There are advantages as well as disadvantages, especially to a creative mind, to be born into a culture that boasts a long and impressive past. The advantages are many but obvious. It is the disadvantages that usually escape our immediate attention. First of all, there is this tradition, an accumulation of centuries upon centuries of the most daring of efforts and the most dazzling of achievements, already so perfect and time-honored as to inspire more awe than ambition. Name any word in the language, and a cultivated mind soon recalls its countless nuances, connotations and associations from the masters of old. Such a heavy burden would crush out all but the boldest and most original of spirits in their attempts to create anything "new" in the face of tradition. Others would simply turn out unconscious imitations of the patriarchs that read like parodies. Then there is the irresistible temptation for the well-informed critic, whether native or foreign, to measure whatever success the poor modern writer may hope to wring against those of his great ancestors and easily reduce it to insignificance. The predicament of a child of such an overwhelming culture is analogous to that of an heir of position and wealth: if he succeeds, people would attribute it to his family influence; if he fails, he himself would be held doubly responsible for the disgrace.
A notable example is the present generation of Chinese writers who are overshadowed by the towering giants of classical literature. The Book of Songs, fountainhead of Chinese poetry and racial sentiment, dates back from the tenth to eighth century B.C., when poems were composed mainly as songs and reached audiences instead of "readers." Both the Book of Songs and Francis James Child's English and Scottish Popular Ballads number 305 songs, a happy coincidence. Yet, while the songs in Child's collection are all ballads, that is, short narrative poems, their Chinese counterparts are not all folk and still less narrative. As a whole, the Book of Songs is more lyrical than narrative, and a minor portion belongs to court and temple songs. Furthermore, the Child songs are taken plainly as ballads, but the Chinese songs, until quite recently, had been taken seriously in the Confucian tradition as a primer for moral cultivation of thoughts and sentiments befitting a gentleman. The Child collection has remained folk, but the book honored with the editorship of Confucius had been for a long time held sacred.
Traditionally, however, the Chinese would turn to the T'ang dynasty (618-907) for the heyday of classical poetry, when poetry permeated culture almost to the saturation point. Honored as a requirement of civil service examination on the national level and encouraged through court patronage as a short cut to royal favor, poetry in that period gained prestige as well as popularity not only in bureaucratic and academic circles but, generally, in civilized life. Versification attained maturity and flexibility. Style was full of contrasts between the sublime and the exquisite, the exuberant and the sparing, the rugged and the ethereal. Theme was enriched to cover the ennui of court life, the pleasures of hermitage, and the complaints of exile and war. Most indicative is perhaps the social diversity of practitioners of this popular art, ranging from princes to commoners, generals to scholars, housewives and youngsters to Buddhist and Taoist monks and nuns. The full magnitude of T'ang poetry became manifest when, during the reign of Emperor K'ang Hsi in the early eighteenth century, a Complete Poetry of the T'ang Dynasty was compiled by royal decree to contain, in 900 volumes, 48,900 poems by more than 2,200 poets. To this day it stands as one of the massive monuments of world literature.
From the T'ang dynasty such well-established forms as "lü shih" (regulated verse), "chüeh-chu" (stop-short verse) and "ku feng" (irregular ancient style) were popular for almost one thousand years until the beginning of the twentieth century. By that time all possibilities in diction and versification had been fully explored, and any "new" attempt at such compositions could only result in subtle yet traceable plagiarism at the best, and at the worst embarrassing parody of the old masters. It is true that, down through Sung and Yuan dynasties, there had been metamorphoses of conventional poetry that took the shape of "tz'u" (a verse form seemingly irregular but strictly prescribed on a metrical pattern which in turn is dictated by a set tune) and "ch'u" (operatic libretto that can be independently enjoyed as verse drama), but these, too, had traced their cycles of growth. Sooner or later, a new kind of poetry had to make its appearance, a poetry more fitted to the diction and rhythm of modern speech and, accordingly, more expressive of life in modern China.
With the abolition of the traditional civil service examination, followed by the introduction of modern education, in the first decade of the present century, modern Chinese poetry did take shape among other cultural and social changes. Dr. Hu Shih (1891-1962) and a handful of friends found time, apart from other reforming activities, to make experiments in new poetry. They freed themselves from the shackles of conventional versification and dated expressions by adopting Mandarin as the new language of poetry. Hu's Collection of Experiments marks the conscious beginning of modern Chinese poetry. But Mandarin as a poetic language had to wait for some time before it was duly tested and refined towards its initial stage of comparative maturity. Hu was an enlightening trailblazer, but his endowments were not exactly meant for creative writing, and soon he gave up poetry in pursuit of broader reforms, only to return to it very casually.
But other steps were heard down the trail, steps of more serious hikers such as Hsü Chih-mo, Wen I-to, Chu Hsiang and Kuo Mo-jo. The newcomers showed rapid progress in thematic scope, metrical dexterity and verbal command, and for a few years they were quite popular, especially in the case of Hsü Chih-mo. Unfortunately, they were not to remain on the scene. Hsü Chih-mo and Chu Hsiang died prematurely in their thirties, Hsü in a plane crash and Chu by jumping into the Yangtze River. Wen I-to was murdered at the end of World War II. Kuo Mo-jo pursued a variety of interests and became more and more involved in politics until, playing court poet at Peiping, he debased himself early in the fifties by addressing a fulsome panegyric to Joseph Stalin, calling the dictator "great sun."
In their wake, however, there emerged a younger generation of poets oriented in more recent schools of Western literature. Hsü Chih-mo and his contemporaries were essentially romantic in temperament, tempered with a strand of classical Chinese sentiment. The younger poets, such as Feng Chih, Pien Chih-lin, Ho Ch'i-fang, Ai Ch'ing, Tai Wang-shu and Li Chin-fa, displayed, on the other hand, more restraint and complexity in a symbolist manner. Yet the reader, newly weaned from classical Chinese poetry and still intrigued by the overbrimming, if somewhat maudlin, lyricism of Hsü's romantic school, was not ready for the delicate nuances and prismatic associations of the younger group. Enshrined by untimely death, the image of Hsü Chih-mo as a romantic was to dominate the scene with the general reader for years after his death.
Of course the younger generation was not without its influence, however limited. The style of poets like Tai Wang-shu and Li Chin-fa, leaning heavily on French symbolism and sometimes verging on the obscure, made a great impression on such lesser figures as Chi Hsien, Ch'in Tzu-hao and Chung Ting-wen, who were yet to build their stature after their arrival in Taiwan in the late forties. When the mainland fell to the Communists, only a handful of veteran writers of a liberal persuasion managed to cross the strait and made Taiwan their home. The many who stayed behind would later be forced either into silence or into periodic manifestations of conformity to the critical criterion of the ruling party. If in defiance they should speak the truth, as Hu Feng and others did, they would soon be persecuted.
When Chi Hsien and Ch'in Tzu-hao began anew in Taiwan in their early forties, they were not yet established literary figures, but were already looked upon as forerunners because they had somehow brought the latest influence of the mainland days to bear upon the new poetic scene and because, at that early stage, the budding poets on the island were mostly young men in their twenties. After a few years of simmering, modern Chinese poetry was at last ready for full career. Suddenly, around 1954, all was astir. One immediately after another, three groups came into being.
First of the three was the Modernist School, established under the patriarchal leadership of Chi Hsien, an inspiring high school teacher. For a while over half of the poets on the island professed their membership and a discipleship in one way or another to Chi Hsien, whose basic program for modern Chinese poetry included an emphasis on intellectualism as a remedy for lyricism, a replacement of conventional poetic diction with plain prose, and a transplantation on native soil of recent Western poetry since Baudelaire. Though he advocated intellectualism as a theorist, Chi Hsien the poet was incorrigibly temperamental and emotional, almost exactly the opposite of what he tried to inculcate in his followers. It was in Fang Ssu, instead, that we find a serene poet and solid scholar, who of all the members best fulfilled Chi Hsien's requirements for intellectualism. By no means a prolific writer, Fang Ssu offered his fellow practitioners the example of his small output, wherein the neat style, restrained tone and sparing imagery testified the point that to go modern does not mean to go sloppy. As a poet Chi Hsien has been far less consistent and turned out treasures among trash, but it was his magnetic personality and undaunted spirit rather than Fang Ssu's quiet merits that attracted a wide following for the movement. Among other notable members of this group, whose poetry has survived the general iconoclasm of those years, mention must be made of Yang Huan, for the bitter-sweetness of his nostalgic poetry and the charm of his nursery rhymes, and of Cheng Ch'ou-yü and Lin Ling, for their melody and grace. Most of the others deserve the oblivion into which they have sunk.
The Blue Stars Poetry Society was founded by Ch'in Tzu-hao, Chung Ting-wen, Hsia Ch'in and Yü Kwang-chung. Less dramatic and dogmatic in their program, the Blue Stars were more quietly creative and sought to maintain some critical balance. They were not certain if they should avow allegiance to the classical Chinese tradition, but were unanimous in their rejection of Chi Hsien's proposal to transplant foreign schools on Chinese soil. In general practice it was manifest they preferred a spontaneous kind of lyricism to contrived intellectualism. As to the use of prose in place of verse, the response of the Blue Stars was divided: while some showed a leaning towards free verse, others were more selective in their adoption of versification. Chi Hsien's advocacy of simple, unadorned prose to replace the ornate poetic language did clear a way for some to greater freedom and freshness of expression, but it was also abused by many others as an excuse for their unshapely "prosiness" of style. Other than the founders, distinguished members of this group included, in their order of appearance, Jung Tzu, Wu Wang-yao, Juan Nang, Hsiang Ming, Huang Yung, Lo Men, Chou Meng-tieh, Hsiung Hung, Chang Chien and Fang Hsin. Though Fang Ch'i comes close to the style of the Blue Stars, he has been a lone ranger of a poet, unrelated to any group. It is of course impossible even to describe briefly the individual styles of these poets, but for some time the two groups were able to maintain a balance between native tradition and international trends, lyricism and intellectualism, verse and prose. But soon a third group came upon the scene and tipped the scales heavily towards foreign influence.
The Genesis Group, also known as the Epoch Society, drew its principal members from the Chinese armed forces. While the Modernists were either Chi Hsien's friends or students, and the Blue Stars formed a motley group of people from the office, the camp and the campus, the Epoch poets were a batch of sprightly naval officers stationed at their base at Tsoying in southern Taiwan. At first its leaders, Ya Hsien, Lo Fu and Chang Mo, aimed at setting a "model for national poetry," which did not materialize. After a few years, they suddenly switched to the other opposite and underwent radical Westernization by adopting French surrealism. To carry out this program, they later enlisted Wai-lim Yip's help for his academic acquaintance with Western poetry. Thus they plunged headlong into the inner world of the unconscious and tried to present their private experiences, unprocessed by the distortion of reason, in the so-called automatic writing. Theoretically, they sought to free the unconscious from such cultural and social inhibitions as morality, logic, grammar and rhetoric, and to cut all links of textual association. Such a willful doctrine, if seriously pursued, would have resulted in total anarchy, though in practice it is impossible to follow the surrealist teachings all the way. However, the Epoch's promotion of surrealist experiments did lead to a state of nihilism and obscurity which brought upon modern Chinese poetry bitter criticism from both outsiders and fellow groups. Ya Hsien never let himself fall into the pit of obscurity, though he was sometimes on the verge of it. Lo Fu did, in his controversial book Death in the Stone Cell, but eventually he pulled himself out to explore a less dubious field of experience. Still, we have to admit that they benefited as well as suffered from the surrealist adventure, which accelerated their maturing process. Among other members attention should be paid to Kuan Kuan, Shang Ch'ing, Hsin Yü, Ch'u Ke, Ta Huang and Mei Hsin. Yeh Shan, a fine poet and essayist, was not a member, but was equally associated with Epoch and the Blue Stars.
The furor of modern poetry has since provoked two major controversies, first between the alienated public and the practicing poets, and then among the poets themselves. The former raged most vehemently in 1959-60, though there have been periodic eruptions ever since. The detractors of modern poetry complained of its clumsiness of style, obscurity of language and irrelevance to society. In retort its defenders pointed out that the critics were unduly unsympathetic, unimaginative and unreceptive of anything original. In addition to that the chagrined poets cited instances of ruggedness and difficulty in certain masters of classical poetry and appealed to the authority of Han Yü, Li Ho, Li Shang-yin and Huang T'ing-chien for self-justification. Gradually, the quarrel between the bohemians and the Philistines gave way to differences between two kinds of poets. In fighting the Philistines the bohemians were unanimous that Westernization was a necessary step in modernizing Chinese poetry, but then they became divided as to whether, in the modernizing process, native tradition was only an obstacle or, inherited judiciously, a great help. The internationalists, consisting mainly of the Epoch poets, would rather throw native heritage overboard. The nationalists, mostly the Blue Stars members, argued that anything so uprooted from its native soil could not thrive, however invigorating the alien weather. The debate had gone on, varying only in degree of earnestness, until the end of the sixties, when the internationalists came to realize the importance of national identity and the necessity of hearty acceptance by native audience.
After twenty years of development, modern poetry in Taiwan has come of age and won an ever increasing public. What seemed suspicious and transient to the audience a decade ago is now being taken for granted by a younger generation that also greets modern fiction and abstract painting. Meantime, the poets themselves have also matured. Many of them have passed or are approaching forty and, coming to closer grips with society, have also attained a more balanced outlook on life and the arts. Some of them have also won distinction as essayists, critics, translators or scholars. Poetry reading in public has become quite popular, and a well-known poet easily attracts 200 to 600 people. A "best-seller" of modern poetry sells 2,000 to 8,000 copies.
The established poets were beginning to command respect about two years ago when they were challenged by aspiring poets of a younger generation. The newcomers, who had learned their trade from the work and theory of the older poets, became disillusioned with the heavy style typical of poetry of the early and middle sixties. Above all they were fed up with the thick, clogged images and involved syntax of their predecessors. Rebellious, they tried to mold a new poetry that is quiet, unaffected, lucid in language, relaxed in tone, sparing in imagery. Yet any reaction to prevalent absurdities could easily be carried by its own momentum to opposite ones. There have been many instances already, where the new experiments ended up with uninspired pieces that just looked plain, loose and sparse. Surely the younger generation is coming, but it will take some time yet before it really arrives.
Li Poetry Magazine was founded in 1964 by a handful of native Taiwanese including Lin Heng-tai and Pai Ch'iu, former members of the then disintegrating Modernist School. Li, meaning "bamboo hat" in Chinese, clearly indicates their quiet but confident affinity to the rural, the earthy, and the broad experiences of Chinese life. Among their guiding principles are: exploration of life itself instead of mere culture, use of daily speech as the legitimate medium of poetry, and rejection of pretension and egotism. A commendable practice of the Li Magazine has been its unreserved criticism of poets, especially of the older generation, and its frequent group discussion of specific poems. Early in 1971, differences among the Li poets split the group. Huan Fu, Chao T'ien-i and others took sides with the founders, but dissenting members joined some outsiders to launch the Dragons Poetry Quarterly in March of the same year. As the name suggests, the Dragons take pride in the tradition of Chinese culture, but intend to rejuvenate it into something lively and contemporary. With only one exception, all members are under thirty. Lin Huan-chang, Ch'en Fang-ming, Su Shao-lien, Hsin Mu and Ch'iao Lin share practically the same beliefs in critical thinking as the Li poets, but as a body seem to surpass the latter in creative writing. Add Lo Ch'ing and Fu Min to the list, and we get a fairly close picture of who are the most active of the young generation.
Of the older generation, Yang Huan met death prematurely when he was run over by a train in 1954. Ch'in Tzu-hao died of cancer in 1963. Fang Ssu, Lin Ling, Juan Nang, Wu Wang-yao, Huang Yung and many others have long been inactive either because of their long absence from the scene at home or because of their loss of faith in the Muse. Even such poets of stature as Chou Meng-tieh, Ya Hsien, Hsia Ch'in and Fang Hsin have not appeared in print over the past four or five years. But we are happy that, in addition to the young talents that are rising, some of the older poets, Pai Ch'iu, Yeh Shan, Lo Men, Kuan Kuan, Lo Fu and a few others, have remained active in their changing styles. How much longer they can hold out without repetition or deterioration, nobody knows. Somehow, modern Chinese poetry in Taiwan has gone full circle in its wild goose chase of the Western Muse and has just come to the point where the odyssey ends at a new beginning. Now is the time for the prodigal poets to look back critically at what they have done and also to look forward judiciously to what they will do. It is true in their orientation of Western literature they have learned a lot about the technique of mining, but genuine gold still lies relatively unexplored in the mines at home, in the life and tradition that are China. Westernization is only a means, but not the end, of the modernization of Chinese literature. Taiwan is the only place left of whole China where the creative Chinese mind is able to pursue its own course: it is our only chance for a cultural renaissance.
We shall see if the poets are up to the new challenge.
The following miniature anthology attempts to present some aspects of contemporary Chinese poetry in Taiwan, which is looked upon by over seas Chinese poets in Hongkong, Singapore, Malaysia, Vietnam, Europe and the United States as marking the most advanced state of modern Chinese poetry since the May Fourth Movement in 1919. I have selected poems written mainly during the last four years; hence the exclusion of poets who have not been creative recently. The limitation of space further necessitated my concentration on short lyrics. The anthology is by no means representative of the whole picture of what has been going on since 1968. Where it could not be helped, I have taken occasional liberties with the Chinese original, especially with my own, to make it more readable in English translation. I am fully aware of these sins of commission, of which I wish I had not been guilty.
THE CREMATION
Like a letter scribbled all over,
Enclosed in a manila envelope,
They nailed him in
In a thin, slender coffin,
And, like slipping a letter
Into a letter-box,
Shoved him through the door
Of the cremator.
—Anyway, it's like a letter,
Stamped,
Canceled,
And delivered to a far country.
—Chi Hsien
THE LONE WOLF
I am a wolf scourging the wilderness all by myself.
Not a prophet,
And never a word of complaint,
Yet I can rock the void of heaven and earth
With peals of shrill, plaintive howl
That space itself shakes as if in fever
And cold winds rise bristling up my spine.
Call it stupefaction
Or full satisfaction.
—Chi Hsien
MY LOOKING GLASS
My looking glass is a hunchback cat
That keeps changing her sibyl eyes
And with them my evasive self.
A hunchback cat, a silent cat,
A lonely cat is my looking glass,
Whose surprised look is a closed dream.
But what goes rippling inside there,
Time or light or melancholy?
My looking glass is a cat called Fate
That, like a confining face, locks my wealth
In her bareness, and in her crudeness
Locks my grace. And so her steps
Lag and drag like dull summer days.
Giving up her rhythmic trot in constraint,
My looking glass is a squatting cat,
My cat is a puzzled dream of gloom
And never tells the truth of my form.
—Jung Tzu
NOSTALGIA ON LAKE KIAMESHA
farther
than the limpid water
are the dismal woods
farther
than the dismal woods
are the silent hills
farther
than the silent hills
are the gloomy clouds
farther
than the gloomy clouds
is the remote sky
farther
than the remote sky
is my homeward eye
—Shang Ch'in
PITTSBURGH
Driving through the thin fog feels like an escaping fish.
Pittsburgh is probably about to vanish.
I can see that city
In a rising balloon
Lost by a little black girl.
Really there is no city but a grove,
Really there is no grove but a tree,
Really there is no tree but some leaves,
Really there are no leaves but some birds,
Really there are no birds but some sad songs.
The birds are singing, but no word from the black people.
Temperature keeps dropping.
I keep looking at the distance and though it's only nine in the morning
I seem to have seen—sunset—and dusk.
—Shang Ch'in
BY THE LIGHT
By the light
I've been reading my wife's letter,
Unaware when
Cigarette ash over the ash tray's edge
Fell.
But the moon must be high and small now it's no longer warm.
—Shang Ch'in
THE WILD GEESE
We still live on. We have to fly
On and on in the boundless sky.
The horizon forever withdrawing forever lures us on.
We live. We're always on the chase.
Feeling we're close only to see it's still out of reach.
The sky is still the sky our forefathers flew by,
Vast and void like a changeless advice.
We are the same wings as our forefathers', hard on the winds,
Holding to a will, falling in an endless nightmare.
Dim between the dark earth
And the sky, bottomless, deep, blue,
The horizon lies ahead
And lures us on.
We will slowly die in pursuit, we'll die
Like sunset's unknowing chill. We have to fly
Hanging across the boundlessness like lone leaves down the wind.
While clouds upon cold clouds,
How coldly they keep watch on us.
—Pai Ch'iu
THE BIRDS
The birds are forever searching the sky.
Up there, we must have lost something.
All the trees chained to the earth
Wildly throw up their arms and cry.
It's cloudless throughout the space,
But half of earth is a darkened face.
When night leaves, the world is strewn with unchaste
tears
Upon the grass.
Some one burns himself into a torch
And sends the smoke up the sky
Like bird after searching bird.
Half of earth is always a dark face.
—Pai Ch'iu
BEYOND THE ASH
You were once yourself,
Too innocent to need a name.
The flower of death blooms in the clearest eye,
And so we kneel down
To the moment about to burn to ash.
We aren't anybody, and we blush
Like a forged coin hid in a pants pocket.
An embryo of fire, you grow by burning yourself
And, provoked by anyone's pomegranate insult of a fist,
You'd fling your arm in fury, violence flooding against the sweat.
You are the legendary candle that half remains,
The other half beyond the ash.
—Lo Fu
TOMB-SWEEPING DAY
Indeed we have nothing to say. On April's face
Tears bloom like flowers.
Across the lawn the dandelion is a kite-flying kid
Hauled along dangling by the clouds.
The clouds drag the kids,
The crafts drag the bombs.
Kids and bombs are things you don't lose temper with
Things we don't feel safe to discuss.
Tomb-sweeping day,
When everybody is used to such a game,
Not to cry,
But to sob.
—Lo Fu
ON THE SEA
Evening on the sea, the cattle clouds cannot rest,
Their watery hoofs just cannot rest
Upon the restless blue sea-plain.
Evening on the sea's not for rest.
—Fang Ch'i
SMALL BOATS
Lonely boats are all anchored slantwise.
It's so where there is a beach,
Just as heads leaning slantwise
Are full of sadness.
—Fang Ch'i
WINTER CURFEW
Don't you know it's blackout and curfew's in force?
Don't you know I shut my eyes to shut the rain off?
Don't you know even God on the wall puffs for warmth?
Don't you know over every bed rises the banner of love?
Don't you know pillow is a ferryboat to dream?
Don't you know my dream like an old blanket covers you?
—Fang Ch'i
TABOO
Don't go alone down the misty valley
And sing yourself free of obsession,
For in a year doubled echoes will call you
Clearly with my voice.
Don't look up in search of the moon.
Even when she's dark she is there
Behind the hush of palace doors,
Enigmatic in her bower.
Don't count the calendar on the desk.
Time's an accordion that swells and shrinks.
I am the morning and the evening star
East and west of the Eternal Blue.
Don't look at the mirror in an empty room,
For you will see me in the mirror,
And sudden at midnight when you wake,
You'll find you wake up in my dream.
—Fang Ch'i
LUNAR ECLIPSE OF THE FIFTEENTH*
Eight o'clock. On my second floor the moon
Tried to pass through the window.
In the evening of the fifteenth
I caught her
So that you all
Had a lunar eclipse.
But, came midnight,
She left her clothes on my bed,
And that's why
She was so bright, that night.
—Lin Huan-chang
*According to Chinese lunar calendar, the moon is at its fullest on the fifteenth of each month.
IT WAS AN EVENING
It was an evening that year
After the winter solstice
That I played hide-and-seek
With Algy the boy next-door.
I hid by the wall back of his house.
I had counted up to one hundred
And Algy hadn't caught me
When the big burly night
Rolled over and covered me up.
So we kept playing on.
Algy hasn't found me yet,
Mama hasn't found me yet
Since that evening.
I still dare not go home.
—Lin Huan-chang
READING THE WALL
1
Every day I would go there to read the wall
—A leaf torn from the book of Time,
Highly obscure.
The plaster is pealing off
And uncovers an eroded face.
Time O Time,
Is this how you look?
I often pass you, elbows brushing,
But never have learned those hieroglyphics
Etched on your brow.
2
Night, I have read.
But the wall remains a page of dark sky where stars,
The stars are always hid
Behind the hopeless lid.
Who else would listen to my question?
Greatness because of modesty,
Boulders because of silence.
So I've begun to learn from you.
3
The flyleaf shall be turned over at last.
Though sunshine looks like a good preface,
It too, shall be turned over.
So morning finds me stuck at the most obscure.
What, then, is the wall for, to defend or to confine?
For a long, long time
Such a heavy page
I've not dared to turn over.
—Lin Huan-chang
CHINA, CHINA
If a glass breaks in my tight grasp,
How shall I look for blood in my palm
and for you in my blood?
O life,
It is such a river
That at the very beginning
Traced in me my native mainland.
The mountains stand as witnesses,
The seas lie open to receive.
Even when my veins are all drained of blood,
Over the dry bed, like hieroglyphics,
Would still be written your dear name and dear name,
China, China.
—Lin Huan-chang
VARIATIONS ON THE MOON
The Bee's Moon
From the earth
There goes a new-born bee,
Oaring its flimsy wings cautiously
Towards a garden of mystery until,
Lightly circling, slowly alighting,
It lands on the enormous sphere of a white flower
In bashfulness.
Upon the clear, far, far sphere of the moon
In ecstasy.
If every flower be a reverie star,
If countless stars set a garden afloat,
Some flowers opening,
Some flowers closing,
If a garden be a universe,
If in that universe there stirs
A bee.
Chauffeur Earthy's Moon
The moon again alights
Upon the right upper corner of the windshield
Exactly in the manner of a traffic sign,
All blank inside,
With its "Keep A Safe Distance" lettering
Turned outside and invisible
To the people on the bus.
Some get off and some get on, it's a circuit route.
None on the bus knows where it all starts and ends.
Radios and televisions say
Some people have made it to the moon.
What could they be printing the other side of the moon?
Chauffeur Earthy wonders
And, both hands on the wheel, takes more care
To match the roughly turning wheels
And the quietly turning earth.
The Bedside Moon
The moon lies by the window, looking at distracted me.
I lie by the bedside, looking at tormented him.
Beyond music and chess, art and poetry,
Beyond cigarettes and wine, card and tea,
We care for each other and we meet
In each other's sympathy
Beyond the workshop calendar
Of the planets and the sun.
I know the moon's chagrin failing to change his career.
He knows my misery failing to change my vocation.
Our fellowship is pure disinterestedness
Like clean air merging with clear light.
Ours is neither the first nor the last.
I know this isn't my first looking at the moon,
The moon knows this isn't his last looking at me.
I don't know who it was who first saw the moon,
Nor does the moon know who shall be
The last of men he is to see.
The Moon of March 29
Once in spring the moon pressed behind the crowd,
Peeping, shoulder-high, at a roadside show,
And at random found him drooling at the mouth,
Hunched on his sister's back, asleep:
He was then three years old; once in summer
The moon and he and a bunch of grapefruits
Went climbing up Uncle Doggie's grapefruit trees
And woke up all them stars:
He was then only thirteen.
He laughed and the moon laughed with him,
He wept and the moon no longer laughed.
Once in autumn in the grass by the stream
The moon saw him secretly kissing
A girl's picture in silent tears;
And then in winter
The moon found him again, helmeted,
Hunched upon a little bullet, again asleep:
He was then, yes, he was
Just over twenty-three.
—Lo Ch'ing
THE FACE OF CHRIST
Gone
So you are gone
Without taking off your shoes,
Without washing your face.
So you are gone
Without casting an eye on me,
Without ever saying a word.
So you are gone,
Just leaving the door
Open behind you.
So you are gone
Without looking back.
Gone.
A Walk in the Rain
Countless raindrops sprouting out of the ground,
Countless marble tombstones ranged above the ground, Countless voices come alive from underground,
I walk alone
With raindrops all around me,
With tombstones all around me,
With voices calling all around me.
I walk alone
With myself all around me.
My Call
My restless feet that keep going
Cannot hear my call.
My sharp eyes that keep staring
Cannot hear my call.
My quick ears that keep turning
Cannot hear my call.
All the leaves
In all the autumns hurriedly fall,
Foot after foot,
Eye after eye,
Ear after ear.
Head
Yesterday, it's a head in the lap.
Today, it's a head in the dust.
Tomorrow, what kind of head will it be?
What's there to think of, head of yesterday?
What's there to think of, head of today?
What's there to think of, head of tomorrow?
A Leaf
At sunrise day before yesterday
It's an outburst of a new bud.
At sunrise only yesterday
It's an upspringing of a green leaf.
At sunrise today at last
It's a descending of a yellow leaf.
And when the sun rises tomorrow.
And when it rises day after tomorrow.
Feet
Day before yesterday they were mama's feet,
Yesterday they were my feet,
Today they are dusty feet,
Tomorrow whose feet will they be?
The shoes are broken,
The soles are broken,
The bones are broken,
The heart is broken.
Homeward Road
The trees are in the wind,
My feet are on the road,
What's my wife doing at home?
Is she steaming rice cakes?
The head keeps at home,
The feet keep on the road,
The trees keep in the wind.
What's my wife doing at home?
—Must be scrubbing
The black stains on the plastered wall;
The more scrubbed the worse they get
Each year.
—They call it "getting rid of the old".
Road and Feet
The road is just a long, long road,
The feet are just two short, short feet.
The road is motionless,
The feet are all motion.
The road takes it easy,
The feet take it busy.
Long the road,
Short the feet.
—Ch'iao Lin
TO THE READER
A thousand stories make one story;
The theme forever same's the theme,
Forever the shame and the glory:
When I say China I only mean
Such as myself and you and him.
—Yu Kwang-chung
WHEN I AM DEAD*
When I am dead, lay me down between the Yangtze
And the Yellow River and pillow my head
On China, white hair against black soil,
Most beautiful O most maternal of lands,
And I will sleep my soundest taking
The whole mainland for my cradle, lulled
By the mother-hum that rises on both sides
From the two great rivers, two long, long songs
That on and on flow forever to the East.
This the world's most indulgent roomiest bed
Where, content, a heart pauses to rest
And recalls how, of a Michigan winter night,
A youth from China used to keep
Intense watch towards the East, trying
To pierce his look through darkness for the dawn
Of China. So with hungry eyes he devoured
The map, eyes for seventeen years starved
For a glimpse of home, and, like a new-weaned child,
He drank with one wild gulp rivers and lakes
From the mouth of Yangtze all the way up
To Poyang and Tungt'ing and to Koko Nor.
—Yu Kwang-chung
* Composed in 1966 when the author was a Fulbright visiting lecturer in Michigan, the United States. Names in the last line are those of lakes on the Chinese mainland, one father west than the other.
PASSING FANGLIAO*
Listen, listen to the rain
Falling flush on Pingtung's plain,
On Pingtung's fields of sugar cane.
The sugary rain on the sugary plain,
How the sugar canes suck
The juicy rain in the juicy fields.
The rain falls flush in Pingtung's fields.
From here to the distant hills
How the fertile plain lulls
The canes, the sweet hope of the canes.
My bus whizzes across the green,
Greeted by the green guards of Pan,
While I wonder what cane he dozes under,
The shaggy and bearded god.
Listen, listen to the rain
Falling flush on Pingtung's plain,
On Pingtung's fields of watermelon.
The sugary rain on the sugary plain,
How the watermelons suck
The juicy rain in the juicy fields.
The rain falls flush in Pingtung's fields.
From here to the distant shore
How the cradle sands rear
The melons, the swelling hopes of the melons.
My bus whizzes across the sands
In view of the fecund hoard of Pan,
While I wonder what melon he sits on,
The sanguine and seedy god.
Listen, listen to the rain
Falling flush on Pingtung's plain,
On Pingtung's fields of banana.
The sugary rain on the sugary plain,
How the banana trees suck
The juicy rain in the juicy fields.
The rain falls flush in Pingtung's fields.
The rain is a swishing shepherd's song,
The road is a slender shepherd's flute
Fluting miles of paddy paths.
The rain falls flush in banana fields,
Plump the bananas plump the rain.
My bus never outruns the openness of Pan.
The road is an endless shepherd's flute.
We're saying Pingtung's the sweetest of counties
And the town must be built with sugar cubes when,
A sharp right turn, the saltiest,
A shock slap in the face, look,
The sea!
—Yu Kwang-chung
* Fangliao is a small town in Pingtung, the southernmost county of Taiwan and the "fruit kingdom" of the island.
BUILDING BLOCKS
How surprising to find, now the poem's written,
That the rain has stopped all of a sudden!
All, all has sunk in sleep, the world below.
Not even the rain would stay up with me;
I'm all alone up in the tower,
The ultimate self is a top-air self.
—The passage of twenty years
Still finds me playing poetry,
A game of building blocks with words.
But such a game is too sad,
Played only by oneself,
When youthful playmates all have grown
Into maturity and no longer would
Share a game that never grows old.
The last loneliness is all my own
And twenty years find me still in the game,
Still convinced such blocks,
If built solid enough and tall,
Would one day so steadfast stand
No child's play could ever upset,
As stubborn and as proud
As something ultimate.
—Yu Kwang-chung