6
Tears about to fly. Do they have eagle wings
or take a Boeing 767, taking off on
an economic miracle? Three thousand km of old tears, from Beijing
to New Delhi skies
just like that. After time flies, can the double exposed
red and white of our minds’ oriental archaeologies
match the supersonic, withstand
the miracle’s
sudden turbulence? Can we borrow eagle eyes to watch the sunset
dissolve inside a jellyfish like mica?
Can the Ganges’s
rainbow span of 2009 flow through the heavens, back to 1632?
If the flying sea trembles like a bedsheet,
if people today fall asleep in the depths of the sky,
will the ancients
be jolted awake, waking from traversing the sky’s torrential tears,
waking from the warbling of one hundred birds, into the eagle’s singularity
and sobriety?
Eagle, stop: the flight is preparing its descent.
With a swipe, mountains and rivers switch their masks.
11
Tears from one to one hundred, filled, overflowed.
From one flow to one hundred: an increase, a decrease,
or an interflow, each ending at zero?
As soon as emotion holds back tears, the heart washes in tears, the gods illuminate tears.
The many will ultimately heed the one, making tears more sparse
and more pure.
But shall those dark impure tears be stopped from flowing?
The lime and iron in the tears, the ore horizons, the mud and sand flowing together,
immense vitality, immense mortality, immense singing and weeping,
tears flowing when young,
old, weary, still flowing.
Eyes cried blind still flow. Flowing from those with eyes,
and in those with no eyes they bore an eye from which to flow. This tear of a
peacock whose
form is emptiness like a lantern, blue whether tailfeathers fan out or not.
Who could forget the color of the sea, however the color of the sun may rustle its tears?
E.g., blown in from Indian blue, the Indian red of gauze and silk.
E.g., the Chinese red that flows from fire eyes.
12
Tears like eyes borrowed but returned wrongly
are not in wristwatches. The eyes of the ancients and moderns
are each other’s opposites. A millennium-old love,
nearer than ten minutes of cable news.
Beyond the millennium
we wait in a long line. At the Taj Mahal, between the evening news
and ancient scrolls. We’re just tourists,
and whether our tears flow or not, amber is not an eye.
At times bird tears get the eyes wrong,
when an eagle eye
is moved into a cat’s eye, when behind security doors
we look from the internet to the starry sky beyond—
a thief
steals a deft Tagore. Will he leave behind Zhuangzi?
When Global System Mobile’s text messages send Beijing’s night snow
to the Agra morning. Spring’s shutter
clicks: in 2009, I snapped a picture of my 1632
self of no self.
Had my self been lost by myself?
16
Jade slivers a death more glorious than can be asked: because the hand of divine love
puts heart slivers
in the palm of imperial dotage.
Except no matter how much jade, Taj, is in the three thousand affections
piled on top of you,
a mere touch will turn it to dust.
The whole heart is jade, and when the heart aches, jade aches.
The balletic feet of jade slivers, supporting the jade from which mist emanates,
and also, jade slivers placing their past and current lives
from rhetoric to flesh
on the slivers of the shared heart of the whole of humanity.
In 2009, the mirror image glances back, handing over a trans-incarnational
1632 rendezvous.
What was is no more: an echo transmits the sound of a beauty knocking on the moon.
This is not the Taj speaking to other women, this is heart’s image
constructed in the substance of the image of the thing. Heart’s tears, tears of dripping things.
Flying
how great it would be to fly, but the Taj’s tears
are not any swallow you see,
because she is every swallow.
In eagle’s sleep, you are awake, walking, a stagger
from yes to no
dropping into the mañjusaka spider lily world, hearing as if in a daze
Shah Jahan calling you with the Taj’s name, but you
are a Chinese woman,
Lady Meng Jiang, Fragrant Consort Xiang Fei, poetess Li Qingzhao, Princess Taiping.
from Taj Mahal Tears
Ouyang Jianghe
translated from the Chinese by Lucas Klein
Read the original in Chinese, Simplified
Ouyang Jianghe wrote “Taj Mahal Tears” after a trip to New Delhi in 2009 to take part in the Almost Island Dialogues between Indian and Chinese writers. A visit to the Taj Mahal moved him to tears—not only because of the beauty of its ivory architecture amidst its surroundings, but also because of the story of its creation: it was commissioned in 1632 by a Mughal emperor in memory of his wife, who had died in childbirth with their fourteenth child, a girl. Overcome with thoughts of his own daughter and ex-wife, he began writing a poem that ended a decade-long period in which he had composed very little, to initiate what he considers to be the third stage of his writing career.
The poem is, of course, about the tears that fill relationships between men and women, but it is also about the relationship between god or gods and man as well as the relationship between India and China—not to mention both countries’ relationships to their histories. Parts of the poem take place in, and take advantage of, the vocabulary of fungibility and modernity; other parts excavate an archaeology of historical lexicons, including Buddhist terminology and a broad scope of literary and cultural allusion. As a translator, I had in mind the English of a handful of poets known as practitioners of ethnopoetics, investigating the deep recesses of the self at the same time as the wide resources of the planet. As Ouyang writes, “the mirror image glances back.”
The poem is, of course, about the tears that fill relationships between men and women, but it is also about the relationship between god or gods and man as well as the relationship between India and China—not to mention both countries’ relationships to their histories. Parts of the poem take place in, and take advantage of, the vocabulary of fungibility and modernity; other parts excavate an archaeology of historical lexicons, including Buddhist terminology and a broad scope of literary and cultural allusion. As a translator, I had in mind the English of a handful of poets known as practitioners of ethnopoetics, investigating the deep recesses of the self at the same time as the wide resources of the planet. As Ouyang writes, “the mirror image glances back.”
Ouyang Jianghe (b. 1956) is a Chinese poet who is known as one of the “Five Masters from Sichuan.” He is also a prominent critic of music, art, and literature, and president of the literary magazine Jintian. His poetry volumes Doubled Shadows and Phoenix, translated by Austin Woerner, have been published by Zephyr Press. He now lives in Beijing, where he is a professor of creative writing at Beijing Normal University.
Lucas Klein is a father, writer, translator, and assistant professor at the University of Hong Kong. His work has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Jacket, Rain Taxi, CLEAR, Comparative Literature Studies, and PMLA, and from Black Widow, Fordham University Press, and New Directions. His translation Notes on the Mosquito: Selected Poems of Xi Chuan won the 2013 Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize, and his October Dedications, translations of the poetry of Mang Ke, is now available from Zephyr and Chinese University presses. New York Review Books will be publishing his translations of Tang dynasty poet Li Shangyin, and his monograph, The Organization of Distance: Poetry, Translation, Chineseness, is forthcoming from Brill.
