The Anchor Book of Chinese Poetry (48 page)

BOOK: The Anchor Book of Chinese Poetry
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Abandoned Woman

My long hair hangs over my eyes

to cut off shameful and wicked quick glances

and the rush of blood and deep sleep of dessicated bones.

Dark night and mosquitoes slowly sneak in

over this corner of a low wall

to screech into my unstained ears

like furious wilderness winds

that throw all nomads into tremulous fear.

I feel a god's spirit trembling in a leaf of grass in an empty valley,

and my grief is imprinted only in the brain of an itinerant wasp

or pours a mountain spring over a high cliff

then vanishes like a red leaf.

The abandoned woman's secret sorrow burdens her motions,

and the setting sun's fire cannot cremate her malaise of time

into ash flying from a chimney

that dyes the wings of roaming ravens,

and nests with them on a reef in a tsunami,

yet quietly listening to a boatman's song

and to sighs from her stale skirt

as she paces by a tomb

dropping no more hot tears

on the grass

to spangle this world.

1
Bonnie S. McDougall and Kam Louie,
The Literature of China in the Twen tieth Century
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), p. 60.

2
Translated by Kirk A. Denton, in Kirk A. Denton, ed.,
Modern Chinese Literary Thought: Writings on Literature, 1893–1945
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), pp. 390–91.

LIN HUIYIN
(1904–1955)

Lin Huiyin was born in Fujian province but raised in Beijing. Her father was a powerful governor, and she traveled with him in Europe and the United States. She and her husband, Liang Sicheng, studied together at the University of Pennsylvania, but unlike her husband she was forced to study art instead of architecture because the School of Architecture did not admit women in that era. Nevertheless, she became an important designer and architect, and both she and her husband taught architecture at Qinghua University, where her husband founded the architecture program. They worked together as architectural historians, cataloging and attempting to preserve China's extraordinary heritage of built forms. In China, Lin Huiyin was involved with the Crescent Moon Society. She held literary salons and wrote fiction, drama, and essays in addition to poetry. In the Communist era she and her husband helped to design the national flag, the national emblem, and the Monument to the People's Hero in Tiananmen Square. Her passionate affair with the poet Xu Zhimo has been depicted in a popular Taiwanese television drama,
The April of Humanity.

Sitting in Quietude

Winter has a message of its own

When the cold is like a flower—

Flowers have their fragrance, winter has its handful of memories.

The shadow of a withered branch, like lean blue smoke,

Paints a stroke across the afternoon window.

In the cold the sunlight grows pale and slanted.

It is just like this.

I sip the tea quietly

As if waiting for a guest to speak.

Translated by Michelle Yeh

DAI WANGSHU
(1905–1950)

Dai Wangshu, also known as Dai Chaocai, is the pen name of Dai Meng'ou. He was born in Hangxian, Zhejiang province, and went to school in Hangzhou. While in high school he and Shi Zhecun founded the Blue Society and published a literary journal called
Friends of the Blue Society.
Starting in 1923 he studied Chinese language and literature at Shanghai University, and then French at Zhendan University. In 1926 he, Shi Zhecun, and Du Heng began publishing the literary journal
Jade Stone.
He joined the Communist Youth Corps in 1925 and the Left-Wing Writers League in 1930 and was arrested for revolutionary activities. When his poem “A Rainy Lane” was published in
Short Story Monthly
in 1928, he won widespread acclaim and earned the nickname “Rainy Lane Poet;” the poem appeared in his first book,
My Memories
(1929). In 1932 Dai Wangshu worked with friends to create The Modern Press, a book and magazine series, and he went to France to study at the University of Lyons and the University of Paris. He published his second book,
Wangshu's Drafts
, in 1933, and then returned to China in 1935 to become
editor in chief of
Modern Literature.
After the Sino-Japanese War he moved to Hong Kong and continued to work as an editor. In 1941–1942 he was sent to prison for three months after the Japanese invaded Hong Kong, and it was while he was imprisoned that he wrote “Written on a Prison Wall.” He moved back to Shanghai after the war and published his last collection,
The Catastrophic Years
, in 1948. After the 1949 Communist Revolution he worked briefly as a translator of French in the Foreign Language Press before his death in 1950.

A Chopped-off Finger

In an old dusty bookcase

I keep a chopped-off finger soaked in a bottle of alcohol.

Whenever I have nothing better to do than leafing through my ancient books,

it summons up a shard of sad memory.

This is a finger from a dead friend,

pale and thin, just like him.

What lingers clearly in my mind

is the moment when he handed me this finger:

“Please preserve this laughable and pitiable token of love for me.

In my splintered life, it just adds to my grief.”

His words were slow and calm as a sigh

and with tears in eyes he smiled.

I don't know anything about his “laughable and pitiable love.”

I only know that he was arrested from a worker's home.

Then it was cruel torture, then miserable jail,

then sentence of death, the sentence that awaits us all.

I don't know anything about his “laughable and pitiable love.” He never mentioned it to me, even when he was drunk. I guess it must be very tragic, he hid it, tried to forget it, like the finger.

On this finger there are ink stains,

red, lovely glowing red

sun-bright on the sliced finger

like his gaze at the cowardice of others that scorched my mind.

This finger gives me a light and sticky sadness and is a very useful treasure. Whenever I feel bothered by some trifle, I'll say: “Well, it's time to take out that glass bottle.”

A Rainy Lane

Alone and with an oil-paper umbrella in hand,

I hesitate up and down a long, long

and solitary rainy lane,

hoping to meet

a girl like a lilac

budding with autumn complaints.

She has

the color of lilacs,

the scent of lilacs,

and lilac sorrow,

plaintive in the rain,

plaintive and hesitant;

she walks hesitatingly in this solitary lane,

holding an oil-paper umbrella

like me

and just like me

she silently paces

lost in clear and melancholy grief.

She walks by me close,

close and casting

a sigh-like glance

she floats by

like a dream,

like a sad and hazy dream,

like a floating dream

of lilacs

the girl drifts past;

and in silence walks far, far away

past the ruined fence

at the end of the lane in the rain.

In the sad song of the rain

her color is lost,

her fragrance gone,

and gone is even her

sigh-like glance

and her lilac melancholy.

Alone and with an oil-paper umbrella in hand,

I hesitate down a long, long

and solitary rainy lane,

hoping to see floating past

a girl like a lilac

budding with autumn complaints.

Written on a Prison Wall

If I die here,

Friends, do not be sad,

I shall always exist in your hearts.

One of you died,

In a cell in Japanese-occupied territory,

He harbored deep hatred,

You should always remember.

When you come back,

Dig up his mutilated body from the mud,

Hoist his soul up high

With your victory cheers.

And then place his bones on a mountain peak,

To bask in the sun, and bathe in the wind:

In that dark damp dirt cell,

This was his sole beautiful dream.

Translated by Gregory B. Lee

FENG ZHI
(1905–1993)

Feng Zhi was born Feng Chengzhi in 1905 in Hebei province. He graduated from Beijing University, where he had studied German from 1921 to 1927. He later studied German philosophy and literature in Berlin and Heidelberg and then returned to China to teach at Tongji University. He published two poetry collections,
Songs of Yesterday
(1927) and
Northern Wanderings and Other Poems
(1929), and then didn't publish for over a decade. He began writing again after fleeing Beijing for the south of China, taking refuge in the city of Kunming, Yunnan province, where he worked at Southwest United University. After being driven out of Kunming by the Japanese bombardment, he began to write his famous series of twenty-seven sonnets (published in 1942 as
Sonnets)
, which show the influence of Rainer Maria Rilke. He later worked as professor of German language and literature at Lienta and was appointed director of the Foreign Literatures Institute at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in 1964.

Sonnet
1

Our hearts are ready to experience

the miracles that take us by surprise:

after millennia with few events,

a sudden comet, or a whirlwind flies.

And it is in those moments in our lives

in passion something like a first embrace,

hat all past griefs and happiness contrive

to crystallize a vision in our gaze.

So we adore the tiny insects that

after they copulate once in a life

or after they encounter some deep threat

will terminate their silent luscious lives

—and know that our entire being waits for

a whirlwind or a sudden meteor.

Sonnet
2

Whatever can be shed we jettison

from bodies, let return again to dust

—a way to compose us for age. And thus,

like leaves and the late flowers that one

by one the autumn trees release

off of their forms into the autumn winds

so they can give themselves with naked limbs

to winter, we compose ourselves to lose

in nature, like cicadas abandoning

behind them in the dirt their useless shells.

So we compose ourselves for death, a song

that though shed from the music's form still sings

and leaves a naked music when it's gone,

transformed into a chain of hushed blue hills.

Sonnet
6

I often see in the wild meadows

a village boy or wife who cries

up to the unresponsive sky.

Is it because some evil shadows

them? Or because a husband died?

Or because of a broken toy?

Or sickness in a little boy?

It seems as if they've always cried,

as though their whole life were ensnared

inside a frame and outside of the frame

there is no life, there's no world left.

It seems to me it's been the same

since the world started, and they've wept

for the whole cosmos of despair.

Sonnet 16

We stand together on a mountain's crest

projecting vision far across the steppe

till sight is lost in distance, or else rests

where paths spread on the plain and intersect.

How can the paths and streams not join? Tossed

in sky, can winds and clouds do otherwise?

The cities, mountains, rivers that we've crossed

become a part of us, become our lives.

Our maturation and our grief is near,

is a pine tree on a hill over there,

is a dense mist on a town over here.

We flow inside the waters, blow in air.

We are footpaths that crisscross on the plain

and are the people traveling on them.

Sonnet 21

Listening to the rainstorm and the wind

by lamplight, I am utterly alone,

yet though this cabin is so small I find

between me and the objects in my room

are thousands of miles spreading far away.

The pitcher's brass longs for the mountain's ore

as the ceramic cup craves river clay

and everything whirls like birds in a storm,

dispersed to east and west. So we hold on

in fear our bodies will lift off from us

flying through storm in the deep sky then gone

in rain that pummels all the world to dust.

Nothing is left except this shaking flame

to indicate to me my life remains.

Sonnet 23 (On a Puppy)

For half a month the rain fell constantly

and ever since the moment of your birth

you've known just clamminess and poverty

of light. But now the rain clouds have dispersed,

illuminating sunlight saturates all the far wall,

and so I see your mother

take you in her mouth into the sun's utter

gentleness, utterly immersed and taking

in for the first time the sunlight's heat.

At sunset she will take you back between

her teeth again. You have no memory.

But inside you this incident will dream

and meld into your barking deep at night.

And then all night you will bark forth the light.

Sonnet 24

A thousand years ago this earth

already seemed to sing the way

we would live out our lives today.

Although it was before our birth,

out of the sky of apparitions

and from green grass and the blue cypress

a singing sound seemed to express

our fate and our condition.

How can it be that we expect

these days to hear such singers sing

when we are hunched with heavy grief?

Look over there, a small insect

hovering on its busy wings

is humming songs of endless life.

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