Amnyé Machen, Amnyé Machen: Poèmes

Tsering Woeser

Translated by Brigitte Duzan and Valentina Peluso

Edited and annotated by Katia Buffetrille

256 pages, 2023, EUR 23.90

Éditions Jentayu               

Reviewed by Kevin Carrico

Amnyé Machen, Amnyé Machen: Poèmes [English: Amnye Machen, Amnye Machen: Poems] is a remarkable collaboration between Tibetan author Tsering Woeser, ethnologist Katia Buffetrille, and translators Brigitte Duzan and Valentina Peluso, documenting the author’s pilgrimage around Mount Amnye Machen. The book combines narrative, poetry, and photography to bring the unforgettable experience of this sacred peak to life for readers.

The book begins with a brief introduction by Woeser explaining how the project came into being. Buffetrille, as an expert on sacred geography and pilgrimages, has journeyed around Mount Amnye Machen a total of four times: first in 1990, and then again in 1992, 2002, and 2018. On this last occasion, she was accompanied by Woeser, who was experiencing this pilgrimage for the first time. Along their journey around the mountain, Woeser composed a series of eighty-three poems (numbered one through eighty-three) which make up the main text of this book.

I am not a specialist in poetry. In fact, I cannot even say that I am much of an enthusiast of the genre. Yet even someone as hopelessly poetically illiterate as myself found countless treasures in this collection of eighty-three poetic meditations on this majestic site, translated beautifully into French by Brigitte Duzan and Valentina Peluso, with detailed annotations and explanations by Katia Buffetrille.

One thought-provoking early poem in Amnyé Machen, Amnyé Machen: Poèmes (#6) contrasts the sacred geography of the region with the profane propaganda of the State. Woeser first describes in minute detail the steps of prostrating oneself at the start and conclusion of the pilgrimage, carefully placing a small white stone on the mani stones. Yet at the moment that she does this and glances toward the majestic peak, she is overshadowed by a large propaganda sign showing the Tiananmen rostrum and the five-star flag of the People’s Republic, reading “Enhance national unity, join hands to build a magnificent ‘Chinese dream.’” The slogans are bilingual—big Chinese characters towering imposingly on the notably smaller Tibetan script. Here we can see the State attempting to borrow the power of the pilgrimage site for its own ends, endowing its propaganda with a sacred aura. Yet the juxtaposition produced by this attempted sacred outsourcing instead renders the slogans’ unseemliness even more apparent.

One of the most beautiful aspects of this collection of poems, however, is the way in which the distressing political context alluded to in the preceding poem can fade away amidst the awe of nature. Another poem (#31) captures the wonders of this region through the narration of one night of sleep. Woeser recounts how the pouring rain and chilling winds awakened her throughout the night: first at three, then again at four, five, and six o’clock in the morning. Reading her recount of this night, one can almost feel the power of nature: the rain pounding down on the canvas of the tent and winds rushing along the ground as if they could pick one up and carry one away. Woeser prayed for it to end: “Please, this torrential rain, make it stop… this crazy wind, make it stop…” The next morning, a young man accompanying them on the pilgrimage asks Woeser not to pray like this: “because we are not alone in this world. There are plants and animals as well who need the wind and the rain.”

There are also numerous meditations on domestication, a theme that speaks across both nature and politics. Poem #27 presents a haunting meditation on this theme: “Some words: train, domesticate, tame, render docile, render obedient… types of domestication: individual or collective… Modes of domestication: direct, indirect, medicalized…” Elsewhere the political implications of domestication are addressed more directly (#59): “the domesticated yak displays a rare tenderness; the domesticated Tibetan displays an unexpected docility.” In the narration of her journey around Mount Amnye Machen, we see the author breaking out of domestication and rediscovering the wonders that surround her.

There are countless other gems in this collection, from the story of the prayer flag placed on the mountain for Eliott Sperling to a brief and amusing poem about symbolically evocative yak dung, from reflections on pilgrimage by car to unforgettable dialogues with fellow pilgrims. A friend of Woeser’s has reportedly described the poems as an “ethnographic chronicle of pilgrimage in the form of poetry;” there could be no more succinct and evocative description of this collection.

The poems in Amnyé Machen, Amnyé Machen: Poèmes are interspersed with stunning photographs from Buffetrille’s journeys around the mountain over the years, capturing everything from dramatic landscapes to the smallest details of life in this unique ecosystem where people, animals, and deities meet. We see pilgrims, portraits of deities, yaks, dogs, small mountains of horse skulls, and large snow-capped mountains extending into the clouds, rendering the figures standing before them minute by comparison. The dialogue established between the poems and the photographs, allowing one to pause between readings and reflect on the beauty and power of this region, brings the poems to life.

Finally, the collection closes with a letter from Buffetrille to Woeser written in late April of 2020, precisely as the type of movement that the poems narrate, came to an anxious halt for many of us amid the realization of the full extent of COVID-19’s spread around the world. At this moment, Buffetrille recounts her first journey around Mount Amnye Machen in 1990, telling of her initial experience with a yak and the difficulties encountered in lighting a fire. She recounts one night looking up into the skies and being overwhelmed with happiness, sensing that she belonged totally to this world, and that this world also belonged to her.

Yet the most evocative moment in this letter at a moment of global crisis is Buffetrille’s narration of the power of Mount Amnye Machen, its people, and their spiritual beliefs, which “nothing to date has been able to destroy: neither the convulsions of history, nor globalization, nor global warming.” Although the journeys that this collection narrates are increasingly unlikely for many of us in a massively changed post-COVID world, the poems and photographs in the French edition of Woeser’s poems, Amnyé Machen, Amnyé Machen: Poèmes, stand as beautiful and unforgettable testaments to this power, which we can only hope will continue to remain indifferent to and undisturbed by the vicissitudes of the world today.

Kevin Carrico is a Senior Lecturer in Chinese Studies at Monash University’s School of Languages, Literatures, Cultures, and Linguistics. He is the author of The Great Han: Race, Nationalism, and Tradition in China Today (University of California Press, 2017) and Two Systems, Two Countries: A Nationalist Guide to Hong Kong (University of California Press, 2022). He is also the translator of Tsering Woeser’s Tibet on Fire: Self-Immolation against Chinese Rule (Verso, 2016).