“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
The Anchor Book of Chinese Poetry Page 42
