This Translation Tuesday, we flit between sleepless dreams in Mingwei Song’s immersive poetry. Hypnotized by incantations, we are firmly inside while the outside is ever-evolving; night falls and seasons pass. Translated from the Chinese by Eleanor Goodman, Angel and Bearing in Mind are an entrancing study of repetition and change.
Angel
Waking from a dream, I dimly recall you, like a broken-winged angel
carefully hiding yourself in the crowd, like a spot of cardamom red in a black and white movie and in the blink of an eye the entire sky dances with snow, the dream smashes into symbols
like melting ice, flowing into the morning’s sorrow
waking each day again and again
as star after star goes extinct
I can only get up, walk into the origami of ordinary life
turn carefully so as not to bump into the walls covered in incantations
in one vast white day
my body is shadowless
with nowhere to hide the worries of dreams
the daylight holds no warmth
yet is everywhere
the endless day is as hard to traverse as an enormous empire
there is blank white paper everywhere before my eyes
yet I cannot write down your name
Bearing in Mind
The end of a year, with days of interspersed rain and snow
the sunlight has nowhere to make a home
feeling the loneliness of the universe at noon
the flowers also turn to black and white
Do things that happen far away still have any connection to me?
all that joy, that fury
time and space are subsumed into an immeasurable darkness
the soul floats through the void like a firefly
before dusk, watching the rustling pines churn like the sea
the outside makes the room seem even darker
For two Sundays in a row I haven’t slept
the melancholy walls let out a sigh
everyone says the vastness of worry reaches up to the cosmos
helpless, I flip through a book of Jesuit astrology
knowing full well the arrangement of the heavens has long since changed
In a trance, the past and the present muddle into dreams
half dreaming and half awake, I silently chant incantations
hoping to enter a different dimension to sleep without waking
but the heart cannot pretend, it still hurts, it’s still wide awake
it still catches sight of the night sky at noon
and even more, the masters have now become stars
and we still live in darkness
Translated from the Chinese by Eleanor Goodman
Mingwei Song is a poet and scholar residing in Wellesley, Massachusetts. He has published poems, short stories, and novellas widely in Chinese-language literary magazines in both China and Taiwan, and is the author of ten books, including two monographs written in English and published in the United States. He is currently writing a series of short stories about Chinese youths living through the 1989 student protests. He co-authored a poetry collection with Taiwan’s leading experimentalist fiction writer Lo Yi-chin titled “White Horse and Black Camel” (Taipei: Rye Field, 2022). His creative and academic writings have been translated into seven languages other than English and Chinese. He has taught at Wellesley College since 2007.
Eleanor Goodman is the author of the poetry collection Nine Dragon Island, and the translator of five books from Chinese. She is a Research Associate at the Harvard University Fairbank Center and a recent recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. Her newest translation is In the Roar of the Machine: Selected Poems by Zheng Xiaoqiong, which is forthcoming in the US from the NYRB Poets series.
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