Ouyang Jianghe

Five Poems

Crossing the Square at Nightfall

Translated by Michael Day

I do not know were a square of past ages
begins, or where it ends.
Some people take an hour to cross the square,
some a lifetime --
In the morning it's children, in the evening people in the dusk of life.
I don't know how much farther you must walk in the twilight before you can
stop your steps.

In the twilight how long must you survey
before you can close your eyes? When a fast moving auto
opens its blinding lights
in the rearview mirror I saw the flash of the faces
of those who once crossed the square on a bright morning.
In the evening in buses they leave.

A place that no one leaves is not a square,
a place where no one falls is also not.
The departed come home again, but the fallen are forever fallen.
A thing called stone
quickly piles up, towers up,
unlike the growth of bones needing a hundred years time.
Also not so soft as a bone.

Every square has a head built out of stone
making the empty-handed people feel the measure
of life. To look up and think with a huge head of stone,
not a simple matter for anyone.
The weight of stone
lightens the responsibility, the love and the sacrifice on people's shoulders.

Perhaps people will cross the square on a bright morning,
open arms and tenderly embrace in winds from every side.
But when the night falls, hands grow heavy,
the only body emitting light is the stone in the head.
The only keen sword that stabs at the head quietly drops to the ground.

Darkness and cold are rising.
Surrounding the square tall structures put on the latest fashion of china and glass.
All grows small. The world of stones
lightly floats up in the world reflected in the glass,
like an oppressive notion scrawled in children's workbooks
that at anytime can be ripped out and kneaded into a ball.

Cars speed past, pouring the speed
of running water into a huge system of concrete that possesses muscles and bones of iron,
in the shape of the horns bestowed on silence.
The square of past ages vanishes from the rearview mirror.

Disappears forever --
a square covered by acne in its green spring, in its first love.
A square that has never appeared in the accounts and notices of death.
A square that bares its chest, rolls up its sleeves, tightens its belt
that wears patches and energetically scrubs with both hands.

A square that through young blood runs outside its body,
that licks with its tongue, strikes stone with its brow, and covers itself
with flags.

A square of daydreams that has vanished, no more exists,
stops in the morning as if there has been a night of heavy snow.
A pure and mysterious thaw
shimmers in turn in eyes and conscience,
a part grows into a thing called tears,
a part grows hard inside a thing called stone.

The world of stone collapses.
A world of soft tissue climbs up to the high spot.
The entire process like spring water leaving minerals through a draw pipe
going distilled into an airtight, beautifully packaged space
Riding an express elevator I rise in the umbrella stem of a rainy day.

When I return to the ground, I look up and see a circular restaurant
opened like an umbrella revolving in the city's sky.
This is a cap grown out of wizardry,
its size does not agree
with the head of the giant piled up out of stone.

The arms that once supported the square are let down.
Today the giant relies on the support of a short sword.
Will it stab something? For example, a fragile revolution
that was once stirred up on paper, posted to walls?

There has never been a power
that could glue together for long two different worlds.
In the end a repeatedly posted head will be ripped away.
A repeatedly whitewashed wall
has a half occupied by a girl of mixed blood baring her thighs.
The other half is enticing ads for the installation of prosthetics and the regeneration of hair.

A pram quietly parks on the evening square,
silent, not related to this world soon to go mad.
I guess the distance between the pram and the setting sun
to be farther than a hundred years.
This is an almost limitless yardstick, sufficient to measure
the length of the confined era that passed over the square.

The universal fear of house arrest
brought people off their perches to gather in the square
changed the lonely moments of a lifetime into a fervent holiday.
And in the depths of their dwellings, in the silent eye-catching ceremony of love and death,
a square of shadows empty without a sign of life is treasured,
like a tightly sealed room for penitence it is only a secret of the heart.

Must one pass through the darkness of the heart before crossing the square?
Now in the dark the two blackest worlds combine as one,
the hard stone head is split open,
in the dark keen swords flash.

If I could use the mysterious black night chopped in half
to explain a bright morning trampled to the ground by both feet –
if I could follow the flight of stairs swept by the dawn light
and climb up onto the shoulders of the giant standing high on the summit of nothingness,
not to rise, but to fall --
if the epigraph engraved in gold is not to be an eulogy,
but to be rubbed out, forgotten, trampled –

Just as a trampled square must fall on the head of the trampler,
those people who crossed the square on that bright morning,
sooner or later their black leather shoes will fall on sharp swords,
as heavily as the lid of a coffin must fall on the coffin.
As long as it is not me lying inside, and also not
the people walking on the blade of the sword.

I never thought so many people could cross the square
on that bright morning, dodging loneliness and immortality.
They are the survivors of an era of black confinement.
I never imagined they would leave or fall in the evening.

A place where nobody falls is not a square.
A place where nobody stands also is not.
Was I standing? How much longer must I stand?
All in all those who fell and me are the same,
we were never immortal.

Between Chinese and English

Translated by Michael Day

I reside in a pile of character parts,
between the casual looks of this and that form.
They stand alone and penetrate, limbs rocking and unsteady,
a monotonous beat like shots from a gun.
After a wave of sound, Chinese characters grow simple.
Some arms, legs, eyes fall away,
but words still move on, stretch out, and see.
That kind of mystery raises a hunger.
Moreover, it left behind many delicious days,
let me and my race eat it, pick over it together.
In the accent of this place, in a local dialect gathered up like a crystal,
in classical and modern Chinese mixed into one speech,
the figure of my mouth is a circular ruin,
teeth sink into an open space
and do not collide with a bone.
With this kind of vista, this kind of flesh, Chinese feasts over the land.
I finished eating my portion of days, then ate the ancient's, until

one evening, I go to stroll on the English Corner, and see
a crowd of Chinese round a Yank, I surmise they
want to move into English. But English has no territory in China.
It is merely a class, a form of conversation, a TV program,
in university a department, tests and paper.
On the paper I feel the strong likeness of Chinese to a pencil.
Light strokes and vague outlines, the life of a worn eraser.
Having experienced too much ink, glasses, typewriters
and the weightiness of lead,
relaxed and smooth, English rolls up on a corner in China.
It accustoms us to abbreviations and diplomatic language,
also western food, forks and knives, Aspirin.
This type of change does not involve the nose
and skin. Like a daily morning toothbrush
English moves over the teeth, making Chinese white.
Once I ate books
ate the dead, therefore

everyday I brush my teeth. This concerns water, hygiene and contrast.
This produced a feeling for the mouth, a taste for speech,
and the many differences in the language of everyday use.
It also relates to a hand: it stretches into English,
the middle and index fingers spread apart, simulating
a letter, a victory, a kind of fascist experience of yourself.
A cigarette drops to the ground, extinguished when only half smoked,
like a part of history. History is a war that suffers
from a stutter, earlier it was the Third Reich, it was Hitler.
I do not know if this madman shot English, shot
Shakespeare and Keats.
But I do know in the Oxford dictionary there is the English of the nobility,
also the English of Churchill and Roosevelt armed to the teeth,
its metaphors, its objective reality, its aesthetic of destruction,
exploded at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
In Japanese I see piles of Chinese characters become corpses –
but beyond language, China and England-America make a pact.
I read this part of history, and feel very suspicious.
Between history and me I do not know which is more preposterous.

More than one hundred years. Between Chinese and English, what actually happened?
Why do so many Chinese migrate into English,
work hard to become white people of a yellow race, and see the Chinese language
as a divorced wife, see it as a home in a broken mirror? What
actually happened? I live alone secluded in Chinese,
in dialogue with a great many paper people, daydreaming of English,
and see even more Chinese climbing up into it,
changing from a person of pictographic likeness to a phonetic linker of sound.

Spring

Translated by Michael Day

Just as a rose is reddest amid fresh blood,
it will also grow blacker in a black wound,
stopping the world from rising high on your left arm
or hanging down, because what's clenched in your hand is not spring.

Just as a flame grows whiter in white terror,
it will also shine green in the eyes of the dying,
not because of hatred, but for love,
the springtime love sunk in the flesh like the claws of a wolf:

A spring of tightly sealed lips and clenched teeth,
the hiss of a venomous snake is spit from the tip of your tongue,
shadows of death pass through wolf lungs
twisted tight, shaken in upright blood.

The spring wound round our neck is a poisonous snake,
the spring that leaps into our embrace is a pack of hungry wolves.
Like a drowning man saved and thrown into a fire,
spring gives to love the power for blood to flow.

Wearing the moon the snake darts out from the flames,
bearing love the wolf falls in a rose bush.
This is not the fault of lovers, nor
that of the immortals imposed over our heads.

The evil in the heart of man grows up with all things,
it plunges roots into a place the dead can see.
There, the heart sees farther than the eye,
like the smoke that puffs up, your hands are inhaled into nostrils.

A person cannot warm frozen hands on a rose,
although roses and flames answer a similar call,
among the mass of left arms raised in salute that transmits
the annual blossoming, the yearly conflagration.

Neither can a person cool singed lips on a flame,
although a flame becomes water faster than a lover,
rising up into the coldest kiss of kisses,
the yearly selection, the annual annihilation.