The Anchor Book of Chinese Poetry (52 page)
Read The Anchor Book of Chinese Poetry Online
Authors: Tony Barnstone
I'm at my own latitude
with migrant dreams—
White snow. Ice roads.
A heavy-hanging bell
behind a red palace wall
is tearing the motionless dusk.
O I see a cherry brook
opening its dancing skirt
after a downpour;
I see little pines
put their heads together
to make a speech;
and songs are heard in sandstorms
like a spurting fountain.
Thus, tropical suns are sparkling
under eyelashes with heavy frost;
and blood conducts
reliable spring wind
between frozen palms.
At every crossroad
blessed by street lamps
more than love is silently promised
in the kiss good-bye.
Between sea tide and green shade
I'm having a dream against snowstorms.
Translated by Chou Ping
Dark blue night
All at once the old wounds burst open
When simmering the past
The bed's an extremely patient lover
The alarm clock tick tocks tick tocks
Ravages the dream till it is black and blue
Grope along the wall
Grope along the wall for the light cord
Instead by chance catch
A lock of moonbeams
Shimmering silverfish come after the smell, climb up the root
You finally
Soften to a pond
In a slow turn
You look at yourself
You look at yourself
The full-length mirror feigns innocence and one-sided love
The ambiguous wallpaper blurs the pattern
And finds itself hard framed
You watch yourself wither one petal after another
You have no way out no way out
Even if you can leap backward over walls
There are still days you can't leap over blocking you
From behind
Women have no need of philosophy
Women can shake off moon marks
Like dogs shake off water
Close the heavy curtain
The wet tongue of morning lolls on the windowpane
Go back to the hollow spot in the pillow
Like a film: exposed, unrolled
You put yourself there
The chestnut tree under the window shivers loudly
As if touched by a cold hand
Translated by John Rosenwald and the
Beloit/Fudan Translation Workshop
The declaration of love, coauthored by lip prints and tears,
Bravely climbs into the mailbox
The mailbox is cold
Long abandoned
Its paper seal, like a bandage, flaps in the wind
The eaves rise and fall softly under the black cat's paws
Large trucks grind sleep till it is hard and thin
The sprinter
In dreams, hears the starter's gun all through the night
The juggler can't catch his eggs
Street lamps explode with a loud shriek
In its coat of yolk the night grows more grotesque
The woman in her nightgown
Yanks the door open, shaking heaven and earth
Like a deer, she runs wildly barefoot across the carpet
A huge moth flits across the wall
Plunges into the crackling fire of a ringing telephone
In the receiver
Silence
Only snow
Goes on singing, far away, on the power lines
Translated by John Rosenwald and the
Beloit/Fudan Translation Workshop
(1955-)
Yang Lian, one of the original Misty Poets, has been nominated for the Nobel Prize in literature. He was born in Bern, Switzerland, to a family of diplomats posted in the Chinese embassy. His parents returned to China before he was a year old, and he was raised in Beijing. During the Cultural Revolution he was sent to be “reeducated” in the countryside, where he worked as a grave digger and began to write poetry. Yang was a cofounder of
Jin-tian
, the seminal independent literary magazine associated with the Beijing Spring. In 1983, during the Anti-Spiritual Pollution Campaign, the Chinese government banned his work, criticizing his poem cycle “Nuorilang.” Since 1989, the year of the Democracy Movement and the Tiananmen Square massacre, two of his books have been banned on the Chinese mainland. He took on New Zealand citizenship and has also lived in exile in Australia, Germany, and the United States. He has worked at the University of Auckland and has been a writer in residence in Berlin and Taipei City and at the University of Sydney and the Yaddo Foundation.
He currently lives in London and is married to Yo Yo, a novelist. Collections of his poetry in English include
Yi, In Symmetry with Death, Masks and Crocodile, Where the Sea Stands Still, Notes of a Blissful Ghost
, and
The Dead in Exile.
(From the Poem Cycle “Bell on the Frozen Lake”)
How should I savor these bright memories,
their glowing gold, shining jade, their tender radiance like
silk that washed over me at birth?
All around me were industrious hands, flourishing peonies,
and elegant upturned eaves.
Banners, inscriptions, and the names of nobility were everywhere,
and so many temple halls where bright bells sang into my ears.
Then my shadow slipped over the fields and mountains, rivers
and springtime
as all around my ancestors' cottages I sowed
towns and villages like stars of jade and gemstones.
Flames from the fire painted my face red; plowshares and pots
clattered out their bright music and poetry that wove into the sky during festivals.
How should I savor these bright memories?
When I was young I gazed down at the world,
watching purple grapes, like the night, drift in from the west
and spill over in a busy street. Every drop of juice became a star
set into the bronze mirror where my glowing face looked back.
My heart blossomed like the earth or the ocean at daybreak
as camel bells and sails painted like frescoes embarked
from where I was to faraway lands to clink the gold coin
of the sun.
When I was born
I would laugh even at
the glazed and opulent palaces, at the bloody red
walls, and at the people rapt in luxurious dreams
for centuries in their incense-filled chambers.
I sang my pure song to them with passion,
but never stopped to think
why pearls and beads of sweat drain to the same place,
these rich tombs filled with emptiness,
or why in a trembling evening
a village girl should wander down to the river,
her eyes so clear and bright with grief.
In the end, smoking powder and fire erupted in the courtyard;
between endless mountains and the plain, horse hooves
came out of the north, and there was murder and wailing
and whirling flags and banners encircling me like magic clouds,
like the patched clothes of refugees.
I saw the torrential Yellow River
by moonlight unfolding into a silver white elegy
keening for history and silence.
Where are the familiar streets, people, and sounds?
And where are the seven-leaved tree and new grass,
the river's song beneath a bridge
of my dreams?
There is only the blood of an old man selling flowers
clotting my soul,
only the burned houses, the rubble and ruins
gradually sinking into shifting sands and
turning into dreams, into a wasteland.
Translated by Tony Barnstone and
Newton Liu
The decrepit century's bony brow protrudes
and its wounded shoulders shiver.
Snow buries the ruins—below this whiteness an undertow
of uneasiness, through the deep shadows of trees it drifts,
and a stray voice is broadcast across time.
There is no way
through this land that death has made an enigma.
The decrepit century deceives its children,
leaving illegible calligraphy and snow
on the stones everywhere to augment the ornamental decay.
My hands cling to a sheaf of my poems.
When my unnamed moment arrives, call me!
But the wind's small skiff scuds off bearing history
and on my heels like a shadow
an ending follows.
Now I understand it all.
To sob out loud refutes nothing when the fingers of young girls
and the shy myrtle are drowned in purple thornbrush.
From the eyes meteors streak into the endless sea
but I know that in the end all souls will rise again,
soaked with the fresh breath of the sea,
with eternal smiles, with voices that refuse humiliation,
and climb into blue heaven.
There I can read out my poems.
I will believe every icicle is a sun,
that because of me an eerie light will permeate these ruins
and I'll hear music from this wasteland of stones.
I'll suckle from swollen buds like breasts
and have renewed dignity and a holy love.
I'll bare my heart in these clean white snowfields
as I do in the clean white sky
and as a poet
challenge this decrepit century.
As a poet
when I want the rose to bloom, it will blossom;
freedom will come back carrying a small shell
where you can hear echoes of a howling storm.
Daybreak will return, the key of dawn will unlock
the wailing forests, and ripe fruits will shoot out flame.
I, too, will return, exhume my suffering again,
and begin to plow this land drifted in snow.
Translated by Tony Barnstone and
Newton Liu
They say that you tripped on a piece of skipping elastic
And you jumped out of the house of white chalk
On a day of terrifyingly loud rain
Nine bullet holes in your body exude a sweetness
They say that you lost the moon while you were playing
Green grass on the grave Are new teeth
Sprouting where there is no need for grief
You did not die They say
You still sit at the small wooden desk
Looks crash noisily against the blackboard
The school bell suddenly rings
A burst of nothingness Your death is killed
They say Now You are a woman and a mother And each year there is a birthday without you just as when you were alive
Translated by Mabel Lee
(1956-)
Ha Jin was born in Liaoning. The son of an army officer, he entered the People's Army early in the Cultural Revolution at a time when the schools were closed. He worked as a telegraph operator for some time, then went back to school, earning a BA and an MA. After coming to the United States and taking his Ph.D. in English and American literature at Brandeis University, he taught at Emory University before becoming a professor of English at Boston University. He has published three books of poetry—
Between Silences, Facing Shadows
, and
Wreckage
— three short story collections, and four novels, including
Waiting
, for which he won the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award.
Like so many of his contemporaries, Ha Jin elected to remain in exile from China after the Tiananmen Square massacre: “After June 1989 I realized that I could not return to China in the near future if I wanted to be a writer who has the freedom to write.” He is in the unusual position of being a Chinese poet and fiction writer who works in English and lives in America. As he writes in a letter: “Without question, I am a Chinese writer, not an American-Chinese poet, though I write in English. If this sounds absurd, the absurdity is historical rather than personal… since I can hardly publish anything in Chinese now.” The craft of a novelist can be seen in Ha Jin's poems: he often writes in dramatic monologue, recording history from the inside, from the point of view of its imperfect and often unsympathetic protagonists.
Although you were the strongest boy in our neighborhood
you could beat none of us. Whenever
we fought with you we would shout:
“Your father was a landlord.
You are a bastard of a blackhearted landlord.”
Or we would mimic your father's voice
when he was publicly denounced:
“My name is Li Wanbao. I was a landlord;
before liberation I exploited my hired hands
and the poor peasants. I am guilty
and my guilt deserves ten thousand deaths.”
Then you would withdraw your hard fists
and flee home cursing and weeping like a wild cat.
You fought only with your hands,
but we fought with both our hands and our words.
We fought and fought and fought
until we overgrew you and overgrew ourselves,
until you and we were sent to the same village
working together in the fields
sharing tobacco and sorghum spirits at night
and cursing the brigade leader behind his back
when he said: “You, petty bourgeoisie,
must take your ‘reeducation' seriously!”
Until none of us had words.
Sometimes when you're walking in the street,
returning home or leaving to see a friend,
they come. They emerge from behind pillars and trees,
approaching you like a pack of hounds besieging a deer.
You know there's no use to hide or flee,
so you stop and light a cigarette, waiting for them.