meBooks of his Poems On His Works Home
Selected Poems of Chen Li
Translated by Chang
Fen-ling
[Contents]
•Tango for the Jealous •Butterfly Air
•Dialogue •Composition •On the Island
•In the Corners of Our Lives •Kubla Khan
• On the Island—based on Yami myths
"The
fluttering of ten thousand butterfly wings in the Southern Hemisphere causes
a typhoon in the summer mid-day dream of a woman near the Tropic of Cancer, who was
chased by love but betrayed love..." I found this sentence
in the meteorology book with color illustrations lying on the dressing table in your room
Ah, the terrace of memory with metallic walls and glass floor,
where I once entered but later lost the key and could not
get in. With a navy blue eyebrow pencil you highlighted
on the book: "The staple food of the butterflies is love poems, especially
sad ones, ones that cannot be swallowed in one gulp and need to be chewed over and
over..."
I mull over ways to
reach you again: Dismember yesterday,
hang it up and let it float outside your building like a spider? Or, on the wings of one
butterfly stamp after another, deliver a parcel of longing and despair
to your door? Your smooth, tightly closed metallic walls cause every single
crawling insect trying to climb up to slip and fall off the building...
So, I wait for the
fluttering of butterfly wings in the Southern Hemisphere to cause a
typhoon in your summer mid-day dream, to allow the butterfly shadows secretly issued by
sorrow
to flap and strike the doors and windows of your heart, and to let a question mark,
a comma, in the incompletely digested poem stir up your memory
like a tiny screw, pop the top of the old perfume bottle sitting on your
nightstand, so that you can hear anew the chirping insects, barking dogs, singing
clowns
without a nose that we once heard together and are stored inside,
so that you can smell anew the perspiration and scented mud that we once rolled on:
at the bottom of a deep lake a summer night's conversation that cannot be stopped.
Now our hearts are
as far apart as two ends of the globe, although my eyes,
like a thumb tack, still fix on the longitude and latitude of where you are on the map.
I can only write a poem, a sad poem, to make the butterflies in the Southern Hemisphere
fight for food
and make them flutter ten thousand wings so as to cause a typhoon
in the summer mid-day dream of you, who are behind metallic walls in a tall building near
the Tropic of Cancer.
Translated by Michelle Yeh [ Back to Contents]
Nightsong
When your dream
parachute lands
Because of the ruthlessness of others, you suddenly lose speed and change direction
Get hung up in the treetops on the island in the lake
You call for
a childhood landscape to come and help
Your father gives you a lollipop
(Hard as the tree trunk that supports your body)
The Children's Day balloons are tied to the telephone pole in front of the theater like
happiness
(Later, a pill got you just as high)
The small feeble trumpet of the wholesome recreation troupe quivered and said,
“not guilty, not guilty”
Next door, the woman and her husband turn off the living room
light
A purple bra, just washed, hangs dripping under the eaves
You are stranded on
an island surrounded by loneliness and desire
And the night, and boundless memory and shame
And powerless, I look at you from the indifferent mainland
How to turn
blossoms of parachute into cotton candy
How to turn a pair of sandals into wings
At least tonight in a closed body which no key can open
In the body's night
Let the tangled iron blossom in your hair
Let those unused words and incantations
Escaped from the dictionary that pursue you the whole night
Return to their etymological roots
O, beloved
Open your parachute
Humanly in my ruthless arms
Even if all the dogs in the world bark
And jealous of your over-cooked tears
If love deepens the pot of night
If love increases the weight of hate
My monotonous song creaks by like a cart
Carrying your spirit and your flesh
Translated by John J.
S. Balcom [ Back to Contents]
From a distance your
weeping
drills a tunnel in my body.
This morning I return to the familiar darkness,
enter the box of honeycomb that belongs to me,
waiting for sorrow to drip like honey.
In the amber-colored time I
solidify,
feeding on imaginary death, on soft candy
of emptiness. Your weeping
is a soundless inscription on my ear;
at the end of the tunnel it sparkles into
a translucent rain tree.
Look for its shape, not for
its entrance.
A tunnel passes through a life of grief connecting you and me
Translated by
Michelle
Yeh [ Back to
Contents]
Dialogue
For Hikari Oe
At the concert celebrating the sixtieth birthday of the conductor Seiji Ozawa, I hear the new duet by Hikari Oe, mentally retarded son of the novelist Kenzaburo Oe. The aging Russian cellist in exile, the gorgeous Argentine woman pianist. They are conversing. How do shadows weave a crown of laurel, how does imperfection contain the beauty of a flower? In life's earth, stone, cloud, rain—lights, of language and music. Flying over the river of Time: "Wandering, drifting, what am I like?" Exile, return, suspension, resolution. C string and chromosome, pain and love. On my video player whose right speaker is out of order so whenever it replays noises interfere incessantly, I hear so clearly a breeze blowing across fine grass on the riverbanks, my chest suddenly broadens as stars reach down. On my solitary transnational journey in the afternoon, I gladly pull out the passport issued by a fellow traveler from an earlier time:
"The moon rushing forward, the great river flows."
Translator's note: Hikari Kenzaburo was born with brain hernia in 1963 and did not speak his first word till the age of six. At thirty-two he started writing music; he has since become an internationally acclaimed composer. In his 1994 Nobel lecture, Kenzaburo Oe (b. 1935) described his own writing as a coming to terms with his son's condition and referred to "the exquisite healing power of art." The question "Wandering, drifting, what am I like?" and the last line of the poem are direct quotes from "Thoughts on a Night Journey" by Tu Fu (712-770).
Translated by Michelle Yeh [ Back to Contents]
I cultivate a space
with loneliness, with breath.
Two or three plastic bottles on the floor,
a laundered pair of orange panties
dripping from the stainless steel
dripping.
I cultivate orange
smell,
shampoo, wings of a glider.
I cultivate a word in lower case
veronica: cloth with the holy face of
Jesus; a bullfighting pose (with both feet
planted, the bullfighter slowly moves
the cloth away from the attacking bull).
I cultivate a closet in which hang a pair of black jeans
and a blue T-shirt.
I cultivate a
laptop computer awaiting the input
of the sea and a range of waves.
I cultivate a gap:
isolating me from the world
and leading me to your human world hanging beneath the bellybutton.
I cultivate the
tortuous, complex nation-building history
of a newest, smallest country.
Translated by Michelle Yeh [ Back to Contents]
1
Author's
note:
Black long-tailed pheasants are a
rare bird found in the Taroko Gorge National Park. There is a legend about the origin of
the Amis: a brother and a sister sought refuge from a deluge and drifted to the East coast
of Taiwan on a canoe. According to the Atayal myth of the creation, there were a god and a
goddess in very ancient times, who were ignorant of love-making until one day a fly landed
on the private part of the goddess (the Amis have a similar myth). According to a Saisiyat
legend, old people could recover their youth simply by peeling off the skin. An Amis myth
has it that the rainbow was originally the seven-color bow of Adgus, the hunter who shot
down the sun. There is an Amis legend about how earthquake was formed: the people living
on the ground cheated those living underground by exchanging hemp bags filled with bees
for goods. The Paiwan have stories about a girl singing on a rock with her little brother
on her back and being delivered to heaven because she aroused gods' sympathy and affection. A Bunun legend goes like this:
once upon a time there was a beautiful girl whose private part (hahabisi in the
Bunun language) was a little swollen but tightly sealed. Her mother cut it open with a
knife, and out sprang numerous fleas. There is an Atayal legend about the giant Harleus,
who had a tremendously long penis. He stretched it out as a bridge for people to cross
flooded rivers, but he got lustful at the sight of pretty girls. A Puyuma legend goes like
this: two girls were close friends. One day they worked in the taro field on the mountain.
It was so hot that they took shelter from the sun under a tree. Rejoicing, they put hoes
on their heads and were turned into goats.
Translated by Chang Fen-ling [ Back to Contents]
Many poems inhabit
the corners of our lives
Perhaps they didn't apply to the housing authority for residence permits
Or obtain house numbers from the district office or police sub-station
Coming out of the alley you run smack into a jogging candidate
jogging as he makes a call from his cellular phone
His embarrassed smile makes you think of the old doctor who polishes
His young wife's red sports car outside their house every evening
They turn out to be two sections in a long poem
One object might be
aware of another but that doesn't mean they interact
Some float up to become images showing affection for other images
Sound and smell usually seduce first, in secret they communicate
Colors are the little sisters of shyness—they have to stay inside
And decorate the house with pretty curtains, sheets, bathrobes and napkins
Waiting for their men—their masters—to get home and turn on the
Lights. A poem is like a home, a sweet burden
Sheltering love and lust, sorrow and sadness, enduring the worthy and unworthy.
They don't have to go to the
clinic for stitches or condoms
Although they do have their own moral principles and family planning
Being well matched in social and economic status doesn't necessarily
make for the best marriage
Water and milk will mix; fire and water can also fornicate
Hegel eats plain-cooked chicken, black-headed flies debate over
Whether or not a white horse is a horse. Gentle violence
Ear-splitting silence
Incestuous love is the privilege of poetry
Some choose to
inhabit the dark shadow of metaphor or the forest of symbols
Some are sanguine and optimistic like spiders of sunlight climbing everywhere. Some
Prefer hardships outdoors, theoretical talks, untamed coitus, others are like gossamer,
Invisible to the eye, spread over the brain, divided into numerous small suites for rent,
Frequently switching on the loom of dream or the subconscious
It is said that many poems are locked in the room of habit. You close the door
Looking for a good line, you search high and low,
taking great pains to call out, even ride a computer donkey
Drive a mouse, pounding the keys, you search. You open your window
To the vast universe, and behold, there they are:
Irises after the rain. A flock of gulls
Out of school on their way home. The ocean's
Slanting waves
The microwave boiling a dish of tomato and beancurd
You want to add
some peas. You go to the market and see
Cancancancancancancancancancancancancancancancancan
Cancancancancancancancancancancancancancancancancan
Cancancancancancancancancancancancancancancancancan
Casually you take a can and find what you've been racking
your brains for—its very existence due to its very absence:
Cancancancancancancancancancancancancancancancancan
Cancancancancancancancan cancancancancancancancan
Cancancancancancancancancancancancancancancancancan
A persimmon alone
at the register. You say
Marvelous, a persimmon alone at the register
A line of words becomes a family
Immigrated from Japan or from among the quatrains of the High Tang
inevitably you wonder
But really you couldn't care less. You couldn't care less if they'll
All fit into a small shopping bag or not
(2000)
Translated by John J. S. Balcom [ Back to Contents]
In Xanadu, Kubla
Khan decreed
a giant mobile palace be constructed.
“I don't want fixed things.
I am tired of
those regular rooms, of concubines who use the same perfume,
give the same moaning after standard procedures
though there are thousands of them...”
Picking and calculating carefully, his
Italian counselor, good at business administration,
arranged and combined those concubines into teams of six, three, or five,
three times per night, in different directions, in different formations,
to serve their emperor by turns.
Fine wine, opium, honey, leather whips,
globes, vibrators, the Bible, sex-appealing underwear.
“I'll ceaselessly move,
ceaselessly feel excited, ceaselessly conquer,
ceaselessly reach the orgasm...”
But this is not a
question of math,
not a question of military affairs, not even a question of medicine.
“This is a question of philosophy.”
Outside the palace, the ignored Persian
traveler said,
“Time is the
best aphrodisiac
that fosters changes.”
(2000)
Translated by Chang Fen-ling [ Back to Contents]
drink me
drink my blood
drink my milk
drink the saliva from my mouth
drink the juices of my body
drink the fluids of my love
drink my spasms my convulsions
drink my infidelity
before the
use-by date expires
(for date of manufacture, see bottom of casket)
(2000)
Translated by
Simon Patton [ Back to Contents]
here she comes
in my direction
looking like a butterfly, without hesitation
she sits down directly in front of the lectern
in her hair, a bright-colored
hair clip: butterfly on butterfly
in the past
twenty years, in this junior high
by the sea, how many butterflies have I seen
shaped like human beings, like butterflies
carrying youth, carrying dreams, flut-
tering into my classroom?
Oh, Lolita
one autumn day
before noon, the sunlight
so warm, a dazzling Yellow
flew in through the window and circled
between the distracted teacher and
a 13-year-old girl concentrating on her schoolwork
suddenly, she
was up on her feet
trying to hide from that scissory shimmering color-
shape, a butterfly terrified of
other butterflies: she, startled by
them; me, perplexed by their beauty
(2001)
Translated by
Simon Patton [ Back to Contents]
On the Island
——based on Yami myths
1
The island is by the sea, and the sea by the island
Our island is a tiny, motionless ship
Tsunami turned the ship into a cradle
The waves dashed toward the mountaintop, splitting the giant rock
Out of the rock I popped
I am man, I am Tau
I am a man
Tsunami turned the ship into a cradle
The waves tumbled over reefs, splitting bamboo woods
Out of the bamboo I popped
I am man, I am Tau
I am a man
We were the first two on board
We were men having no women to love and
loved by no women
We rested on the ship, slept on the ship
On the knees we twined our exceedingly long penises
We gently swung our knees, sleeping foot to foot
Our knees touched comfortably, getting all the itchier with every touch
We scratched each other thoughtfully
With each scratch came a greater itch
until a man burst out of my right knee
(oh Tau, a man)
until a woman burst out of my left knee
(oh Tau, a man)
They are the Taus
Fulfillment of love between two men
2
The island is by the sea, and the sea by the island
Our island is a tiny, motionless ship
But Mama, our sky is so low
Our deck is so high
That fire ball, with wide open eyes
is hanging above our heads, burning hot
Please ask the next-door Uncle Giant to stretch his arms and legs
kicking the ground down, and upholding the sky
I will use my fish-spearing lance
to shoot blind one eye of the two-eyed fire ball, thus dividing it
into two: the half hanging in the sky will be
the sun, and the other half left to the night to accompany us in sleep
will be the moon
Behold, the moon is risen
So gentle is it, like
a bashful lily
From the depth of the evening sky, my lance slowly drops back
The fish I speared yesterday clings to the sky
becoming a milky way
Translator's note:
The Yami (also called the Tau)
tribe are aboriginal people of Taiwan living on the Orchid Island, which lies to
the southeast of the island of Taiwan.
"Tau" means "man" in the Yami language.
(2004)
Translated by Chang Fen-ling [ Back to Contents]
Introduction to Chen Li's Poetry
by Chang Fen-ling
陳 黎文學倉庫
Chen Li's Literary Bank
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