POETRY FROM WELLSWEEP BOOKS:
from:
Selected Poems by YANG LIAN
WellSweep Chinese Poets 6
translated by Brian Holton
the crocodile, nostrils shut tight as a word
disdains to notice you
just sinks or floats at the surface of this white page
in despair you cry for help
with long-submerged words
sink into water full of crocodiles
those who live in time know time isn’t time
a rock is itself a poem
and shadow engraved as a seat by a lake
weeds every June read aloud here
snow the silver-white book of the dead
and the brush of steel wire and coir is still stubbornly sweeping
a pair of muddy shoes of coffin wood
a set of paper handcuffs make the convict more terrified yet
these words go wrong when written down
words carved on cliffs ride on a runaway cable car
broken apart day after day
poets who leap into a poem deserve only to be broken apart
in an imagination more lifelike than death
snow is a once-only walk once and once only
June rots in chorus as the bodies of the dead ring bells
all men are ringing solitary bells that are fulfilled in this moment
dying more lifelike than in imagination
snow has gone too far can’t help burying everything
from:
YANG LIAN
WellSweep Chinese Poets 6+
translated by Brian Holton
with reproductions of paintings
by the Paris-based dramatist, Gao Xingjian
blue is always higher just as your weariness has chosen
the sea just as a man's gaze compels the sea
to be twice as desolate
going back as ever
to that carved stone ear where drumbeats are destroyed
where tiny coral corpses fall in a snowstorm
gaudy speckles on dead fish
like the sky that holds all your lust
go back to the limit like limitlessness
going back to the cliffs stormheads all around
your pipes doomed to go on playing
after your death tunes of corruption deep in the flesh
as blue is recognized at last the wounded
sea a million candles stands dazzlingly still
Thus I transform, translate. I hear the cliffs and the concrete,
my life is translated, and this is eternal
talking in ciphers, freely beyond comprehension.
The sea’s edge breaks and ripples, the tide, in its rising
and falling demolishes certainty.
Coming and going the stars to steer by. Write it
it is so.
XIV
All the old dynasties breaking, one remains
birdheart and flower unfolding,
characters written. I ride the cliffs in calligraphy,
see all folk, the first Spring bee, and break in laughing.
The salt-water cipher of zero releases, the emerald
wave that breaks and splinters,
blooming into eternal sky.
ONE DAY when I had finished work and returned to my bedroom I first pulled off one of my gloves and threw it on the bed. I then pulled out a cigarette from the packet and stuck it in my mouth. Just as I had lit a match and was preparing to inhale I suddenly found myself staring through the black smoke curling above the flame at the rough and once white glove, which had been coloured red by red earth, black by black earth and red-brown by a mixture of red and black earth.
At that moment, as it had left my hand, the glove was naturally quite empty and flat. The index finger was bent and formed an angle of thirty degrees, the little finger I couldn’t see, as it was squashed and hidden under the ring finger and the middle finger; it looked indeed as if the glove had lost one finger oh, how it must suffer from feelings of loneliness and pain. I hurriedly shook my hand and extinguished the match, pulled off the other glove and in great haste threw it beside the glove on the bed.
The other glove landed on its back with spread-out fingers, deprived of strength. The tips of the fingers pointed at the first glove, with which it formed a right angle, from a distance of about ten centimetres. To say that the gloves were resting wouldn’t do, since they were actually quivering. There they lay, a pair of rough and red-brown gloves which had once been white. What better symbol than these gloves of total hopelessness, utterly empty sadness and a human being who has reached the utmost degree of degradation? Not even a widow who dances a slow waltz with an overcoat.
The book is composed of translations and adaptations in pairs, like the following sample poems the first by John Cayley and the second by David Burnett both based on an original by Chang Jian (8th century AD).
Dawn clears
And enters the old temple,
First light
Caught in the woods’ tall boughs.
A crooked path
Leads straight to the dark retreat
Where monks just sit
Flowers and trees are deep.
Mountain light
Blessed by bird song,
Dark waters
Stilled in a man’s heart.
Here, the howl
Of nature is silent
So only the tone
Of the soul shall sound.
A thousand years
Pine shingle and bowed eaves,
A roof shouldering the sky.
Hanging upon air
Sound falls to nothing here
A thousand feet beneath.
At dawn a hill of song
And the pure emptiness of light,
Each call a hill of light,
And the light singing in each place.
To the rear hall
You climb woods thick with blossom
And half a mile of air.
Here a world falls to shape.
You hear nothing, only
The bright stillness of the air
And a bell gathering its silence,
A sound emptying the sky.
Flower or not flower; mist or not mist was here
At midnight, came with day, no longer there!
Came, as a dream of spring, a time;
Went, like a cloud at dawn, no where.
Bai Juyi
(also transcribed: Po Chü-i)
Spring: The murderer you’ve never met.
Spring: Sharp emaciated wolf pack, a mirror dressed in snow.
Spring: One says: Sell!
Another is driving up the prices.
Spring: Lovers swarm the cliff top. The golden throats ring out.
Spring: Music perseveres. A vigorous old hand writes a careless
signature. All blood of midnight is black.
Spring: Shame is her storehouse.
Spring: The face has been erased from the prison wall.
White buttocks, wrenching her sex.
Spring: Spying and overhearing.
Spring: Judas mounting the crucifix, a forgery. A displacement.
Yet the mask is always the same.
Spring: A market of counterfeits.
Spring: The principles of pygmies.
Spring: Heat and movement. The extravagant aspirations of lilac.
Light, a metaphysical tiger, descending the mountain
to drink.
Spring: _________________________________________________ hostage,
__________.
Spring: __________!
_________________________________________________.
Spring: A filthy blade. Anger and shoes.
Spring: From whom will you borrow?
______________________________________ absent.
Spring: The bud’s clue, the secret of the horse’s eye. Shadows
wrestling on the desert. Timidity inscribed on the medical
history.
Spring: You grind a brick to make a mirror, and see me reflected:
a man in love with poverty.
Spring: You gather snow as provisions, give aid to these promises
of promises:
on the equator of famine
at the adjudication beneath the apple tree
during the oath-taking and the weeping
as blossoms cluster round both nuptial bed and tomb
Spring.
DAOZI
translated by John Cayley
Each time, I
climb this hazardous stairway, with slow steps
circling upward, reaching the top,
switching on the light.
It is a ritual I return to,
led upwards in the darkness by the stairway
step by step, just as before.
And what if I did not take out my keys at the doorway
but raised my hand
to knock,
as if there were someone waiting for me
inside the room perhaps
my former self
would open up the darkness.
August 1990
at my old home near Hepingmen