他图像交融作用”——似乎是对未来的预示，即读者可能会被她的遣词造句刺痛，从而开始探询过去发生的事。