〈夏歌〉節錄

“Summer Song” is part of Five Seasons, a fifty-six-poem sequence that explores human relationships with spring 春, summer 夏, autumn 秋, and winter 冬—not only as the four seasons but also as written characters that have their own shapes, sounds, meanings, and potentials to form other meanings with other characters.

Chen Li’s poems often push the boundary between word and thing, sometimes even temporarily erasing it (as in his concrete works). To Chen Li, words are more than signifiers; instead of being summoned by things, words deploy things by forming creative constellations. For example, in Chinese 夏 (xia) means “summer” and is also the name of a dynasty, 夏朝 (xia chao). Another meaning of 朝 (pronounced zhao), “morning,” provides a counterpoint for the excerpt’s summer night settings. Homophony is another source of such constellations, as in 濕意 (shiyi, “wetness”) and 詩意 (shiyi, “poetic quality”), 兵 (bing, “soldier”) and 冰 (bing, “ice”), 碟 (die, “disk”) and 蝶 (die, “butterfly”). Just like the flower mahjong tiles that grow as vegetation after being scattered by the gods, Chen Li’s character-driven thoughts create an interactive site where signifiers and signifieds stimulate each other. Through this process, the poem sequence uncovers excesses and shortfalls of the seasons, nature, time, and life.

In translating, my goal is to retain as much as possible the fluidity between word and thing, and the grapheme-based nuances. Sometimes, this would mean working around the characters involved, rather than looking for direct equivalents. For instance, section IV plays on the homophonous 碟 (die, “disk”) and 蝶 (die, “butterfly”). A middle ground in English could be “flash,” as in “flash drive” and as an allusion to how butterflies appear. This way of translating shows that Chen Li’s poems are amenable to a wide spectrum of translative potentials.