Read The Anchor Book of Chinese Poetry Online
Authors: Tony Barnstone
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 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.
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, 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.
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.”
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.