The Anchor Book of Chinese Poetry

by Tony Barnstone

“At what point in the struggle for better conditions will you succeed in increasing your servility?”

  Just then, I began to envy the horse left behind in the stables.

  Just then, the man riding me struck my face.

  Translated by John Cayley

  Five Years

  Five glasses of strong liquor, five candles, five years

  Forty-three years old, a huge sweat at midnight

  Fifty hands flap toward the tabletop

  A flock of birds clenching their fists fly in from yesterday

  Five strings of red firecrackers applaud the fifth month, thunder rumbles

  between five fingers

  And four parasitic poisonous mushrooms on four dead horses' tongues

  in the fourth month

  do not die

  Five hours past five o'clock on day five five candies are extinguished

  Yet the landscape screaming at dawn does not die

  Hair dies but tongues do not die

  The temper recovered from the cooked meat does not die

  Fifty years of mercury seep into semen and semen does not die

  The fetus delivering itself does not die

  Five years pass, five years do not die

  Within five years, twenty generations of insects die out

  Translated by Gregory B. Lee

  SHU TING

  (1952-)

  Shu Ting is the pen name of Gong Peiyu. Associated with the Misty school, she was the leading woman poet in China in the 1980s. A southeast Fujian native, she was sent to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution before she graduated from junior high school. Then she worked in a cement factory and later a textile mill and a lightbulb factory. In 1979 she published her first poem and in 1983 was asked to be a professional writer by the Writers' Association, Fujian Branch, of which she is now the deputy chairperson. Her collections include Brigantines (1982) and Selected Lyrics of Shu Ting and Gu Cheng (1985). She has also published several books of prose.

  Along with many of the Misty Poets, Shu Ting was attacked in the early 1980s during the Anti-Spiritual Pollution Campaign, and yet she twice won the National Poetry Award, in 1981 and 1983. Deeply romantic in nature, her work can be understood as a reaction to the repression of romance in literature, film, song, and theater during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966–1976). Although her poems sometimes don't read as well in English translation as they do in Chinese, they have a crystalline, lyrical strength that often rescues them from their saccharine tendencies and that has made Shu Ting the best-known contemporary Chinese woman poet in the West.

  Two or Three Incidents Recollected

  An overturned cup of wine.

  A stone path sailing in moonlight.

  Where the blue grass is flattened,

  an azalea flower abandoned.

  The eucalyptus wood swirls.

  Stars above teem into a kaleidoscope.

  On a rusty anchor,

  eyes mirror the dizzy sky.

  Holding up a book to shade the candle

  and with a finger in between the lips,

  I sit in an eggshell quiet,

  having a semitransparent dream.

  Translated by Chou Ping

  Perhaps

  —Reply to the Loneliness of a Poet

  Perhaps our hearts

  will have no reader

  Perhaps we took the wrong road

  and so we end up lost

  Perhaps we light one lantern after another

  storms blow them out one by one

  Perhaps we burn our life candle against the dark

  but no fire warms the body

  Perhaps once we're out of tears

  the land will be fertilized

  Perhaps while we praise the sun

  we are also sung by the sun

  Perhaps the heavier the monkey on our shoulders

  the more we believe

  Perhaps we can only protest others' suffering

  silent to our own misfortune

  Perhaps

  because this call is irresistible

  we have no other choice

  Translated by Tony Barnstone and Newton Liu

  Missing You

  A colorful hanging chart with no lines.

  A pure algebra problem with no solution.

  A one-string harp, stirring rosaries

  that hang from dripping eaves.

  A pair of oars that can never reach

  the other side of the ocean.

  Waiting silently like a bud.

  Gazing at a distance like a setting sun.

  Perhaps an ocean is hidden somewhere,

  but when it flows out—only two tears.

  O in the background of a heart,

  in the deep well of a soul.

  Translated by Chou Ping

  Dream of an Island

  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

  Mirror

  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

  A Night at the Hotel

  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 s
printer

  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

  YANG LIAN

  (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.

  An Ancient Children's Tale

  (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

  An Elegy for Poetry

  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

  To a Nine-Year-Old Girl Killed in the Massacre

  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

  HA JIN

  (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.

  Our Words

  Although you were the strongest boy in our neighborhood