About Shi Tao and "June"

Shi Tao is a Chinese journalist, poet and PEN member, serving 10 years in prison on the charge of "revealing state secrets abroad". In April 2004, Shi Tao (Shi is his family name) attended an editorial meeting of the Contemporary Commerce News (當代商報), where he worked, and where a document was read out from the Office of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party with instructions for the media during the upcoming 15th anniversary of the June 4 1989 Tiananmen Square Protests and Beijing massacre. Using a Yahoo! Email account and another name, Shi Tao sent notes he took of this document, to overseas pro-democracy websites that publish news and information from China. His notes were published on Demoracy Net (民主通訊), Democracy Forum (民主論壇) and others. He was convicted and sentenced for that email. According to court documents, Yahoo! (Hong Kong) Holdings Ltd provided the Chinese authorities with Shi Tao's identity. Shi Tao wrote the poem 'June', a meditation on the 1989 protests and massacre, less than two months after he sent that fateful email - on June 9, 2004.

Organisers of the PEN Poem Relay chose ‘June’ for this relay not to re-open old wounds on the eve of the Olympics, but to pay tribute to the poet who bravely acted in the face of censorship. While it’s not certain ‘June’, the poem, was ever censored, it is highly doubtful it would ever have been published in a mainstream Chinese publication. The events of 1989 in Beijing and other cities in China remain to this day a censored topic in China. The email Shi Tao sent was itself about the censorship of June 4 1989. In sending that email, Shi Tao bravely acted against that censorship. What greater tribute could we pay, we thought, than to spread his art through the world’s languages and to let the poem itself act as a torch for freedom of expression.

We hope in doing so, we have honoured him and his work and the work of all Chinese writers, journalists and poets.

More about Shi Tao’s case

June by Shi Tao My whole life Will never get past “June” June, when my heart died When my poetry died When my lover Died in romance’s pool of blood June, the scorching sun burns open my skin Revealing the true nature of my wound June, the fish swims out of the blood-red sea Toward another place to hibernate June, the earth shifts, the rivers fall silent Piled up letters unable to be delivered to the dead Translated to English from Chinese by Chip Rolley. Listen to the poem in English

Listen to the poem in Mandarin

About "June"

Cyclonical June

Note on Shi Tao’s poem “June” in the context of the International PEN Poem Relay by Yang Lian

First of all, Shi Tao wrote “June” in memory of the massacre on Tiananmen Square on June 4th in Bejing. It was a turning point in many Chinese people’s lives and minds. The dream of building a modern and strong “New China” ended in a dark nightmare when hundreds of young Chinese idealists were killed publicly and in cold blood by the soldiers of the People’s Liberation Army.

Secondly but perhaps even more important, Shi Tao wrote June not immediately after the events of 1989, but in 2004, 15 years after the massacre. By then China had changed from a very poor Communist country to a country with its own class of “Nouveau Riche” and a strong market economy. It seems the very opposite of the China of 1989. But as Chinese people poignantly remark, it has only turned into a combination of “the worst of communism and the worst of capitalism”.

The first victim after the massacre was the memory of what had happened, for how can those who sit at the same table with the murderes remember the dead of Tiananmen square? The word itself was repressed and people take care to maintain a deep silence. Forgetting and denying render the sacrifice of those who perished on Tiananmen meaningless: their death becomes void.

Shi Tao’s poem “June” pits itself against those two manifestations of death: the actual killing and the forgetting. Read in its depth we become aware of how the extreme situation of 1989 in China exemplifies the vulnerability of the human condition.

The universal meaning of the poem or its even transcendent qualities are closely linked to distinctive features of the Chinese language. Already the first stanza begins with the unspecified “all days” not directly pointing out only the days of June 1989 in China.
In Chinese the verb has no tense, and time has to be specified for example by adverbs. In this instance the time indicator at first seems very clear: “June”. But which June? June 1989, or every June as if saying: all “Junes”? Which tense can be used for the verb? Past tense, present, future tense? “June 1989” certainly is in the past, but “all Junes” are never past. Is the Tiananmen massacre to be understood as an event or as an enduring situation?

In Chinese poetry there is often no clearly indicated “narrator”, no “I”, “you”, “he” or “she”, and the verbform is not linked to a person as eg in English, where the ending in -s points towards the third person singular. Although Shi Tao has used “I” as the main voice in this poem it is interesting to note that this “I” no longer appears in the second stanza. The very descriptive three lines starting with “June” and using almost surrealistic imagery, as well as the last line returning to familiar and concrete matter, are as if written from the perspective of a ghost. Who is it who suffers from those wounds, whose skin is burned open, those letters: who has written them? Anybody, nobody, “everybody”?

Read like this I became aware of the second stanza’s transcendence. It touches one’s own sadness facing the human condition. Memory as well as any actions of such far reaching consequences surpass ordinary boundaries of time. The situation described acquires the quality of being forever for anyone anywhere.
A similar impression occurs taking into account that there is no distinction between singular and plural for the Chinese noun. Without an indicator the translator is left to his or her understanding of the context. So in the first stanza, is Shi Tao talking about a lover or lovers?
And, in the second stanza we don’t know whose skin is burned open, and we might also wonder whether the image applies to more people, to more “skins”.
The more in depth I read, the more my impression grew that the “lover” of the first stanza was meant symbolically, was not a specific person. If ever I translated the poem I would use the plural in this instance. To add another thought to the translation of the line in which the “lover or lovers” die: the importance of the denotation “romantic” for the pool of blood should not be underestimated. We need to remember that mostly very young people died on Tiananmen. Maybe it is also meant to make us think about the perhaps all too “romantic” dreams Chinese people harboured in the hope to rebuild our country. Death, blood and “romance” are set against each other, and the sad question arises whether death has been helped along by our own misreadings of the true situation.

With these few remarks I hope to have contributed to a deeper understanding of Shi Tao’s poetical art and perhaps his mindset. Not least I also hope that some of these references inspire the wealth of translations for the readers all over the world.

Now that we can see the poem in so many languages we can still ask ourselves: How does Shi Tao’s original text support the understanding of the translators, where is the point where his and our souls converge?

I do believe that “June” is not limited to China and 1989 and has not been even at the time when Shi Tao wrote the poem. All these translations will return the poem to its true poetical realm: “All days / will never get past “June” ...

Yang Lian is an outstanding poet whose books have been translated into more than 20 languages. He was born in Switzerland and lived in Bejing until the Tiananmen massacre turned him into an exiled writer. He now lives in London and travels extensively to lectures and readings where he also raises his voice for democracy in China. He is a member of the Independent Chinese PEN Centre.