Hillside
Wildflowers in full bloom float on the black
sandpaper of this night, white ones, yellow ones,
swaying to the sweep of the incoming murk.
They sway in a radiant and lucent landscape
with birds gathered in dreary evening council.
Ah, the playing of an Er-hu pierces the ink painting.
Just the sort of requiem to rouse her, so she’d
rise from the oppression of wildflowers, rise,
and reclaim the space occupied by amnesia.
Rhetoric has replaced a living room crammed with mouths.
Hunger skills have replaced a kitchen stacked with cookbooks.
Lessons in ethics have replaced a bedroom strewn with underwear.
With a renewed and generous solemnity, she
appears to loom near the leafy and shifting
hedge. Did her face betray a tormented smile?
The moisture underneath is the earth sweating,
the wildflower roots wriggle deep into earth’s bones, maggots
crawling up to devour the last bit of fortitude I relied upon.
On the surface, the dead persist in sacrificing themselves.
In fact, it is the living who die yet again.
A glorious transformation of the system.
Please return to the frigid sweat of the hillside,
amid the slackened self-control of the unconscious,
where instead you can make judgments and not just muddle on.
Mao Zedong
To shave away all the color and style of bureaucratic red tape,
to make the great person of accurate contents
show preference for silvery gray—the color of clouds—and indigo—
the color of sea
—to project a prim appearance
of grand manner. He likes this kind of country.
The badge of the sun is fastened to his forehead,
dangling over a sea of people.
The vast reality, forged steel right out of the cauldron,
builds the hazy square, infinity interlaced with finitude,
around the ramparts and tower
of purple gold, but in fact they are made of clay.
Newspapers cheer the ideal victory,
the tidewater rises lawlessly,
millions of heartfelt hurricanes provoke banners to flutter.
Waves of boat masts lead the seawater to rise,
the sea is only boat hulls and the sea bottom.
He sleeps in a swimming pool filled with ancient texts,
a renovated workshop, looking into the air,
speaking short incomprehensible sentences.
Unfathomable ideas are concealed in stiff reeds of utterance,
The soldier’s language comes from an imperceptible battlefield, but who can
understand it?
The Grassy Slope
The slanting grassy slope had the tone of a lamb,
free, bright, melodious as a brass instrument.
I was there in silent meditation, under the three-foot high rocky shore,
the crystalline stream, flowing among the carp.
A herdboy led along a water buffalo, sometimes an ox.
Before the good grass, the beasts were rapacious and gentle.
The grass once eaten grew back even lusher than before.
He was thinking of happy things but singing The Tune of the Mulberry.
A girl came walking toward me with fruit and flower seeds
in both arms, a young landlord following behind.
We played some simple games to make him happy
and teach him a little. He would rather be catching butterflies.
Suddenly, fishing birds flew up and landed at her feet,
grappling for food; it was a shock to me.
In a book about original sin, I read of the measure
of beauty, the only Helen in the realm.
Ah, summer, with the corn stretching down the riverbank,
where did the resplendent woman and river full of children
run off to hide? The autumn wind came on with a vengeance,
the river instantly turned cold, the willows wizened and died.
Air penetrates one’s flesh and like a sparkling paring knife
Shaves the burden from my body.
How light must one’s thoughts become in order to fly?
I reclined, polishing a pebble in my palm.
Three Poems
Xiao Kaiyu
translated from the Chinese by Christopher Lupke
Read the original in Chinese, Simplified
When I was asked to translate a section of Xiao Kaiyu’s poem “Homage to Du Fu,” I said to myself, “Now this is a poet.” Xiao’s poetry is difficult, even abstruse, and contains within it a melding of classical allusions and contemporary social engagement. He is not someone who “writes for the idea,” though ideas are important to his work. Xiao tests the bounds of referentiality and representability. His subject matter is often public: the status of China in the world, gender relations, human finitude, poverty, damage to the natural environment. One can sense from his poetry a strong chord of dignity, but not a dignity of the poet himself. Xiao’s attention is primarily cast upon the ordinary people of China, who in many cases have been left behind in the march toward economic modernity and globalization.
In translating it, I first strive to comprehend his verse as best as possible on a literal level. Xiao utilizes catachresis, convoluted syntax, and a host of other literary techniques to provide the reader with an experience that is inimitable. Having parsed out the literal meaning of his work, at some point I leave the “original” text aside and work on the English version—working it over and over again until it sounds and looks like a poem in English. At this stage, I often forget the details of the original. After I feel comfortable with the English version, I return to the Chinese and compare the two. I then further rework it to ensure the English does not stray too far from the original. However, fidelity to the original cannot compromise the literary quality of the English translation. My version must work as a poem on its own; otherwise, it does a disservice. The challenge and joy of this process is participating in an endeavor that is at once impossible and necessary.
In translating it, I first strive to comprehend his verse as best as possible on a literal level. Xiao utilizes catachresis, convoluted syntax, and a host of other literary techniques to provide the reader with an experience that is inimitable. Having parsed out the literal meaning of his work, at some point I leave the “original” text aside and work on the English version—working it over and over again until it sounds and looks like a poem in English. At this stage, I often forget the details of the original. After I feel comfortable with the English version, I return to the Chinese and compare the two. I then further rework it to ensure the English does not stray too far from the original. However, fidelity to the original cannot compromise the literary quality of the English translation. My version must work as a poem on its own; otherwise, it does a disservice. The challenge and joy of this process is participating in an endeavor that is at once impossible and necessary.
Xiao Kaiyu was born in Sichuan. He is one of the most influential and challenging poets of his age, widely revered in China for his pensive and luminous verse. He studied Chinese medicine in college and, after several years practicing it, moved to Shanghai in 1993, where he served as an editor, taught, and began publishing his poems. He spent the late 1990s and early 2000s in Germany, learning the language and reading widely in European literature. He has a special affection for the work of Paul Celan and Gottfried Benn. Since 2006, he has been a professor of Chinese at Henan University. The “new intellectualism” that characterizes his poetry exhibits linguistic density, care of expression, a layered structure of literary and cultural allusion, and a sustained control of subject matter. The radical rearticulation of the contemporary Chinese vernacular by Xiao Kaiyu exemplifies the best of the avant-garde poetic style.
Christopher Lupke is a professor of Chinese at Washington State University. He was classically trained in Chinese in Taiwan, at Middlebury College, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Cornell University, where he received his Ph.D. in 1993. His scholarship has focused on modern Chinese culture. He has published books on 命 (ming, “fate, destiny, or life’s allotment”), contemporary Chinese poetry, and the cinema of Hou Hsiao-hsien, as well as several articles on the postcolonial nature of modern Chinese culture. His translations have appeared in Chinese PEN, Taiwan Literature, New England Review, Five Points, Free Verse, E-Ratio, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, Eleven Eleven, Michigan Literary Quarterly, Epiphany, and various anthologies.
