Read The Anchor Book of Chinese Poetry Online
Authors: Tony Barnstone
7
Regret probably begins in the middle of fire
He gazes out the window into the distance
His head
Sways with the flight of birds
His eyes change colors as the sun sets
The name that he cries out
Sinks into the echoes
All night long he paces around the room
In front of every window in Weiyang Palace
He stops
Cold pale fingers nip the candlewick
Amid muffled coughs
All the begonias in the Forbidden City
Wilt overnight in
The autumn wind
He ties his beard into knot after knot, unties and ties it again, then walks with his hands behind his back, the sound of his footfalls footfalls footfalls, a tuberose exploding behind the curtain, then he stretches out all ten fingers to grab a copy of the
Annotated Classic of Waters
, the water drip-dripping, he cannot understand at all why the river sobs instead of bellows when it flows through the palm of his hand
He throws on a gown and gets up
He sears his own skin
He is awakened by cold jade
A thousand candles burn in a thousand rooms A bright moon shines on the sleepless A woman walks toward him along the wall Her face an illusion in the mist
8
Suddenly
He searches in a frenzy for that lock of black hair
And she hands over
A wisp of smoke
It is water and will rise to become a cloud
It is soil and will be trampled into parched moss
The face hiding among the leaves
Is more despairing than the sunset
A chrysanthemum at the corner of her mouth
A dark well in her eyes
A war raging in her body
A storm brewing
Within her palm
She no longer suffers from toothache
She will never again come down with
Tang dynasty measles
Her face dissolved in water is a relative white and an absolute black
She will no longer hold a saucer of salt and cry out with thirst
Her hands, which were used to being held
Now point
Tremblingly
To a cobbled road leading to Changan
9
Time: seventh day of the seventh month
Place: Palace of Longevity
A tall thin man in blue
A faceless woman
Flames still rising
In the white air
A pair of wings
Another pair
Fly into the moonlight outside the palace
Whispers
Receding farther and farther away
Glint bitterly
An echo or two reverberate through the storm
Translated by Michelle Yeh
Bei Dao is the pen name of Zhao Zhenkai (he took the name, which means “North Island,” to hide his identity while publishing an underground magazine). He was born in Beijing, where his father was a cadre (administrator) and his mother a doctor. When he was seventeen years old he joined the Red Guard movement of the Cultural Revolution. He became disillusioned with it and was sent to be reeducated in the countryside, where he was a construction worker, a profession he maintained from 1969 to 1980.
Bei Dao's poetry has long been associated with the Democracy Movement. His early poems were a source of inspiration for the young participants of the April Fifth Democracy Movement (1976) as well as the Beijing Spring of 1979. They were popularized in the famous underground literary magazine
Jintian (Today)
, which he started with poet Mang Ke. (
Jintian
was shut down by the authorities in 1980 but was launched again in 1990 in Stockholm by Chinese writers in exile.) Bei Dao soon became the leading poet of the 1980s and the most famous representative of Misty (
mengleng)
poetry, a style influenced by Western modernism, symbolism, and surrealism, which came in for fierce criticism by the defenders of the Social Realist poetry that Mao had championed. By the mid-1980s, with the acceptance of Chinese modernism and the thaw in official censorship, Bei Dao gained mainstream recognition. He edited an official magazine, became a member of the Chinese Writers' Association, and worked at the Foreign Languages Press in Beijing, but he did become a target of the government's Anti-Spiritual Pollution Campaign of 1983–1984. During the 1989 Democracy Movement, his poetry was circulated among the student demonstrators, and he signed an open letter asking for the release of political prisoners. At the time of the Tiananmen Square massacre, he was overseas at a writer's conference. He has since elected to remain in exile.
During the Cultural Revolution the Red Guards, in search of “counterrevolutionary” materials, often raided the houses of intellectuals and cadres. Bei Dao participated in these raids. When he was living in the countryside, a cache of books stolen during one of these raids became essential to his education, introducing him to Western literature in translation. Bei Dao's poetics were influenced especially by the transformative imagery of Federico García Lorca; the surrealism of Vicente Aleixandre, Tomas Transtromer, César Vallejo, and Georg Trakl; the pastorals of Antonio Machado; and the sentiment and delicacy of Rainer Maria Rilke. In an interview Bei Dao says that of all the poets who have influenced him, “I like Celan best because I think there is a deep affinity between him and myself in the way he combines the sense of pain with language experiments. He transforms his experience in the concentration camps into a language of pain. That is very similar to what I am trying to do. Many poets separate their experience from the language they use in poetry, but in the case of Celan there is a fusion, a convergence of experience and experimental language.”
1
Bei Dao's work has been widely translated and anthologized, and several collections of his poetry are available in English:
At the Sky's Edge: Poems 1991–1996
(2001),
Unlock
(2000),
Landscape over Zero
(1998),
Forms of Distance
(1994),
Old Snow
(1992), and
The August Sleepwalker
(1988). His short story collection,
Waves
, and his book of essays,
Blue House
, have also appeared in English. He is currently living in the United States and has taught at the University of California, Davis, the University of Michigan, and Beloit College. He is often mentioned as a candidate for the Nobel Prize and has been made an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Here is where roads become
parallel light beams
a long conversation suddenly broken
Truck drivers' pungent smoke suffuses the air
with rude indistinct curses
Fences replace people in a line
Light seeping out from the cracks of doors
tossed to the roadside with cigarette butts
is tread on by swift feet
A billboard leans on an old man's lost stick
about to walk away
A stone water lily withered
in the fountain pool, a building deliberates collapse
The rising moon suddenly strikes
a bell again and again
the past reverberates within palace walls
The sundial is turning and calibrating deviations
waiting for the emperor's grand morning ceremony
Brocade dresses and ribbons toss up in the breeze
and brush dust from the stone steps
A shadow of a tramp slinks past the wall
colorful neon lights glow for him
but deprive him of sleep all through the night
A stray cat jumps on a bench
watching a trembling mist of floating light
But a mercury lamp rudely opens window curtains
to peer at the privacy of others
disturbing lonely people and their dreams
Behind a small door
a hand quietly draws the catch
as if pulling a gun bolt
Translated by Tony Barnstone and
Newton Liu
Lock secrets in a drawer
write notes in my favorite book
put a letter in the mailbox and stand silent awhile
gazing after passersby in the wind, worry about nothing
eyes caught by a shop window's neon flash
insert a coin into a pay phone
bum a cigarette from an old man fishing under a bridge
from a river steamer a vast empty foghorn
stare at myself in a dim full-length mirror
in the smoke of a cinema entrance
as window curtains muffle the noisy sea of stars
open some faded photos and letters under the lamplight
Translated by Tony Barnstone and
Newton Liu
The sunset and distant mountains
interleaf a crescent moon
moving in the elm woods
an empty bird nest
a small trail encircles the pond
chasing a dog with a dirty coat
then runs into the mud wall at the end of the village
hanging bucket swaying lazily over a well
a bell as silent
as the stone roller in the yard
scattered uneasy wheat stalks
the chewing noise in a horse stall
is redolent with threat
someone's long shadow
slips across the stone doorsteps
firelight from a kitchen range
casts a red glow on a woman's arms
and a chipped earthenware basin
Translated by Tony Barnstone and
Newton Liu
Over this forgotten land
years entangled with bells on the bridles of horses
rang out until dawn, and on the road harsh panting
under a heavy burden turned into a song
sung by people everywhere.
A woman's necklace lifted into the night sky
to the sound of incantation as if responding to a calling
and the lascivious fluorescent dial struck at random.
Time is honest as a wrought-iron fence;
only the wind sheared by withered branches
can get in or out.
Flowers that blossom only in the eternal prison
of a book become the concubines of truth,
but the lamp that burst yesterday
is so incandescent in a blind man's heart
right to the instant he is shot down
that a picture of the assassin is captured
in his suddenly open eyes.
Translated by Tony Barnstone and
Newton Liu
The base make a safe-conduct pass of their own baseness,
while honest men's honor is their epitaph.
Look—the gold-plated sky is brimming
with drifting reflections of the dead.
If the Ice Age is long over
why does everything hang with icicles?
The Cape of Good Hope has been found long ago,
so why do sails still contend in the Dead Sea?
I came to this world with nothing but paper,
rope, and my own shadow
to speak for the condemned
before sentencing:
Listen to me, world,
I—don't—believe!
You've piled a thousand enemies at your feet.
Count me as a thousand and one.
I don't believe the sky is blue.
I don't believe in echoing thunder.
I don't believe dreams are just fantasy,
that there is no revenge after death.
If the ocean must burst through the seawall,
let its bitter water irrigate my heart.
If the continents are destined to pile up,
let us choose the mountain peaks as our hermitage.
Glittering stars and new spinning events
pierce the naked sky,
like pictographs five thousand years old,
like the coming generation's watching eyes.
Translated by Tony Barnstone and Newton Liu
The pagoda's shadow on the grass is a pointer
sometimes marking you, sometimes me
we are just a step apart
separation or reunion, this is a repeating
theme: hatred is only one step away
the sky sways on a foundation of fear
a building with windows open in all directions
we live inside
or outside of it: death just one step away
children have learned how to talk to the wall
this city's history is sealed in an old man's
heart: decrepitude is just a step away
Translated by Tony Barnstone and
Newton Liu
With thin tears a widow worships an idol
while a pack of newborn hungry wolves waits to be fed
barely alive, they escape the world one by one
my howls echo through the stretching mountains
together we circled the state farm
from which you came, when cooking smoke twined into the sky
and crowns of wild chrysanthemums floated on the wind
thrusting out your slight firm breasts
you came to me in a field
where stone outcrops drown in passionate wheat
now you are that widow and I
am what's been lost, with beauty, life, desire
how we lay together in heavy sweat
how our bed drifted on the morning river
Translated by Tony Barnstone and
Newton Liu
On the unpredictable winds
I painted an eye
the moment frozen then gone
but no one woke up
the nightmare kept right on into the light of day
flooding through streambeds, crawling across cobblestones
increasing in presence and pressure
among branches, along the eaves
the birds' terrified eyes froze
fell out
over cart tracks in the road
a crust of frost formed
no one woke up
Translated by James A. Wilson
This is you, this is
driven-mad-by-magic-shadows-whirling you,
first clear then cloudy
I won't go to you again
the bitter cold also deprives me of hope
many years, before the icebergs formed
fish would float to the water's face
then sink away, many years
the reverent wing beats of my heart
bear me gently through the drifting night
lamplight breaks upon steel beams
many years, silent and alone
here there are no clocks in the rooms
when people left they also took
the keys, many years
within thick fog, a whistle blasts
from a fast train over a bridge
season after season
set out from small railway stations among the fields
linger at each tree
the open flowers bear fruit, many years
Translated by James A. Wilson