Translation from one language to another is a risky business, and even more so with poetry. There are nuances that just do not make the transition, cultural quiddities that resist change. Translating poetry from Chinese logograms to English would be even more daunting than English poetry from Latin, but that is what David Lunde, a local poet, has done.

“The Carving of Insects” is a collection of poems by Bian Zhilin, a Chinese poet who lived from 1910 to 2000, one of the most tumultuous times of Chinese history. Lunde in collaboration with Mary M.Y. Fung has translated almost all of Bian Zhilin’s poetry to make this modern Chinese poet accessible to English readers.

Bian Zhilin possibly knew Chiang Kai Shek. He participated in that dismal failure, “The Great Leap Forward.” He spoke French and English and translated Shakespeare’s four great tragedies into Chinese, a feat that boggles the imagination.

He is one of China’s first modern poets, not following the classic strictures of the Tang and Sung dynasties poets. Samples of the latter are available in local libraries in “Poems of the Masters,” published by Copper Canyon Press.

Instead Bian Zhilin used techniques of French Symbolist poets such as Baudelaire, Verlaine, Mallarme and Valery. He was also influenced by T.S. Eliot and W.H. Auden, a most curious mix when applied to Chinese poetry.

My first reaction to Bian Zhilin’s poems was perfunctory. Oh, I’ve read stuff like this before. Then as I slowly wound my way from his early works started in 1930 to the end of this collection in 1939, I realized that I was seeing in his poems the cultural change of traditional warlord China to Communist China under Mao.

Bian Zhilin asks “crows in the bitter north wind / where to, where do you go / where is it then, your native land?” Other early poems pick up the theme of change and dislocation. “The traces left by countless years seem/ in memory but a stretch of hazy incense smoke.” A monk “seems to have tolled the knell of yet another day.”

The poet, however, is not wistful for past Chinese glories. He simply recognizes that Chinese life will go on, though it will be hard. “A long, white, hot road stretches / toward the edge of wilderness, / like a heavy, flat, carrying pole / bearing down on the porter’s shoulders.”

One of the virtues of this volume of poems is that both David Lunde and Mary Fung explain how they were collaborators in the translations. She would first do a word for word translation of a line, such as “A (one+classifier tiao) white hot long road” and then give Lunde an idea of how the Chinese sounds.

The second stanza of this poem (called “Long Road”), for instance, starts with sibilants and fricatives in the Chinese — jisi chixude chanseng. Bian Zhilin said that he was influenced by Valery’s line, “L’insecte net grate le secheresse” where one can hear the locusts click. Lunde combines the ideas into “Faint threads of persistent cicada chirps,” repeating the onomatopoeic sounds of both languages.

One of the virtues of Chinese poetry is that there is a 3,000 year-old tradition behind it in spite of 20th-century poets trying to change it. The poem, “On the White Stone,” reminded me of Ezra Pound’s successful efforts to put into English Chinese thoughts and lines.

“Go, go to the deserted garden, / find a slab of white stone … .” Bian Zhilin uses this basic image throughout the poem to indicate a sense of loss and time. “You might as well sit a while longer / on the white stone / and … gaze at the distant hills / melting gradually into the evening.” There is a tinge of Keat’s “To Autumn” in the poem.

There is the harsh contrast of “Prufrock” in “City in Spring.” Again and again Bian Zhilin uses the line, “Peking City: flying kites on a rubbish heap” to contrast beauty in the slums amidst war. Bombs are dropping from the Japanese invasion of the Chinese mainland in 1933, and throughout the city “ancient trees / [are] crying aloud in vain.” The poet is “a kite with a broken string.” Flowers are brought to the rich in wheelbarrows as “aeroplanes are enjoying the scenery.” “Peking City: flying kites on a rubbish heap.”

Unfortunately Bian Zhilin’s last poems in this volume are not up to the rest. It is hard to wax poetic when writing “To a Sharpshooter on the Front” or “To the Generalissimo,” Chiang Kai Shek.

However, I suspect some irony about “The Children on Sentry Duty” who are fiercely patriotic with their stick guns, giving orders to local magistrates to stop. Zhilin is smiling under the lines as he recognizes that kids will “swing on the branches” or “pick some winter jasmines” when off duty.

Through both their translations and explanations on how they did them, Bian Zhilin has been well served by David Lunde and Mary Fung.

Ralph Mohr taught English and Latin at Marshfield High School for 31 years. He can be reached at rmohr1565@charter.net.