The Anchor Book of Chinese Poetry

by Tony Barnstone

  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

  (1904–1955)

  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.

  Sitting in Quietude

  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

  (1905–1950)

  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.

  A Chopped-off Finger

  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.”

  A Rainy Lane

  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.

  Written on a Prison Wall

  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

  (1905–1993)

  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, Yun
nan 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.

  Sonnet 1

  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.

  Sonnet 2

  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.

  Sonnet 6

  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.

  Sonnet 16

  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.

  Sonnet 21

  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.

  Sonnet 23 (On a Puppy)

  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.

  Sonnet 24

  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.

  Sonnet 27

  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.

  AI QING

  (1910–1996)

  Ai Qing is the pen name of Jiang Zhenghan (or Jiang Haicheng), a revolutionary free verse poet born in Jinhua, Zhejiang province. At the age of nineteen he went to France to study painting. Inspired by Western poetry, especially the work of the French symbolists and the Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, he shifted from painting to poetry and began writing free verse. In 1932 he returned to China and after joining the League of Left-Wing Artists in Shanghai was arrested for sedition. While in prison he wrote a famous long poem, The Dayan River, My Nurse. He was active in the resistance to the Japanese invasion of China, and published a literary magazine titled The Battlefield of Literature. In 1941 he went to Yenan and taught in the Yenan Lu Xun Art Academy. He became a Communist, and though initially accepted in China's post-Revolution society (he was dean of the College of Literature at North China Associated University and editor of the nationally distributed journal People's Literature), he was purged in the 1957 Anti-Rightist Campaign and sent to work in state farms in the far provinces for eighteen years. After Mao's Zedong's death in 1976, Ai Qing was able to return to writing and in 1979 became vice chairman of the China Writers' Association. Despite his own experience with official censorship and persecution, he participated in the government's attacks on the Misty Poets in the 1980s. In addition to poetry, he published several books of criticism.

  Gambling Men

  At the shady bottom of the city wall,

  In the dark corner by the houses,

  Gamblers squat in the middle of a cr
owd,

  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

  (1910-)

  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.