The Anchor Book of Chinese Poetry (49 page)

From freely flowing water, undefined,

the water bearer carries a curved jar

and so the water takes on shape and line.

Look, fluttering in autumn wind, the far

flag holds on to the thing that can't be held.

Let distant lights and dark and distant night

and distant plants that grow, decay, and meld

with earth, and thoughts that hunt the infinite,

all be conserved upon this flag. Don't let

us listen uselessly to the night wind

or watch day turn grass gold and make leaves red

in vain. What place is there to hold the mind?

I hope these poems like a wind flag will swell

and hold a bit of that which can't be held.

At the shady bottom of the city wall,

In the dark corner by the houses,

Gamblers squat in the middle of a crowd,

Anxiously awaiting the outcome of a throw.

Filthy, ragged, stupid—yet inflamed—

Their bodies tremble, their heads squirm.

Cheers and curses

Accompany the clink of coins.

Women and children with disheveled hair

Goggle at them;

A hungry child kicks and wails,

But the mother is entranced by her husband's game.

They squat, stand up,

Slap their thighs and cry out in surprise.

Their faces are flushed, their mouths open,

As they try to reverse their fate in one throw.

They lose, then win, win, then lose again;

What stay the same are filth, poverty, and stupidity.

At nightfall they scatter, disappointed,

Returning to their dingy houses one by one.

Translated by Michelle Yeh

Bian Zhilin was a poet and a translator of French and English literature into Chinese. He was born in Jiangsu and studied Western literature at Beijing University, graduating in 1933. Under the patronage of Xu Zhimo, Wen Yiduo, and Shen Congwen, he began writing the new, vernacular poetry of his day. His early books, generally considered his best, include
Leaves of Three Autumns
(1933),
Fish Eyes
(1935), and
The Han Garden
(1936), which included work by He Qifang and Li Guangtian; his last book was
Poems of a Decade
(1942). Bian was a schoolteacher for some years and then supported himself as a freelance writer. As Bonnie S. McDougall and Kam Louie write, “Out of intensive study of nineteenth- and twentieth-century English and French literature (and his own much-praised translations), against a general background in classical Chinese poetry and Buddhist and Daoist philosophy, he had perfected a strongly individual style.”
¹
Like other writers he joined the revolutionaries in Yenan in the late 1930s, but in 1940 he left for Kunming, where he taught literature. He joined the Communist Party in 1956.

The following poems by Bian Zhilin
were translated by Michelle Yeh

Imagine yourself slightly ill (On an autumn afternoon),

Looking at the gray sky and the sparse tree shadows on the windowpanes,

Lying on a pillow left by someone who has traveled far,

And thinking of the blurry lakes and hills, barely recognizable on

the pillow,

As if they were the elusive trail of an old friend who has vanished

in the wind,

As if they were things of the past written on faded stationery—

Traces of history visible under a lamp

In a book, yellowed with age, in front of an old man.

Will you not be lost

In the dream?

You are standing on a bridge enjoying the view;

Someone's watching you from a balcony.

The moon adorns your window;

You adorn someone else's dream.

Scared of loneliness,

A country boy kept a cricket by his pillow.

When he grew up and worked in town,

He bought a watch with a luminous face.

When little, he was envious of

The grass on a tomb—it was a home for crickets.

Now he has been dead for three hours;

His watch keeps on ticking.

How many courtyards, how many squares of blue sky?

Divide them among yourselves, for I am leaving.

Let a belled white pigeon circle three times overhead—

But camel bells are far away. Listen.

I throw a yo-yo to keep you, fly a kite to bind you,

Send a paper eagle, a paper swallow, and a paper rooster

To the sky—to greet the wild geese from the south?

Am I a toy for some child?

I think I'll go to the library to check out
A Study of Migratory Birds.

Tell me, are you for or against the new law

Forbidding airplanes to fly across the city sky?

My thoughts are like gossamers for little spiders:

They tie me to let me float. I am leaving.

I'll give it some thought at some other place.

How many courtyards, how many squares of blue sky?

How can I go on being an antenna,

Stretching out two arms on the roof in vain,

Never receiving the sound waves I desire?

“Pull it out, pull it out”—from the depth of my dream

Another night train comes. This is reality.

Ancients by the river sigh over the tides;

I am standing at the train station like an advertisement.

Boy, listen to the bee fretting inside the window,

Nail a live butterfly to the wall

To decorate my reality here.

The old mattresses that once squeaked,

The small earthquakes that once shook my dreams,

My pounding heartbeats—

Do they now bewilder the train?

When did I ever want to be a station of dreams!

¹
Bonnie S. McDougall and Kam Louie,
The Literature of China in the Twentieth Century
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), p. 75.

He Qifang (born He Yongfang) was a poet and an essayist descended from a wealthy family of landowners in Wanxian, Sichuan province. After homeschooling in the classics, he went to Shanghai for a modern education and from 1931to 1935 studied philosophy at Beijing University. He was deeply influenced by Western literature. As Bonnie S. McDougall and Kam Louie write, “He Qifang's poetry gives an unusually vivid depiction of the author's progress through romanticism, symbolism, neo-romanticism, modernism, and Russian futurism, from dreamer to patriot.”
¹
In 1938 He Qifang moved to Yenan, where he taught at the Lu Xun Institute of Art and Literature. He joined the Communist Party in Yenan, which was the base of Mao Zedong's Red Army, and after the 1949 Communist Revolution he continued to be an important literary figure in the Writers' Association. He was an editor of the journals
People's Literature
and
Literary Criticism
and the director of the Literary Research Institute of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, and he wrote propaganda poetry for the new state. Despite his stalwart Communism, he was persecuted during the Cultural Revolution and sent to the countryside to be “reeducated.” He died of stomach cancer.

The following poems by He Qifang
were translated by Michelle Yeh.

Shaking down the dew of early morning,

A clinking, lumbering sound drifts beyond the deep ravine.

The scythe, sated with scented rice, is laid down;

Shoulder baskets hold plump melons and fruits from the hedges.

Autumn is resting in a farmer's home.

A round net is cast into the river of cold mist

And collects the shadows of dark cypress leaves, like blue

Hoary frost on the tips of the reeds,

While homeward oars dip and pull.

Autumn is playing in the fishing boat.

The grassy field seems wider when the crickets chirp;

The stream looks clearer when it dries up.

Where did the bamboo flute on the ox's back go,

Its holes overflowing with summery scent and warmth?

Autumn is dreaming in the shepherdess's eyes.

Sunlight shines on the broad leaves of castor-oil plants,

Beehives nestle in the earth-god shrine.

Running against my shadow,

I have returned circuitously

And realized the stillness of time.

But on the grass,

Where are those short-armed children who chased after chirping crickets?

Where are those joyous cries of my childhood playmates,

Rising to the blue sky at the treetops?

The vast kingdom of childhood

Appears pathetically small

Under my feet, which are dusty with foreign dust.

In the desert, travelers treasure a glass of water;

A sailor resents the white waves beyond his oars.

I used to think I possessed a paradise

And hid it in the darkest corner of my memory.

Since then I have experienced the loneliness of an adult

And grown fonder of the mazes of paths in dreams.

¹
Bonnie S. McDougall and Kam Louie,
The Literature of China in the Twentieth Century
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), p. 77.

Ma Luofu, known by his pen name Luo Fu, was born in Henyang, in mainland China's Hunan province, and went to Hunan University. He became a military man during the war years of the late 1930s and early 1940s, and in 1949, the year of the Communist Revolution, he moved to Taiwan, where he studied in the English department of Tamkang College. He worked as a Navy broadcast reporter and liaison in Taiwan and in Vietnam, retiring in 1973 at the rank of commander. He was a cofounder of the Epoch Poetry Club and launched the very influential
Epoch Poetry Quarterly
, which published many soldier-poets. He made a large impact with his strange and obscure modernist collection
Death in the Stone Cell
(1964) and has since published many volumes of poetry and criticism.

That rose, like all roses, only bloomed for one morning.

—H. BALZAC

1

From

The sound of water

Emperor Xuan of the Tang dynasty

Extracts the sorrow in a lock of black hair

2

In the genealogy of the Yang clan

She is

An expanse of white flesh

Lying right there on the first page

A rose bush in the mirror

In full flower, caressed by

What is called heaven-born beauty

A

Bubble

Waiting to be scooped up

From the Huaqing Pool

Heavenly music is everywhere

In Li Palace

The aroma of wine wafts in body odors

Lips, after being sucked hard

Can only moan

And the limbs outstretched on the ivory bed

Are mountains

And rivers too

A river sound asleep in another river

Underground rapids

Surge toward

The countryside

Until a white ballad

Breaks out of the soil

3

He raises his burned hand high

And cries out:

I make love

Because

I want to make love

Because

I am the emperor

Because we are used to encounters

Of flesh with blood

4

He begins to read newspapers, eat breakfast, watch her comb her

hair,

handle official papers in bed
stamp a seal

stamp a seal

stamp a seal

stamp a seal

From then on

The emperor no longer holds court in the morning

5

He is the emperor

But war

Is a puddle of

Sticky fluid

That cannot be wiped off

Under the brocade coverlets

Slaughter is far away

Distant beacon fires snake upward, the sky is dumbfounded

By heart-stopping hairstyles

Leather drums with flame-red tongues

Lick the earth

6

Rivers and streams

Burn between the thighs

War

May not be abandoned

Campaigns are affairs of state

My lady, women's blood can flow in only one direction

Now the armies refuse to budge

All right, all right, you are the willow catkins

Before Mawei Slope

Let the wind in the square hold you aloft

A pile of expensive fertilizer

Is nourishing

Another rose bush

Or

Another incurable disease

In history