The Anchor Book of Chinese Poetry (51 page)
Read The Anchor Book of Chinese Poetry Online
Authors: Tony Barnstone
Sweet tangerines
flooded with sun, sweet tangerines
let me move through your hearts
bearing burdens of love
sweet tangerines
rinds breaking with delicate rains
let me move through your hearts
worries turned to tears of relief
sweet tangerines
bitter nets keep each fleshy piece
let me move through your hearts
as I wander in the wreckage of dreams
sweet tangerines
flooded with sun, sweet tangerines
Translated by James A. Wilson
Maybe these are the last days
I haven't put aside a will
just a pen, for my mother
I'm hardly a hero
in times with no heroes
I'll just be a man
The calm horizon
divides the ranks of living and dead
I align myself with the sky
no way will I kneel
to state assassins
who lock up the winds of freedom
The star holes of bullets
bleed in the black-bright dawn
Translated by James A. Wilson
With bell sounds gone
the spider webs weave in the cracks of pillars
wrap around the same rings with each turning year
Nothing to remember, stones
empty mist in mountain valleys blends with the echoes
of stones, nothing to remember
when narrow trails wound through this weaving
dragons and weird birds would make their ways
along the temple eaves bearing the silence of bells
Wild grass in a year's time
flourishes indiscriminately,
doesn't care if it bends beneath
a monk's cloth shoe or the wind
Stone relics are worn and pocked, their writings long ruined
as when great flames ravage the center of open fields
If a hand could make out the meaning, then perhaps
catching a glance from the living
the tortoise might stir again in the earth
muddy with dark and holy secrets, crawling to the threshold
Translated by James A. Wilson
for the victims of June Fourth
Not the living but the dead
under the doomsday-purple sky
go in groups
Suffering guides forward suffering
at the end of hatred is hatred
the spring has run dry, the conflagration stretches unbroken
the road back is even farther away
Not gods but the children
amid the clashing of helmets
say their prayers
mothers breed light
darkness breeds mothers
the stone rolls, the clock runs backward
the eclipse of the sun has already taken place
Not your bodies but your souls
shall share a common birthday every year
you are all the same age
love has founded for the dead
an everlasting alliance
you embrace each other closely
in the massive register of deaths
Translated by Bonnie S. McDougall
and Chen Maiping
A word has abolished another word
a book has issued orders
to burn another book
a morning established by the violence of language
has changed the morning
of people's coughing
Maggots attack the kernel
the kernel comes from dull valleys
from among dull crowds
the government finds its spokesman
cats and mice
have similar expressions
On the road in the sky
the armed forester examines
the sun that rumbles past
over the asphalt lake
he hears the sound of disaster
the untrammeled sound of a great conflagration
Translated by Bonnie S. McDougall
and Chen Maiping
After braving the music of the air-raid alarm
I hang my shadow on the hat stand
take off the dog's eyes
(which I use for escape)
remove my false teeth (these final words)
and close my astute and experienced pocket watch
(that garrisoned heart)
The hours fall in the water one after the other
in my dreams like depth charges
they explode
Translated by Bonnie S. McDougall
and Chen Maiping
The shadow that tries to please the light
leads me to pass between
the aspen that has drunk milk
and the fox that has drunk blood
like a treaty passing between peace and conspiracy
The chair draped with an overcoat sits
in the east, the sun is its head
it opens a cloud and says:
here is the end of history
the gods have abdicated, the temples are locked
you are nothing but
a pictograph that's lost its sound
Translated by Bonnie S. McDougall
and Chen Maiping
Tonight a confusion of rain
fresh breezes leaf through a book
dictionaries swell with implication
forcing me into submission
memorizing ancient poems as a child
I couldn't see what they meant
and stood at the abyss of explication
for punishment
bright moon sparse stars
out of those depths a teacher's hands
give directions to the lost
a play of shadow mocking our lives
people slide down the slope of
education on skis
their story
slides beyond national boundaries
after words slide beyond the book the white page in pure amnesia I wash my hands clean and tear it apart, the rain stops
Translated by David Hinton
The landscape crossed out with a pen
reappears here
what I am pointing to is not rhetoric
October over the rhetoric
flight seen everywhere
the scout in the black uniform
gets up, takes hold of the world
and microfilms it into a scream
wealth turns into floodwaters
a flash of light expands
into frozen experience
and just as I seem to be a false witness
sitting in the middle of a field
the snow troops remove their disguises
and turn into language
Translated by Eliot Weinberger and
Iona Man-Cheong
Who believes in the mask's weeping?
who believes in the weeping nation?
the nation has lost its memory
memory goes as far as this morning
the newspaper boy sets out in the morning
all over town the sound of a desolate trumpet
is it your bad omen or mine?
vegetables with fragile nerves
peasants plant their hands in the ground
longing for the gold of a good harvest
politicians sprinkle pepper
on their own tongues
and a stand of birches in the midst of a debate:
whether to sacrifice themselves for art or doors
this public morning
created by a paperboy
revolution sweeps past the corner
he's fast asleep
Translated by Eliot Weinberger and
Iona Man-Cheong
1
From Gabi Gleichmann, “An Interview with Bei Dao,”
Modern Chinese Literature
9
(1996), pp. 387–93.
(1951-)
Duo Duo is the pen name of Li Shizheng, an important poet of the Misty school who worked as a journalist for the
Peasant Daily
in Beijing before leaving China to live in Holland and London. It was as a journalist that he witnessed the Tiananmen Square massacre of June 4, 1989. He had been scheduled to leave China on the fifth of June for a reading tour, his first poetry tour
in the West. Like many Chinese writers, he chose to stay in the West rather than return to a China once again in the grip of political repression.
Duo Duo's influences include Baudelaire, Robert Desnos, Dylan Thomas, Sylvia Plath, Marina Tsvetaeva, and Federico García Lorca. His poems have an emotional, even nightmarish intensity just below a “misty” surface. Duo Duo began writing poetry privately during the Cultural Revolution, assuming that the political climate would never shift in such a way that he might actually become a published writer. He began to achieve some level of public acceptance in the 1980s, only to find himself a writer in exile, circumstances that make the sense of nightmare underlying his poems seem less surreal than real. His books have appeared in English in the collections
Looking Out from Death
and
The Boy Who Catches Wasps: Selected Poems of Duo Duo.
No bell had sounded to awaken memory
but today I heard
it strike nine times
and wondered how many more times.
I heard it while coming out of the stables.
I walked a mile
and again I heard:
“At what point in the struggle for better conditions will you succeed in increasing your servility?”
Just then, I began to envy the horse left behind in the stables.
Just then, the man riding me struck my face.
Translated by John Cayley
Five glasses of strong liquor, five candles, five years
Forty-three years old, a huge sweat at midnight
Fifty hands flap toward the tabletop
A flock of birds clenching their fists fly in from yesterday
Five strings of red firecrackers applaud the fifth month, thunder rumbles
between five fingers
And four parasitic poisonous mushrooms on four dead horses' tongues
in the fourth month
do not die
Five hours past five o'clock on day five five candies are extinguished
Yet the landscape screaming at dawn does not die
Hair dies but tongues do not die
The temper recovered from the cooked meat does not die
Fifty years of mercury seep into semen and semen does not die
The fetus delivering itself does not die
Five years pass, five years do not die
Within five years, twenty generations of insects die out
Translated by Gregory B. Lee
(1952-)
Shu Ting is the pen name of Gong Peiyu. Associated with the Misty school, she was the leading woman poet in China in the 1980s. A southeast Fujian native, she was sent to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution before she graduated from junior high school. Then she worked in a cement factory and later a textile mill and a lightbulb factory. In 1979 she published her first poem and in 1983 was asked to be a professional writer by the
Writers' Association, Fujian Branch, of which she is now the deputy chairperson. Her collections include
Brigantines
(1982) and
Selected Lyrics of Shu Ting and Gu Cheng
(1985). She has also published several books of prose.
Along with many of the Misty Poets, Shu Ting was attacked in the early 1980s during the Anti-Spiritual Pollution Campaign, and yet she twice won the National Poetry Award, in 1981 and 1983. Deeply romantic in nature, her work can be understood as a reaction to the repression of romance in literature, film, song, and theater during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966–1976). Although her poems sometimes don't read as well in English translation as they do in Chinese, they have a crystalline, lyrical strength that often rescues them from their saccharine tendencies and that has made Shu Ting the best-known contemporary Chinese woman poet in the West.
An overturned cup of wine.
A stone path sailing in moonlight.
Where the blue grass is flattened,
an azalea flower abandoned.
The eucalyptus wood swirls.
Stars above teem into a kaleidoscope.
On a rusty anchor,
eyes mirror the dizzy sky.
Holding up a book to shade the candle
and with a finger in between the lips,
I sit in an eggshell quiet,
having a semitransparent dream.
Translated by Chou Ping
—Reply to the Loneliness of a Poet
Perhaps our hearts
will have no reader
Perhaps we took the wrong road
and so we end up lost
Perhaps we light one lantern after another
storms blow them out one by one
Perhaps we burn our life candle against the dark
but no fire warms the body
Perhaps once we're out of tears
the land will be fertilized
Perhaps while we praise the sun
we are also sung by the sun
Perhaps the heavier the monkey on our shoulders
the more we believe
Perhaps we can only protest others' suffering
silent to our own misfortune
Perhaps
because this call is irresistible
we have no other choice
Translated by Tony Barnstone and Newton Liu
A colorful hanging chart with no lines.
A pure algebra problem with no solution.
A one-string harp, stirring rosaries
that hang from dripping eaves.
A pair of oars that can never reach
the other side of the ocean.
Waiting silently like a bud.
Gazing at a distance like a setting sun.
Perhaps an ocean is hidden somewhere,
but when it flows out—only two tears.
O in the background of a heart,
in the deep well of a soul.
Translated by Chou Ping