from Issue #8: Poetry by Geng Xiang, translated by Ouyang Yu

Photo (CC) Victoria Reay

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An Account of Beilin or the Forest of Stone Steles

A hand-made brush
And an ingot of hand-ground ink, a deep breathing thousand years long
Left on a heap of stones, yinly or yangly
By a group of Chinese characters
Collectively dancing

Only the power of the sunlight
Could bind and lay out the Chang’an book of heard hearts
In black and white, along the rough edges of time
And, drifting among them, under whose wind-calling pen
Was the shadow behind a dynasty copied in such a way
That clouds spread and curled? Accompanying an ancient locust tree
Written in the calligraphic style of Li, and before The Ode to the Stone Gate
I watched and listened

Tell the Forest of Stone Steles that you have to put your footsteps
Inside its long corridor and your eye
On its forehead
Before you know the poems free in brushes and ink, collected by Chang’an
And it is the Chinese characters crowded with stones that make me show
The sharps of humanity
In heresy or crevices. Now, my question to the hands
That have touched the stones in the country: will you dare
Touch another kind of stone?

Leaning against a stone stele, I, in the thousand-year-long
Breathings, in black and white, of the brushes and the ink, have heard the history
Also standing in front of a volume of rivers and mountains, starting to grind the ink
Wetting the brush and moving the air

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An Account of the Terracotta Soldiers and Horses

Mud and flame, across the most pictographic memory
Of the Chinese characters, have quietly sent a crowd of people
Risen from the yellow earth back to the yellow earth

Mud is standing in the muddy earth
As flame gets under the skin of the mud’s breathings
The way paintings of the battlefield are hidden in one
The way a wound, thousands of years long, fits the busy rural fields
Instead, an onlooker has seen a mulberry tree
Taking roots by the body of a terracotta soldier
On a mulberry-gathering day, when someone is reminded
Of the touch of silk with skin
Thicker and denser than the armour

And, standing by the crowded pit
I grew fearful of the instigating eyes of the crowd
That might again induce their murderousness. The wheat fields are like the clothes
That give a simple body back to the farmer
The hand holding the sword is taking hold of hand tools
Grabbing hold of a virgin body, lost years ago, as if by the veins of life. Let me kneel
In memory of the Qin people, a grand funeral, of earth

Mud and flame, underneath a plot of wheat field
Have turned thoroughly cold. As the hand caresses the collectively sewn
Terracotta soldiers and horses, with broken limbs, the breath of the Qin people
Hits the face, through the Chinese characters

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An Account of the Great Wild Geese Pagoda

A pagoda like a cloud. All the seasons around
There is a great snow that flutters down the mountains of the Qinling
For whom are you coming, flying? A red mountain gate, reclining in the clear
And solitary sky of Chang’an, tell me
About the features of it left on the earth
When a dynasty far receded

A great dream of the Tang Dynasty. From the much-loving arms
Of an individual, I drew the silk
As if I was drawing an avenue of silk. And in the sound of the shuttling
On the loom, and at the top of the pagoda, filled with the hidden volumes of scriptures
That the great geese had carried there, can the black bricks
turned into the Buddhist shadows
Still sound the 7 notes of Chang’an
Towards the skies? At this moment
I won’t appear on the field although I am willing
To be taken as a listener

As long as I raise my head, the eye, hidden in the pagoda
Or the volumes, will attack me from the gray seams
Of the bricks. It’s one person’s swan-goose song
Who will say, on the plain
Softened by the spreading silks: My Guanzhong
And my pagoda of great geese, resemble a worn
Kasaya, and, more, they resemble a feather
Fallen from a goose in its flight

Let me re-read one clothed in kasaya, from the height
Of your seven notes, with his facial expressions on his way back
From the far distant silk road, his back inserted
Between the pages of those volumes or
Standing under the sky

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The Substitute

What bonds me is the substitute doll
Primitive imagination of rags
Sewn and patched on the collar of my clothes

Prior to my turning 12, there must have been
12 such dolls, growing up
With me, lankily. When I saw them, my heart would grow tense
Contracting like wrinkles of wave, and I’d grab hold of Mother’s
Hands, mysterious ones, that were sewing them
Without daring to stir. In my eyes, brighter than
Fine china, tears were running
Scarily

How much load of illness or disaster did these 12 dolls
Used to bear for me? I am not sure what ferocious ghosts
Caught them and, along with the souls
Dissolved the sins that accompanied my growth. Even less am I sure
On the day when I take off my armour and return to the fields
In which corner of my house
They will rust and erode, filled
With my childhood of witchcraft

The substitute doll, I shall always remember how
I held your cloth body when Mom was asking for my soul
As the heart of my hand kept sweating

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR AND TRANSLATOR

Born in 1958, GENG XIANG is from Yongshou, Shanxi, and now lives in Xi’an. A member of the Chinese Writers’ Association as well as a leading member of Chinese Poetry Society, he began writing poetry in the 1980s and has had poems published in shikan (Poetry Monthly), shiyue (October) and huacheng (Flower City). In 1991, he attended the Fourth National Young Writers’ Conference and, in the same year, he attended the Ninth ‘Youth Poetry Conference’, held by Poetry Monthly Society, and was a representative at the sixth and seventh Chinese Writers’ Association Representatives Conferences. In 2010, he visited Serbia as part of the Chinese writers’ delegation. He has published eight collections of poetry and essays, including At the Back of Xi’an, Gathering Copper from the People, The Chang’an Book and The Lamp on the Land. He has won the Lao She Award for Essays, the Bing Xin Award for Essays and the Poetry Monthly Annual Award.

Since his arrival in Australia in 1991, OUYANG YU has published 73 books of fiction, non-fiction, poetry, literary translation and criticism in both English and Chinese. His latest novel in Chinese is Taojin Di (Land of Gold Diggers), published by Jiangsu Literature and Art Publishing House in 2014 and his latest novel in English is Diary of a Naked Official, published by Transit Lounge in 2014. His latest translation into Chinese is The Fatal Shore by Robert Hughes, published by Nanjing University Press in 2014. He is now professor of English at Shanghai University of International Business and Economics.