The following poems by Bian Zhilin
were translated by Michelle Yeh
Entering the Dream
Imagine yourself slightly ill (On an autumn afternoon),
Looking at the gray sky and the sparse tree shadows on the windowpanes,
Lying on a pillow left by someone who has traveled far,
And thinking of the blurry lakes and hills, barely recognizable on
the pillow,
As if they were the elusive trail of an old friend who has vanished
in the wind,
As if they were things of the past written on faded stationery—
Traces of history visible under a lamp
In a book, yellowed with age, in front of an old man.
Will you not be lost
In the dream?
Fragment
You are standing on a bridge enjoying the view;
Someone's watching you from a balcony.
The moon adorns your window;
You adorn someone else's dream.
Loneliness
Scared of loneliness,
A country boy kept a cricket by his pillow.
When he grew up and worked in town,
He bought a watch with a luminous face.
When little, he was envious of
The grass on a tomb—it was a home for crickets.
Now he has been dead for three hours;
His watch keeps on ticking.
Migratory Birds
How many courtyards, how many squares of blue sky?
Divide them among yourselves, for I am leaving.
Let a belled white pigeon circle three times overhead—
But camel bells are far away. Listen.
I throw a yo-yo to keep you, fly a kite to bind you,
Send a paper eagle, a paper swallow, and a paper rooster
To the sky—to greet the wild geese from the south?
Am I a toy for some child?
I think I'll go to the library to check out A Study of Migratory Birds.
Tell me, are you for or against the new law
Forbidding airplanes to fly across the city sky?
My thoughts are like gossamers for little spiders:
They tie me to let me float. I am leaving.
I'll give it some thought at some other place.
How many courtyards, how many squares of blue sky?
How can I go on being an antenna,
Stretching out two arms on the roof in vain,
Never receiving the sound waves I desire?
Train Station
“Pull it out, pull it out”—from the depth of my dream
Another night train comes. This is reality.
Ancients by the river sigh over the tides;
I am standing at the train station like an advertisement.
Boy, listen to the bee fretting inside the window,
Nail a live butterfly to the wall
To decorate my reality here.
The old mattresses that once squeaked,
The small earthquakes that once shook my dreams,
My pounding heartbeats—
Do they now bewilder the train?
When did I ever want to be a station of dreams!
1 Bonnie S. McDougall and Kam Louie, The Literature of China in the Twentieth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), p. 75.
HE QIFANG
(1912.-1977)
He Qifang (born He Yongfang) was a poet and an essayist descended from a wealthy family of landowners in Wanxian, Sichuan province. After homeschooling in the classics, he went to Shanghai for a modern education and from 1931to 1935 studied philosophy at Beijing University. He was deeply influenced by Western literature. As Bonnie S. McDougall and Kam Louie write, “He Qifang's poetry gives an unusually vivid depiction of the author's progress through romanticism, symbolism, neo-romanticism, modernism, and Russian futurism, from dreamer to patriot.”1 In 1938 He Qifang moved to Yenan, where he taught at the Lu Xun Institute of Art and Literature. He joined the Communist Party in Yenan, which was the base of Mao Zedong's Red Army, and after the 1949 Communist Revolution he continued to be an important literary figure in the Writers' Association. He was an editor of the journals People's Literature and Literary Criticism and the director of the Literary Research Institute of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, and he wrote propaganda poetry for the new state. Despite his stalwart Communism, he was persecuted during the Cultural Revolution and sent to the countryside to be “reeducated.” He died of stomach cancer.
The following poems by He Qifang
were translated by Michelle Yeh.
Autumn
Shaking down the dew of early morning,
A clinking, lumbering sound drifts beyond the deep ravine.
The scythe, sated with scented rice, is laid down;
Shoulder baskets hold plump melons and fruits from the hedges.
Autumn is resting in a farmer's home.
A round net is cast into the river of cold mist
And collects the shadows of dark cypress leaves, like blue
Hoary frost on the tips of the reeds,
While homeward oars dip and pull.
Autumn is playing in the fishing boat.
The grassy field seems wider when the crickets chirp;
The stream looks clearer when it dries up.
Where did the bamboo flute on the ox's back go,
Its holes overflowing with summery scent and warmth?
Autumn is dreaming in the shepherdess's eyes.
Shrine to the Earth God
Sunlight shines on the broad leaves of castor-oil plants,
Beehives nestle in the earth-god shrine.
Running against my shadow,
I have returned circuitously
And realized the stillness of time.
But on the grass,
Where are those short-armed children who chased after chirping crickets?
Where are those joyous cries of my childhood playmates,
Rising to the blue sky at the treetops?
The vast kingdom of childhood
Appears pathetically small
Under my feet, which are dusty with foreign dust.
In the desert, travelers treasure a glass of water;
A sailor resents the white waves beyond his oars.
I used to think I possessed a paradise
And hid it in the darkest corner of my memory.
Since then I have experienced the loneliness of an adult
And grown fonder of the mazes of paths in dreams.
1 Bonnie S. McDougall and Kam Louie, The Literature of China in the Twentieth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), p. 77.
LUO FU
(1928-)
Ma Luofu, known by his pen name Luo Fu, was born in Henyang, in mainland China's Hunan province, and went to Hunan University. He became a military man during the war years of the late 1930s and early 1940s, and in 1949, the year of the Communist Revolution, he moved to Taiwan, where he studied in the English department of Tamkang College. He worked as a Navy broadcast reporter and liaison in Taiwan and in Vietnam, retiring in 1973 at the rank of commander. He was a cofounder of the Epoch Poetry Club and launched the very influential Epoch Poetry Quarterly, which published many soldier-poets. He made a large impact with his strange and obscure modernist collection Death in the Stone Cell (1964) and has since published many volumes of poetry and criticism.
Song of Everlasting Regret
That rose, like all roses, only bloomed for one morning.
—H. BALZAC
1
From
The sound of water
Emperor Xuan of the Tang dynasty
Extracts the sorrow in a lock of black hair
2
In the genealogy of the Yang clan
She is
An expanse of white flesh
Lying right there on the first page
A rose bush in the
mirror
In full flower, caressed by
What is called heaven-born beauty
A
Bubble
Waiting to be scooped up
From the Huaqing Pool
Heavenly music is everywhere
In Li Palace
The aroma of wine wafts in body odors
Lips, after being sucked hard
Can only moan
And the limbs outstretched on the ivory bed
Are mountains
And rivers too
A river sound asleep in another river
Underground rapids
Surge toward
The countryside
Until a white ballad
Breaks out of the soil
3
He raises his burned hand high
And cries out:
I make love
Because
I want to make love
Because
I am the emperor
Because we are used to encounters
Of flesh with blood
4
He begins to read newspapers, eat breakfast, watch her comb her
hair,
handle official papers in bed stamp a seal
stamp a seal
stamp a seal
stamp a seal
From then on
The emperor no longer holds court in the morning
5
He is the emperor
But war
Is a puddle of
Sticky fluid
That cannot be wiped off
Under the brocade coverlets
Slaughter is far away
Distant beacon fires snake upward, the sky is dumbfounded
By heart-stopping hairstyles
Leather drums with flame-red tongues
Lick the earth
6
Rivers and streams
Burn between the thighs
War
May not be abandoned
Campaigns are affairs of state
My lady, women's blood can flow in only one direction
Now the armies refuse to budge
All right, all right, you are the willow catkins
Before Mawei Slope
Let the wind in the square hold you aloft
A pile of expensive fertilizer
Is nourishing
Another rose bush
Or
Another incurable disease
In history
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
(1949-)
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 tra
nsforms 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.
Night: Theme and Variations
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
The Anchor Book of Chinese Poetry Page 40