For this week’s Translation Tuesday, we celebrate the start of National Poetry Month (U.S. and Canada) with an ode from one of China’s greatest contemporary poets to one of Sweden’s. Bei Dao’s “For T. Tranströmer” recounts the sights and sounds of Tomas Tranströmer’s home life while channeling the concrete, narrative accessibility of the Nobel laureate’s work. Like a sequence of developing photos, Bei Dao’s vivid imagery creates snapshots that are dreamlike yet somehow worldly: the poet’s creative “center” is likened to echoing church bells and dancing headless angels, while the subject’s piano (a well-known source of solace for the late poet) sits atop a cliff and produces a “roar like thunder.” The subject’s “blue home” (which we also see in Bei Dao’s essay collection Blue House, a philosophical memoir which details his visits with Tranströmer) becomes the setting of a poet’s silent sanctuary—a place where music, poetry, and nature coexist. The artistic comradery between these two literary giants is a fitting launch to National Poetry Month as we recognize the international kinship between poets and translators.
For T. Tranströmer’
you place the final line of a poem
in your heart, locked. that is your center,
like the echo of ringing church bells
or the moment when the headless angels
begin to dance. you have held your balance.
your piano sits perched on a cliff, its
audience gripped, tighter and tighter, by a roar
like thunder, its keys roused to sprint. your
memory of a hurtling night train, how has
it caught up to the darkness ahead?
from the station of your blue home you
braved the rain to study mushrooms. for
days and months, this was the forest’s signal:
behind the rainbow, seven years old, the area
is packed–they all wear their cars as masks.
“For T. Tranströmer” by Bei Dao, from FORMS OF DISTANCE, copyright ©1993 by Zhao Zhenkai. This translation appears by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.
Translated from the Chinese by Jonathan Chan
Bei Dao is the pen name of Zhao Zhenkai 趙振開, a major writer and poet of modern China. His poems first appeared in Today 今天, a magazine he co-founded. His works have been translated into over thirty languages, including English translations of his poems in Unlock (2000) and Landscape Over Zero (1996); essays in Blue House (2000) and Midnight’s Gate (2005). Bei Dao was elected an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and has received a number of literary awards. He is currently Professor of Humanities in the Centre for East Asian Studies at The Chinese University of Hong Kong.
Jonathan Chan is a recent graduate of Cambridge University. Born in New York to a Malaysian father and South Korean mother, he was raised in Singapore, where he is presently based. He is a naturalised Singaporean citizen. He is interested in questions of faith, identity, and human expression and has recently been moved by the work of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Wendell Berry, and Ken Liu. His work has appeared in The Shanghai Literary Review, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, Of Zoos, the Eunoia Review, and the Quarterly Literary Review of Singapore.
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