Contrappasso Magazine: International Writing

Edited by Matthew Asprey Gear

Navigation

Skip to content
  • Home
  • Artwork
  • Fiction
  • Interviews
  • Memoir
  • Poetry
  • Multimedia
  • Contributors
  • About

Tag Archives: The Substitute

Post navigation

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

Posted on June 7, 2015 by theodoreell
Photo (CC) Victoria Reay

Photo (CC) Victoria Reay

*

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

.

*

.

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

.

*

.

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

.

*

.

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

.

*

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.

Posted in Poetry Tagged An Account of Beilin or the Forest of Stone Steles, An Account of the Great Wild Geese Pagoda, An Account of the Terracotta Soldiers and Horses, Chinese poetry, Contrappasso Magazine, Geng Xiang, Issue 8, Ouyang Yu, poetry, The Substitute, Translation Leave a comment

Post navigation

"A periodical that moves restlessly, thrillingly among its interests and concerns...the Sydney-based Contrappasso publishes international writing of the highest order." Los Angeles Review of Books.

NOW AVAILABLE



LONG DISTANCE
70 writers, working in 7 languages, hailing from Australia, New Zealand, China, Malaysia, Iraq, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Russia, the UK, Ireland, the USA and Argentina.





ISSUE 8
Interview with F. H. Batacan; fiction by Roberto Arlt, Andrea Pasion-Flores, Rick DeMarinis, Kent Harrington; Morris Lurie tribute; poetry by Alicia Aza, Blanca Castellón, Geng Xiang, Lu Ye, Mary MacPherson, Sascha Morrel, Frank Russo, Floyd Salas, Paolo Totaro, and more.





WRITERS AT THE MOVIES
Essays by Luc Sante, Sarah Berry, Richard Lowenstein, Richard Hugo, Clive Sinclair, Michael Eaton, Jon Lewis, Anthony May; fiction by Barry Gifford; poetry by Michael Atkinson, R. Zamora Linmark, and James Franco; and interviews with Jonathan Rosenbaum, Emmanuel Mouret, Scott Simmon, and Richard Misek. Edited by Noel King & Matthew Asprey Gear.





ISSUE 6
Interviews with Judith Beveridge, Lawrence Block and Jose Dalisay. New fiction by Mitsuyo Kakuta, Álvaro Bisama, Jon A. Jackson and R. Zamora Linmark. Poetry by Elizabeth Smither, Iain Britton and Stephen Oliver, Flora Delalande, Penny Florence, Ouyang Yu, Richard James Allen, Stuart Barnes, Jamie Grant, Siobhan Hodge, Frank Russo and Les Wicks.





NOIR ISSUE
A grab-bag of essays, interviews, and classic and new noir poetry. Contributors include: Luc Sante, Suzanne Lummis, Nicholas Christopher, Barry Gifford, Morris Lurie, Dahlia Schweitzer & Toby Miller, Andrew Nette. Interviews with Dennis McMillan and Adrian Wootton. Edited by Matthew Asprey & Noel King.





Other EBOOK formats @




ISSUE 4
Featuring: Writings in memory of Seamus Heaney; the Crate-Diggers' Symposium; fiction by Juan Villoro, Clive Sinclair, and Elisabeth Murray; poetry by Mira Peck, Hong Ying, Mikhail Yeryomin, Rogelio Guedea, Morris Lurie, Floyd Salas, Tegan Jane Schetrumpf, and more.





Other EBOOK formats @




ISSUE 3
Featuring: Guadalupe Nettel's memoir of the late Carlos Fuentes; an essay and poetry by Robert Gray; fiction by Lester Goran and John Hughes; artwork by Clinton Walker and Marco Luccio; and poetry by Rebecca Lehmann, Sergio Badilla Castillo, John Bryson, Geoff Page, Mira Peck, Giorgio Orelli, Shaindel Beers, and others.





Other EBOOK formats @




ISSUE 2
Featuring: Interviews with Elmore Leonard and Clive Sinclair; work by David Thomson, Chris Andrews, Floyd Salas, Peter Doyle, Clive Sinclair, Antigone Kefala, Mark O'Connor, and others.





Other EBOOK formats @





ISSUE 1
Featuring: James Crumley, Lester Goran, Floyd Salas, Peter Doyle, Mimi Lipson, Vanessa Berry, and more.





Other EBOOK formats @




Background photo by Alex Thomson @ Flickr (Used under a CC licence).

© 2012-2015 Contrappasso Magazine and individual contributors. All rights reserved.

Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Contrappasso Magazine

Contrappasso Magazine

Twitter Feed

Tweets by ContrappassoMag

Recent Posts

  • Shylock Must Die by Clive Sinclair
  • Clive Sinclair (1948-2018)
  • El Hombre Valeroso: An Interview with Clive Sinclair
  • Contrappasso Archives: Noir Issue
  • Contrappasso Goes to the Philippines: A Final Recap

Archives

  • July 2018
  • March 2018
  • July 2017
  • November 2016
  • August 2016
  • June 2016
  • May 2016
  • April 2016
  • March 2016
  • February 2016
  • November 2015
  • October 2015
  • September 2015
  • August 2015
  • July 2015
  • June 2015
  • May 2015
  • March 2015
  • February 2015
  • January 2015
  • December 2014
  • November 2014
  • October 2014
  • September 2014
  • August 2014
  • July 2014
  • June 2014
  • May 2014
  • April 2014
  • March 2014
  • February 2014
  • January 2014
  • December 2013
  • November 2013
  • October 2013
  • September 2013
  • August 2013
  • July 2013
  • June 2013
  • May 2013
  • April 2013
  • January 2013
  • December 2012
  • November 2012
  • October 2012
  • September 2012
  • August 2012
  • July 2012
  • June 2012

Categories

  • Artwork
  • Essay
  • Fiction
  • Interviews
  • Memoir
  • Poetry
  • Uncategorized

Meta

  • Register
  • Log in
  • Entries feed
  • Comments feed
  • WordPress.com

Blogroll

  • 3%
  • Arts & Letters Daily
  • Bookgasm
  • Conversational Reading
  • Dalkey Archive Press
  • Evergreen Review
  • Granta
  • Hard Case Crime
  • HiLoBrow
  • KCRW Bookworm
  • LA Review of Books
  • London Review of Books
  • N+1
  • New Directions
  • New York Review of Books
  • NYRB
  • Open Letters Monthly
  • Paris Review
  • The Believer
  • The Literary Saloon
  • The Millions
  • The New Yorker
  • Times Literary Supplement
Create a free website or blog at WordPress.com.
Privacy & Cookies: This site uses cookies. By continuing to use this website, you agree to their use.
To find out more, including how to control cookies, see here: Cookie Policy
  • Follow Following
    • Contrappasso Magazine: International Writing
    • Join 3,095 other followers
    • Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
    • Contrappasso Magazine: International Writing
    • Customize
    • Follow Following
    • Sign up
    • Log in
    • Report this content
    • View site in Reader
    • Manage subscriptions
    • Collapse this bar
 

Loading Comments...