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PATHLIGHT SPRING / 2015 Spring 2015 ISBN 978-7-119-09418-2 © Foreign Languages Press Co. Ltd, Beijing, China, 2015 Published by Foreign Languages Press Co. Ltd. 24 Baiwanzhuang Road, Beijing 100037, China http://www.flp.com.cn E-mail: [email protected] Distributed by China International Book Trading Corporation 35 Chegongzhuang Xilu, Beijing 100044, China P.O. Box 399, Beijing, China Printed in the People’s Republic of China CONTENTS Hai Zi Autumn 4 On the Great Plain a Great Snow Seals off the Mountains Swan Words West of the Vineyard Wu Ming-yi Death is a Tiger Butterfly 8 Deng Yiguang Wolves Walk Atwain 18 Gerelchimig Blackcrane The Nightjar at Dusk 28 Sun Yisheng Apery 38 Cai Shiping Wasted Towns and Broken Rooms 48 Thicketing of Shadows Toothache Red The Mountain Spirit A Bird Sings on a Flowered Branch Liu Liangcheng A Village of One 56 Shu Jinyu Liu Liangcheng: Literature Only Begins Where the Story Ends 66 Luo Yihe snowing and snowing 74 the moon white tiger the great river Rong Guangqi After the Rain 80 Full Moon Metal Squirrel Wei An Going into the White Birch Forest 84 Thoreau and I 86 Xia Jia Heat Island 92 Ye Zhou Nature’s Perfume 104 Nine Horse Prairie Qinghai Skies Zhou Xiaofeng The Great Whale Sings 110 Qiu Lei Illusory Constructions 122 Shao Bing Clear Water Castle 132 Wang Zu Snowfall 136 Shu Jinyu Ouyang Jianghe: Resistance and the Long Poem 144 Li Shaojun The Legend of the Sea 150 Mount Jingting Idle Musings in Spring Liu Qingbang Pigeon 154 Zhang Wei Rain and Snow 164 Ye Mi The Hot Springs on Moon Mountain 174 Recommended Books 186 Translators 188 海子 Hai Zi Born in Anhui in 1964, Hai Zi (the penname of Zha Haisheng, literally meaning “son of the sea”) was accepted into Peking University at the age of 15, and later taught philosophy and art theory at China University of Political Science and Law. Between 1983 and 1989 – when he took his own life by lying in the path of an oncoming train – he wrote around two hundred poems and several epic cycles. Translations of his poems have appeared in Asymptote and Mãnoa. 4 PATHLIGHT / SPRING 2015 Autumn Autumn grows deep, in the god’s house the eagles gather in the god’s hometown the eagles speak autumn grows deep, the king composes poems here in this world autumn grows deep what should be gained has not yet been gained what should be lost has long since been lost On the Great Plain a Great Snow Seals off the Mountains On the commune someone sings the praises of rain and snow and the sloping foothills Autumn passes in a flash many bumper-crop villages lose its traces Yesterday’s lightning cleaved the cart and horse snow seals off the mountains from now on the days get hard PATHLIGHT / SPRING 2015 5 _ Hai Zi Swan At night, I hear the distant sound of swans flying over a bridge the river in my body echoes them As they fly over the mud of a birthday, the mud of dusk one of the swans is injured but only the blowing lovely wind knows she’s injured. She’s still flying while the river in my body is heavy heavy as the lattice doors on the house as they fly over a distant bridge I cannot echo them with graceful flight As they fly over the cemetery like snow the snow has no path to my door —the body has no door—only fingers upright in the cemetery, like ten frostbitten candles On my muddy ground on a birthday’s muddy ground a swan is injured just like the folk singer sang 6 PATHLIGHT / SPRING 2015 Poetry _ Words West of the Vineyard It’s just as well I feel I’m carried toward a poor but holy snowfield I’m planted there, by pairs of large laboring hands painstakingly planted So I feel Solomon’s tent blown open by a southerly gust Solomon’s psalms unfold down the mountainside like spring water against my back The dark graceful face in the gully is interred in my heart. It’s just as well I feel I’m carried toward a poor but holy snowfield loveliest of all women, you are my coffin, I am your coffin Translated by Eleanor Goodman PATHLIGHT / SPRING 2015 7 吴明益 Wu Ming-yi Taiwanese author Wu Ming-yi, born in 1971, is also a noted academic and environmental activist who is famous for his non-fiction books on butterfliesThe ( Book of Lost Butterflies and The Dao of Butterflies) in addition to his novels. Darryl Sterk’s translation of his ecological parable The Man With the Compound Eyes (shortlisted for the 2014 Typographical Era Translation Award) received international acclaim from critics and writers such as Ursula K. Le Guin. 8 PATHLIGHT / SPRING 2015 Death is a Tiger Butterfly By Wu Ming-yi But my heart was strangely quiet. Something had bead of sweat, Carson pondered the memory: made it friendly to death. But most of all I shall remember the monarchs, that Naoya Shiga, “At Kinosaki” unhurried westward drift of one small winged form after another, each drawn by some invisible force. We talked a In that tiny, quenched image of vitality, a bird like a little about their migration, their life history. Did they re- leaf dropped by the wind in passing, I felt something of our turn? We thought not; for most, at least, this was the closing common, friable substance – a shared vulnerability… journey of their lives. John Haines, “Death is a Meadowlark” But it occurred to me this afternoon, remembering, that it had been a happy spectacle, that we had felt no sadness n the department office, after the staff had all when we spoke of the fact that there would be no return. gone, I encountered my colleague Professor And rightly – for when any living thing has come to the end Kang, whose father had recently passed away. of its life cycle we accept that end as natural. I She looked exhausted. I sat across from her, Professor Kang, this is what Carson, not knowing going on about the things I’d been reading as that she was just half a year from the end of her own she sorted through her mail. Suddenly, she looked up life cycle, was writing about, what the migrating mon- and asked, “How long did you spend grieving your fa- archs had related to her in the whispered language of ther? Until you were able to move on?” flight. They revealed the riddle of what life is, before I couldn’t say, my dear Professor Kang. You under- leaving with the key to the riddle. For they were soon stand life more than me. With every breath you take, to be discarded by life: once the monarch mothers lay you are more in synchrony with the rhythms of the their eggs they lose the impulse to fly. They decom- Earth, and closer to the Lord than me. I couldn’t say, pose into organic matter in the soil where, the follow- Professor Kang. I don’t know how much time I spent ing spring, a cluster of milkweeds will bloom. grieving. Maybe I don’t even know if there’s a time Professor Kang, I admit the metaphor is inapt, when (or a space where?) one can finally move on. because a father is not the same as a monarch but- On 14 April, 1964, Rachel Carson died in Silver terfly. After all, I am an organic outgrowth of my Spring, Maryland. A few days later, at the funeral, the own father’s cellular tissue. We’re bound by the same minister read a letter Carson had sent the previous genetic chain, by a set of circumstances related to sur- September to her friend Dorothy Freeman. In the let- vival, you might say. Father bit his nails when his mind ter, Carson wrote about a trip they’d taken together, wandered, the same way I do. I have poor color vision, about how moved they were to witness a monarch but- because he had poor color vision. But while he might terfly migration in Maine at the end of the summer. have been worried about keeping the family shoe store Pouring out her feelings with every tear and every afloat. I would just let myself sink into a nameless funk PATHLIGHT / SPRING 2015 9 _ Wu Ming-yi between excitement and dejection. He used to stitch Death is a monarch butterfly. Did she not just flut- soles, while I would doodle on the shoeboxes. ter her flame-like wings? To be honest, I don’t know whether he was able “to regard the end as natural” when he was about to There are monarchs on record in Taiwan, espe- leave this world. But it seems to me that sorrow is a cially in the south. But in the 1960s the monarchs parasite emotion that cannot survive without its host. mysteriously disappeared, all over Asia – swiftly, help- My father’s sorrow passed away when his irises dulled, lessly, heavy as a sigh. The great Taiwanese lepidopter- while I have given up on moving on from the space of ist Mr. Chen Wei-shou once said that a monarch is so grief. (Or should I say, the time?) I have even, at cer- full of vitality that when you catch it to make a speci- tain secret moments, been drawn out by sorrow into men, it’s not easy to pinch it unconscious.

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