Little Spring Goddess Primer
The second day of the new year, and on the balcony
the baldheaded snow had taken the place of the shoes
prepared from dried leaves by the awn god. You jumped off
the still-dreaming bed, ran
to pull open the curtains, bringing the song of the earth
inside. Those days, when
you woke, that was the first thing
you wanted to do. A glorious power
that you seemed to have stolen
from your mother’s hand. To keep out the light,
the curtains were as thick as a tent;
as you pulled hard, it was as though when the curtains
opened, we in the darkness
would suddenly find ourselves next to a portal of the world.
What you couldn’t yet understand was this festive season
had another celebration, and we two adults
yearned to use each other as an even more urgent portal.
How could only a sacred excuse
find in your curious heart
a moment of perfect smoothness? Right,
you went downstairs to see if the narcissus in the living room
had opened or not. Thump thump thump. The sound of the stairs
came like the distant drumbeat of spring rites.
You went downstairs again to count, how many flowers had opened?
Don’t forget to check how many buds are about to open.
Thump thump thump. Your early spring task
wasn’t fully complete: Do narcissus flowers
have five petals or six petals, did you see?
Thump thump thump. You went down to inspect,
five narcissus flowers, which one is the older sister, which one
the youngest sister? This one tested
your young eyesight. Thump thump thump.
A few round trips later, you began to realize
each time you went down the stairs, there was something
wonderful we were purposefully concealing from you.
Blue Hourglass
When you’d just learned to speak, you got
your first hourglass. As a toy,
among all the other trinkets I bought, it most
resembled bait. Its silence
was no less than a stratagem, its silence
meant it could also be given to the aging child
inside an adult. Its performance
might start anytime. Its significance
depended on its extemporaneous innocence,
whether a childhood interest could have
an unexpected effect on you. The magic of sand
belongs to the virtuoso school: placed anywhere,
the first thing it will do is make time’s emotions
sensitive to its movement; with the bottom full,
the emptiness of the top will suddenly
gain a transparent freedom.
What it demonstrates is intuitive—
all emptiness is temporary;
the emptier one is, the closer one comes
to self-satisfaction. Its simple construction
hides an inner subtlety;
it could even smell in your pink body
a sweet little beast hiding.
It is faithful to time’s theater: your
tiny touch was a caress of passing years.
In return, the two glass globes,
mouth to mouth, take time’s secrets
and seal them alive in tears of sand.
from The Loquat Boy: Elegies for my Son
Zang Di
translated from the Chinese by Eleanor Goodman
Click here for Eleanor Goodman’s other translations from the Chinese in the archive.
Read the original in Chinese, Simplified
These poems come from The Loquat Boy: Elegies for my Son, a collection Zang Di wrote after the tragic, accidental death of his only child. These are poems of mourning and darkness, of hopelessness in the face of unimaginable loss. A father’s love and pride does not end with such an ending, yet ordinary life continues on, sometimes seemingly in a cruel reproof of such emotions. Yet there are consolations to be found in these poems as well, in the memories of a child’s wonder and discovery, in his playfulness and his inveterate curiosity. As is true throughout Zang Di’s work, the natural world plays a fundamental role, serving as an attestation that there are greater mysteries and processes than human beings can conceive of at work all around us. A narcissus opens according to its own specifications, impervious to the human condition. And then there is also the consolation of the unavoidable passage of time: “What it demonstrates is intuitive—/ all emptiness is temporary.” Zang Di shows us that even in the midst of profound grief, poetry offers a way out of the caverns of darkness and back into the light of the world.
Zang Di was born in 1964 in Beijing, and is the celebrated author of many books of poetry, including most recently 最美的梨花即将被写出 (The Most Beautiful Pear Flower About to Be Written; 江苏凤凰文艺出版社, 2023). He has been featured at many international festivals including the Rotterdam Poetry Festival and the Princeton Poetry Festival, and has received numerous awards for both his poetry and his poetry criticism. He has been named one of China’s Ten Most Outstanding Poets on three separate occasions. He is a professor in the Department of Chinese Language and Literature at Peking University.
Eleanor Goodman is an award-winning translator and author. Her first poetry collection is Nine Dragon Island (Zephyr Press, 2016), and her translations include Something Crosses My Mind: Selected Poems of Wang Xiaoni (Zephyr Press, 2014), Iron Moon: An Anthology of Chinese Workers Poetry (White Wine Press, 2017), and The Roots of Wisdom: Poems by Zang Di (Zephyr Press, 2017). Her newest translation, In the Roar of the Machine: Selected Poems by Zheng Xiaoqiong, is forthcoming in The New York Review of Books poetry series. She is a research associate at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University.
