Training
Outside, a sudden rain.
But my will within is clear.
One night's snow
has melted into mist
hanging over fish meat.
(Haven't you remarked? A chopping machine
is what the age has become.)
Thus the weights.
I thought I needed discipline.
(Such a private matter, I'd tell only you.)
A dumbbell sits on my chest.
You I place in my heart.
Training is about to begin.
Gentleness
Gentleness. An endlessly rotating
microwave. The times I'm free, you're
not. The sky outside the window
like a lion's mane, coiling round a nexus.
Loneliness. A kitten tucked in a yard, afraid
to be seen... Only a deeper night, flickering
porn. Like a flower, the magnificent swell, unattainable
Bliss. I want to know there exists in this life
something more important.
Loch Ness
When it comes, what kind of
gargantuan will it be? is its soul
the one with flashing lights
its head with horns stuck on?
could you, on its neck,
take cover from rain?
when first you meet
set things straight
the cost of hesitation is
you each live on in someone else's myth
primordial wars, primordial hurts: life —
this collapsible heap
of faunae: the really big ones
have already gone
These Chance Encounters
— so hypnotic
the howl of a faraway wind is gently quelled
an entire planet's migraine sufferers are needed to doze it off
sleepwalkers creeping along a petal
burst into debate, applause
— so heroic
one grenade takes care of almost everyone
borrow light from the fire to ask the survivors' names
often we bomb entrances, clothes, ourselves
and never get that longed-for martyrdom
— so magical
all the lake surfaces under the brume
strike an accord with us
ah! should doves scatter now from this moment's hat
should icy hail drop from this moment's sky
— so peaceful
hitting you unawares ball after ball, singling you out fatefully arrow after
arrow
(no matter the palm reading, no matter the revolution, let's do it)
lying in ambush
at one corner of the imagination
how corrupt, this secret that I love you
how absolute, this secret that I love you
from Nobita
Jing Xianghai
translated from the Chinese by Lee Yew Leong
Read the original in Chinese, Traditional
Read the Chinese, Simplified translation
Listen to 'Training' in the original Chinese read by Huang Yin-Nan:
Jing Xianghai is a Taiwanese psychiatrist as well as poet and essayist. His three collections of poems are A Wanted Man (2002), A Mental Home (2006) and Nobita (2009); his collections of essays Looking for Friends Along the Coastline (2004) and A Welder of the Milky Way (2011).
Born in Taoyuan, Taiwan, in 1976, Jing was educated at Chang Geng University, where he earned a general doctor's degree. In 2009, he passed his exams to qualify as a psychiatrist and started practicing in a hospital in Taipei.
In 1996, he began posting his first poems on BBS. By the time he set up his blog, "The Thief Who Steals From Jing Xianghai," in 2004, he had already acquired a loyal following as a result of his well-received debut collection, A Wanted Man, which came out in 2002. Celebrated by the poetry reading masses (these exist in Taiwan), Jing has been included in the annual anthology The Best Taiwanese Poetry almost every year since 2001 and is easily the best-selling as well as most acclaimed Taiwanese poet of his generation.
Lee Yew Leong is the founder of Asymptote, winner of the 2015 London Book Fair Award for Literary Translation Initiative. As Asymptote’s fiction editor and editor-in-chief, Yew Leong has presented a newly translated story or poem in The Guardian every Tuesday since November 2015. Based in Taipei, he works as a freelance editor and translator of contemporary Taiwanese literature. Among the three book-length works he has translated, Fu-chen Lo's From Taiwan to the World and Back is the most recent publication. His translation of Chang Hui-Ching’s “War Among the Insects” was selected for the anthology Chutzpah!: New Voices from China (University of Oklahoma Press). Winner of the James Assatly Memorial Prize for Fiction (Brown University), he has written for The New York Times, among others, and currently serves as one of the judges for PEN International’s 2016 New Voices Award.
