Seven Poems by Chen Xianfa

By Chen Xianfa, translated by Martyn Crucefix and Nancy Feng Liang

‘From the window of a prison’
 
From the window of a prison in another province,
a view of autumn clouds. 
 
My interviews did not go well. Some prisoners spoke
obscure dialects, languages from a different planet.
 
Others of them never opened their mouths
for days on end. But years later,
 
there was still one writing me letters. 
By then, he was being taken to another prison,
 
under escort, heavy machine guns, crossing a hilly terrain,
beneath the moon, the red earth below.
 
On account of his failing eyesight, I wrote back to him
using extraordinarily large, heavy print. 
 
It was the end of the month of October.
The nights had grown chilly and full of dreams.

“It Is perfectly possible”

It is perfectly possible to set my exhaustion
in a frame as if it were a painting
hung on a wall that has long been empty.
 
When I can’t write a word, I prop my feet up
on the old bookshelf
and stare long and hard at the blank wall.
 
Out of this blankness, my father often returns,
coming to offer scraps of news
from the far side of death.
On other occasions, suspended there too,
there appears a light rain from years ago. 
 
But in the late autumn night,
I am not the only one who cannot sleep.
 
The world’s executioners may be thunderously snoring,
but illegal kiln workers cannot sleep.
 
The geese flying south may be thunderously snoring,
but geese flying north cannot sleep.
 
The father in the earth may be thunderously snoring,
but together on the wall the father and son cannot sleep.
 
 
 
‘The to and fro of a pendulum’ 

The to and fro of a pendulum wears us down
Every gust of autumn wind wears us down.
 
Every obituary in the evening news wears us down.
Cries from the delivery room wear us down.
 
Cow dung wears us down.
Master Hong Yi – he wears us down too.
 
Patches of damp on the walls wear us down.
More profoundly, the blank of the walls wears us down.
 
As kids, we mocked the Buddha, we sneered at monks,
now we quote scraps of half-baked illumination.
 
Confucius, utopia and the circus – all come and gone,
yet the world still rubble-strewn as ever.
 
It’s such failures that wear us down: while the wise wake,
the vulnerable weep, 
 
the dead go on mocking us,
the newly arrived trying to preserve their illusions:
 
there’s only one precious thing I cling to,
the hope that every day a stranger will speak my name.

 
‘On his deathbed, my father’
 
On this deathbed my father dreamed of sparrows
fluttering from my grandfather’s throat.
 
As he told it, in a year of terrible famine,
my grandfather lay on a dyke, crippled by hunger,
and used the last of his strength
to catch a couple of fledgeling sparrows, too starved
to fly away. He swallowed them alive – feathers, bones and all.
 
Ever since then, I have been fearful of the species.
Their very name makes me nervous.
I have downloaded countless videos of sparrows from the internet.
I have looked into their small, keen eyes.
 
On the faces of sparrows, I observe a grief
quite unlike any other bird. Before now, I had never
imagined writing a poem like this about sparrows.
 
I live in fear that one day, in the open countryside,
or at dusk in some sordid alley, an old sparrow
will suddenly recognise who I am . . . 
 
 
‘Tremor in the Dust’
 
I tread very carefully on the earth
as I move forward.
Any slight tremor, in the least of the dust,
runs the risk of spilling over into another life.
 
Our bodies are no better
than that of a cricket under a dry leaf.
And our songs to solitude are not even as delicate
as those of the cricket.
 
At this moment, I am sitting at my desk,
squinting out into the glare of the blazing sun.
I see my father up a ladder –
he is near the top of a derelict wall, waving
a large pair of shears.
He has been dead these seven years.
 
It’s time he left.
Both his brooding and his shyness remain so powerful –
now it’s time for the cricket to express them
in a different language.


‘A remote sky’
 
A remote sky filled with cloud-drift, unconcerned, at ease.
In the bottle, ink is blue as autumn.
Every impulse jagged as the blade of a saw.
Every teenager an expert in the erotic arts.
In the cause of freedom, God confines himself within an imposed order.
 
Every leaf exhaling hallucinogenic substances.
Every tree aglow with dazzling phosphorescence.
Young men cannot stop rushing into the streets.
Still, nowhere to go. The future, a serious illness without end.
 
Yet still the hawthorn tree sings.
The water in the stream is still sweet to taste.
Poets still free themselves by resorting to madness.
The dangerous boa-constrictor still hides in the most exquisite chandelier.
 
And still, you may wonder at death.
The simple spider remains. The grey-necked crane can still be seen.
The grains of salt endlessly dissolving in water are still there.
Still the body that will carry us into the next life neither begun, nor ended.
 
Think of the words uttered in prison, not yet extinguished.
The absurdity of the world that so many depend upon,
far from over. Still, we can match this bright autumn
with the darkening bloodstains of this changeable world.
 
In the cold ash there are still seeds for the lonely man to swallow.
The emptiness in chains, the emptiness
of the Six-Harmonies Pagoda,
still visiting us by turns, beyond both sides of this spun coin,
hidden mysteries still, the eye unseeing –
 
 
‘On an Old Envelope’
 
Starlight jagged among the grey ashes.
My desk lamp turned away to shed less light.
I am concerned with the few lines I wrote last night
on a scrap of paper
then burned straight away.
 
Some sounds prove impossible to hear.
The ripe pomegranates bursting softly
in the middle of the night are not heard by the couple
breathing beneath the tree.
 
On the dyke, after a hot summer, the sound of reeds
withering is the decay of white light.
The almost dry river still wears its pebbles away.
 
I like to walk further on, towards the shoreline,
to the steeper inclines where I hear
a faint tearing sound –
the last threads of water falling.
 
Always, late at night, I write a few lines –
an old impulse to mail them to somebody I don’t know.
Every word, opening and closing on the lips of the ashes,
an accomplice, helping me into perpetual silence.

About the authors:

Chen Xianfa is a poet, essayist and journalist born in Anhui Province, China, where he still lives. He has published four books of poems: Death in the Spring (1994), Past Life (2005), Engraving the Tombstone (2011) and Poems in Nines (2018) which was awarded the Lu Xun Literature Prize. A Selected Poems appeared in 2019. He has published two collections of essays, Heichiba Notes (2014 and 2021). Other awards include China’s Top Ten Influential Poets (1998-2008), the Hainan Biennial Poetry Prize (2011), Yuan Kejia Poetry Prize (2013), Tian Wen Poetry Prize (2015) and the Chenzi’ang Poetry Prize (2016).

Martyn Crucefix’s whose recent publications are Cargo of Limbs (Hercules Editions, 2019) and The Lovely Disciplines (Seren, 2017). These Numbered Days, translations of the poems of Peter Huchel (Shearsman, 2019) won the Schlegel-Tieck Translation Prize, 2020. He has also published Daodejing – a new version in English (Enitharmon, 2016). A Rilke Selected will be published by Pushkin Press in 2023. A translation of essays by Lutz Seiler, Sundays I Thought of God, is due from And Other Stories in 2023. He is currently a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at The British Library and blogs on poetry, translation and teaching at http://www.martyncrucefix.com

Nancy Feng Liang is a bilingual poet and translator living in Massachusetts and North Carolina. She has translated Henry David Thoreau’s Wild Fruits into Chinese (published by China’s Culture and Development Press in 2018) and Chen Xianfa’s Poems in Nines (publ. in China by Anhui Education Press, 2018). Her most recent poetry collection, Qi Cun Tie, was published by Taiwan Showwe Press, 2020. She graduated from Harvard University with a Master’s degree in 2004.