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Introduction by Wang Ping Commentary by Yunte Huang
From "Yellow Tiles and Red Walls
The gate of hell, so gloomy so cold so deep and so far away,
opening and closing at the bottom of the dry well
Girls dare not bend to look in
afraid of a hand pusing from behind
Concubine Zhen died thin.
Her husband was an emperor, her mother-in-law the emperor dowager
Widowed for many years,
the dowager feared the laughter between man and woman,
feared that Zhen's graceful steps and her perfume
hooked the emperor's eye.
She ordered Zhen to die
and the emperor to love another.
Crying she said she didn't want to die or pollute the well.
If she died the other person would also perish . . .
Before she finished she was pushed
into a long distant night
She's been floating ever since
in the news
a girl who rebels against an exchange marriage
jumps into a well
translated by Wang Ping and Murar Nemet-Nejar
The wheat reaper has ground his sickle sharp. His wine is also ripe like the sickle The wheat is waiting to fall like friends far away coming over to fall into your arms He hears the sound of wheat meeting the sickle He is that sickle as well as the wheat If there were no winter the reaper would have given up the harvest Wine agrees when it cuts his throat translated by Wang Ping and Murar Nemet-Nejar
Those who are gone or going away
stand still at the sound of your voice
The air that ascends to heaven floats in different images
The finger of a tawny daylily
plucks the string of a distant memory
I walk away to lie in the sunny marsh
The May sun makes love to me from different angles
I loiter on the street corner
I see the world piece itself together then fall apart
When you start moving
every life stops to watch
When you think of women
you knit your brows or smile openly
The flag on the tower is playing with the wind
It makes you think of her body surging like a wave
the same body that ripped the city
of its sex
You reach out your hand
and penetrate her skin like a hero
You think of the snow that covered the fields all winter
and the fresh damp air
Someday
you will no longer belong to yourself or to anyone else
you will become a wriggling sprout out of the ancient past
That moment only takes a second on your watch
Within that second your life ends then begins again
Death is the destination of birth
This Buddhist eulogy is depressing
On another day in another situation
you thought about many women by drawing inference
about other cases from one instance
and their seducing postures
You predicted destinations of all journeys
That short second is a complete life
Day is day
night is night
You and the women are all rusty machines
We close our eyes vertiginously
We embrace to keep warm
and wait for the next samsara
while thoughts ferment discreetly between the transmigrations
You no longer restrain yourself from fantasizing about other
women when you make love
One night you suddenly see through your own face
Waking up the next morning you said to the only star:
I wish I could die quickly
to be born again in a moment
translated by Wang Ping and Lewis Warsh
Prelude In that place either silent or blind You're writing the only poem. In the backyard of time you've written the lines to replace words and objects. Before the destruction you started the poem which no one can kidnap, which has no beginning. It's approaching the winter. The pen tip gleams. The last stroke in the dark brings the world to a sudden halt. Those whose ears were stolen will never forgive. The disaster caused by the snow storm awoke all the intoxicated. A gardener who keeps death and roses is trying to learn cool wisdom with the short days of his life. Doors and windows are tightly closed. How you wish you could keep your relatives here and let trees enjoy the silent twilight. You're doomed to write this only poem. The breath of the blooming words is short-- you linger on. translated by Wang Ping and Leonard Schwartz
The person who is fixed in place in this room is scared of the table. Words are endless holes that he doesn't know how to repair. A piece of blank paper lives a cleaner life. All is but habit. He often wonders about the clock on the wall. It might be more accuratge if only it stopped ticking. A premonition throbs in his temples. He can hear nothing. Thunder stuns the woods as in a vicious dream. It's already the dawn after a sleepless night. An utterly unjust fire saves his life from the book. translated by Wang Ping and Leonard Schwartz
This is not the last that's punished by language. A new wooden house is knocked down by a tree. The prisoner makes traps around himself. If he's let out alive he'll take the crimes with him. He has no other shortcut. A knife between life and death. Light is cut open and bent by the lonely sky. The world is as painful as fate. Words are shackles. Once he's learned how to confess, no one can ever defend him. Translated by Wang Ping and Lewis Warsh
At night I reach out my hands Bright fingers, pointing in the direction of roses, my head bent silently to the blooming, withered and soft fingers, pointing in the direction of waves, my head bent silently to the calm cold fingers, pointing in the direction of the cliff, my head bent silently to those who remain I slip into spring water pebbles cloves My hair has grown like wheat, but can't be harvested At night I reach out my hands rough fingers pointing in the direction of language, my head bent silently to the talking, listening and slim fingers, pointing in the direction of a miracle, my head bent silently to the existing, non-existing and bent fingers, pointing in the direction of a dream, my head bent silently to the beautiful scenes and nightmares At night, I dream I'm thrown into a slaughterhouse Death is not a secret, death is a gaze Dawn is here, the fingers are still pointing in the direction of a song Once I sang, but now I have lost my voice The sun has risen, the firm fingers pointing in the direction of mother I was born there, but now I am drifting farther away The sun is blinding my eyes, the trembling fingers pointing in the direction of a city which holds a funeral for me as if I were a puppet who doesn't show any sign of life unless touched by a hand Tears stain my face, I can't see what direction the last finger is pointing If it's pointing in the direction of my imagination then it's the direction of time which is also your direction After someone said the water was flowing so fast you came over and made a whirlpool to drown me, to choke me then you pointed your finger suddenly in the direction of the void translated by Wang Ping and Lewis Warsh
I sell dreams, cheap following my inclinations like a dog who sold his master I sell epochs, my body crosshatched with scars I sell time, diarrhetic penniless as fresh air I sell country, motherland disappears I sell space, earth vanishes I hold the universe in my hand and write you a love letter I sell holidays, together with loneliness in ignorance of the world I sell everything: life, breath, death But tonight you must listen I'm going to kiss you seriously and turn over like a sunken boat You're the ocean the only thing I have left translated by Wang Ping and Lewis Warsh
In my eyes there's nothing but China
She blooms forever
breeding poetry which delights the world
I've read the women of Chu, Lu and Wu
and the goddesses from the last century
Through the loudspeaker of the human tongue
I disclose the misery of the earth to the universe
I call a man father
I scorn mountains
I experience the void night and day
My body has grown into the shape of the seven continents pieced
[together
Homer is blind
I'm bright-eyed
A woman calls me darling
I nap under the wall of the Paris Commune
I have four limbs like the four oceans
The possibility of remaking nature still exists in my brain
Everyday I read the newspaper and cry
I can only be myself
When it's dark, I hold
the secret of China in my hands
When it's bright,
I become the last struggle,
the last harvest
on earth
translated by Wang Ping and Lewis Warsh
When I'm gluttonous, I want to taste dinosaur meat and smell the cooker phoenix When I'm hungry, I want to eat iceberg and drink sunlight I hate girls with big front teeth hate the college students who study the nutritive value of Jin Gangshan herbs with Citzen watches around their wrists I've just managed to learn how to be honest, only to discover the world has already betrayed me I'm bursting with anger It makes me look ugly when I laugh So I only grimace To defend the blue sky, I drive away all the clouds To defend the bonfire, I set the whole grassland on fire To defend autumn, I turn myself into a fruit I want to eat everything. Quick, close your eyes It's embarrassing to see me so gluttonous and hungry translated by Wang Ping and Lewis Warsh
Poetry suffers and freezes. We turn our backs to the memories In the distance are the endagered fish The masterpiece of foam A melancholy narrator under the waterline Days live in dark seclusion and don't hear the fish teeth grinding They can't hear the bad news of my disappeared poet-brothers Water, gigantic water curves in dizziness Who will notice the body's double trembling breathing like a thread, like an ant Finally a first pair of wings born in humiliation Another pair! Lightly I flap my wings and take off I write down my name on the surface of the water the tremendous dream under the green lotus leaf's shadow I pass the land and the market of cattails like an insect kindergarden or a grand ball of the white lotus I accept the beautiful scenes along the shore as a cheer The first trip into a multiple world without help from a machine The thread-like object on the tail serves to keep balance in this dust In my own sky I make a tragic surge The trace of crash can teach all new-comers To begin like an apprentice to summarize like an expert Unconsciously I'm approaching eternity nearing multiplicity Oh humans, why are you so greedy Give me a day One day is enough for me Give me one day of eternity Measurement doesn't exist No need to be excited about beginning or end Death is just a ritual the ritual of leaving your life We fly in groups at twilgiht facing the same sunset Within concentric circles are innumerable other circles The first and last days of a lunar month just a secondary matter If a soul is multiple enough it can hold anything No need to point at the sky and say This is a second or billions of light years The explsoion is on-going The cosmos in one moment we all exist in this enthusiastic shot Dancing Flying is also a performance But no audience. The morning bacteria and underground soul are not the distance that separate us It's an ultimate affirmation proving that we deserve to be underlined The flight in the process holds water and sky which are more casual than us Flight means embracing this attitude embracing the land and humans For the sea and the pity for a drop of salt our flight exists without boundaries We take our lives as a holiday-- On the same day, we lay eggs, mate and die translated by Wang Ping and David Shapiro
Title page--like daytime before I was born, light at the other
end of the tunnel
In a blind navel I found a white fear
A baby grown accustomed to the dark is impressed
by the first look at light
To praise darkness, to sing about the dark, is a habit
I've cultivated in the center of the sea
I'm mysterious like a sea urchin, far away like fish,
and I cry like a mermaid
My tears, each drop as big as fan shells
make a new deposit, the colors on my left gray forehead
keep interweaving like an exchange, and record the
ocean's tremor
The shrinking skill in a book of poetry
I didn't forget to leave my name and date
The first page--in the center of a small, dark universe, I'm warm
and safe, surrounded by amniotic memory
A universe in a shell, sometimes it hides out of
temporary necessity
I suck the darkness and delicious liquid
History is torn off by my hands
The worst crime is a pearl
The pale core is a grain of salt
The most discolored is the rule
Withdrawal again is out of temporary necessity
From the first to second--not only a movement of turning
pages. The sea is the source. For me,
there's always another eye open in the bottom of the brain
Face the iron
Now I understand your language
I suffered the heaviest blow at the bottom of the sea
It taught me life
In the electric chair of universe, the contractions became
violent
The human universe fights against the human
Some misfortune is foredoomed
Some birthmarks are indelible
Between the third and fourth pages--the design that can't be
washed away even by the sea is your native tongue
At the moment of flight, you said I needed light, and the
light shone on you
and a blurred tall god was surrounded by a halo
Thus religion was born, and nurses became angels
All the angels are white dwarf stars
All crows are fallen angels
Like fixed stars and their moons, nights are the collapse of
daytime
We've been forcing ourselves to believe that a thousand
years of darkness will be rewarded with a thousand
happy years
On Page X--contractions made me forget my last name, the whitest
page, the criminal page, the light turned on and off
suddenly, and the wounded one is comforted
I turned the page, but forgot to number it. I didn't
darken it deliberately
When you open your eyes
you'll become blind again after you see the light
It's time to utter your first calls
in a language that can be understood throughout the world
Don't let this X turn into a swastika
Don't be sentenced before you sing
My only concern is the force-field of language
The untimely end--like the night before I was born, like a white
moth turned into black, a dance or a mutation
Suddenly I grew into a singer and my first song
was dedicated to a night
All the living and dead, the first and last night
the pattern of the trembling sea, in which a youth drowned
He taught me how to raise my voice, how to drink the
sunlight or blood while shouting
how to drink the sunlight in the dark, to drink bood in
light
to see light in the dark, to read my handwriting in the
light
Time Space
translated by Wang Ping and David Shapiro
It's a sick epoch, lungs hit me with coughing My own lungs are getting sick with love. My own body hits me with diseases My own body is like a clock of our time. Diseases attack me repeatedly I'm plucked many times, so loud. It's a sick time, I want to love more and my health gets worse. Violent coughing shakes me I, who loves to shout, am losing my voice. translated by Wang Ping and David Shapiro
Hunt down the fall in a fallen leaf Walk farther than human beings on an abandoned street The miserable days that hang onto trees belong to such leaves But in whose mind do I hang, in pain? The long street dances against the wind This street looks like a twig full of empty calls. She touches the sky's cheeks Her own strength bends her backwards A fallen leaf crawls in the approach of life's limits. I hold my hand out to a leaf and send my city into a deep, dignified sleep. Nobody wakes up! Nobody! But let's walk through this empty street like human beings! translated by Wang Ping and David Shapiro
The red land about thirty-five acres at the bottom of the hill
On the slope grow pine trees grass and mushrooms
A wooden cottage an ox head hangs from the window ledge
The front yard has firewood footprints dogs and a muddy plough
The host not seen the ploughed red soil looks fertile
The sound of a stream seems to come from behind the mountain
As if a place for gods everything splendid
Except for a piece of fence standing in the middle of the fields
instead of around the house
crooked about ten branches tied toegether with vines
standing over there fencing in nothing surrounded by nothing
If it went a few steps back it might make a vegetable garden
Or if it extended further along the meadow and the new soil
it could become a sign of possession
But it isn't where it's supposed to be
firmly planted in the middle of the red filed far away
from the edges of everything
It isn't a statue in a square but a piece of fence
The cottage has often appeared in my dreams But I never expected
this extra piece of fence
It makes me feel unsatisfied anxious to correct it
However it has nothing to do with me
I'm just passing through
This is a place for dogs For them
over there in the middle of the red land
there should be a piece of fence
translated by Wang Ping and Ron Padgett
On the fifth floor in the city of Qujing
they were talking about the Pearl River and its source
"We were there two years ago fifty miles away from the city
Nothing to see there
Not a tree no grass no person no road
Only some rocks
Big and small all gray the mud sucked at our shoes
Some crows flew up out of nowhere almost scared us to death
what bad luck
After a long trek in the mud we reached a ditch A drop of water
dripped down from a crack in the rocks This is the source of
the Pearl River
We'll never go again in this life What bad luck"
In the city of Qujing I listened to them talking about the Pearl River
and looked into the distance Far away there were only barren hills
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