Twelve Poems by Tian
Yuan
田原：诗十二首
Tr. by Denis Mair
田原：诗十二首
Tr. by Denis Mair
REGARDING BIRDS
Flying this way, flying that
Is just something birds do
But what they do tugs at my heart
What with chirps that sometimes sound like singing
And other times sound like crying
Bearing sunlight on their wings
Changing my inner grayness to a glow
And when the sky turns clear
My dim and drafty room fills
With the vigor of their warbling
Are witnesses to my dying
Motionless birds in an art book
Sense my gaze and breath from my nostrils
Birds come making flashes of fairy-like light
After leaving notes of song they hide their forms away
Making me forget their eyes and feather color
Birds of the imagination
With vehement flaps of their wings
Come trailing a storm behind them
They swoop to the earth
Trailing freshets of rain
Begins to rage and churn
Grasses proliferate at a bend in the river
Making a lurking place for serpents and their fangs
The current winds by under tree canopies
Passing nests in the forks of branches
In the space of a transparent windowpane
This thin and brittle layer
Distances the birds and me from the world
Like flame from a torch
Leaping up and away
It left behind a long cry
A note of surprise in my quiet mind
TRANSIENT
Now and then the word “transient”
Flashes like a laser beam
From the depths of memory
Like a sturdy horse
Driven by that era’s invisible whip
To gallop into a wasteland
Was dotted with barren hills
They stood in the way
Of my view into the distance
Setting my homesickness adrift
Across the waste spaces, yet giving shelter
Beneath their slopes from storms
Providing a haven for a wanderer
Where I dwelled for a time
Often appears in my dreams
Slat-framed windows and red bricks, just as always
In loneliness enduring the weather
And the fearsome howls of wolves
A transient showed up one day
A man who came from Shandong
Behind a thick growth of whiskers
I could not tell his age
He brought me a granddaddy fish
He had caught in a haunted lake
And told me in a lowered voice
He was a fugitive
I caught a glimpse of the fearsome side
Of the world we lived in
I never knew what crime he committed
Suddenly I wish
To change into a horse and go
Searching for him across that wasteland
Even though by now he may be
A heap of white bones, or a grave
---for Hiroto Emi, painter
I sense the floodtide of time
Pouring down the staircase
Engulfing a silent space
As if wielding a beam of light
Out of darkness restoring a stairway
Turning cubical facts to planar abstractions
On the stairway. How like a cloud
Of sunlit motes is our life?
Shifting along with a beam, a vanishing figment
Then rising with the sun's rays to show itself again
Concealing deep secrets in its philosophy
A stairway is a kind of silence
Bearing the weight of darkness and solitude
Such as gradient, width, material of wood or cement
But it carries out a single duty
Upward: to shorten your distance from the sun
Downward: you walk onto broad ground, toward the horizon
On nights of power outage, we have to proceed carefully
Climbing as best we may, feeling our way with footsteps
A stairway can also be a chair—there are times
It offers a seat to rest on, or nurse silent anger
In fact, there is a stair in each person’s heart
It often puts us to the test:
Will we be able to go up; will we be able to come down?
Heading south, along memories reined in
By a story, in a little waterfront town
A barking dog from another era
Stirs the sadness of a sojourning heart
A pillaged farmhouse is restored by words
Deep in a crystalline pond
Stars of that era are still seen on fish scales
Gleaming under water
The river is a weary bandage
Enwrapping the wounded village and hills
A dock that has witnessed ordeals
Affords a view of rippling reflections
As if awaiting a haggard boatman
Who will return against the current
Rowing a boat with rattan canopy
A few sparrows are chirping
Counting footfalls on flagstones
Inside a dilapidated temple
A monk who reached perfect quietude
Enters heaven in a dream
Resounding downstream
But water that bears a boat
Cannot carry away coughing sounds
Mingled with the piping of heaven
Is a mirror
Showing blemishes of memory
Inverted reflections of an era
Waver upon the water’s surface
And lose their clarity of outline
Strangeness is less strange when wrapped in night’s darkness
Wherein I see an old boatman in a dream
The intermittent glow of his pipe
Is cast on my face
ANTI-CREDO
The wind that whirled around you has scattered
Clarity gives the sky extra height
The tree we leaned against
Begins to turn frail
Dimness of twilight descends
Swallowing your footprints
On the river’s edge of memory I am
An emptied-out, broken boat
To evade a merciless storm
I rest gasping on the bank
An unfamiliar face
Floats in the stultifying air
Separating me from you
Along the boundary of night and day
The convoluted world tries on fancy costumes
Floodwaters spread due to betrayal on the opposite bank
Navigation lights are ruddy like an old lady’s cheeks
Writing parables across the river’s surface
You will always be related to the river
After your disappearance
I become the bodily remains of wind
Strewn along the horizon
Does not drench the downward-seeping fragrance
Raindrops in their stuttering fall
Long for a journey on the Silk Road
The monsoon drenches the horizon
Before it disappears beneath my feet
Far off mountains that swallow up echoes
Are like a gigantic sponge
Greedily sucking in
Every single raindrop
Having reveled in this plentiful bath
Trees bring forth a deeper shade of green
The sun screened off behind clouds
Anxiously waits to show its nakedness
Even the moon’s dark side grows mold
As fallen logs conceive the shapes of mushrooms
EXILE
Was it the Motherland’s wind
That extinguished the lamp in your heart?
Or was it the sun of an exotic locale
That lured you to travel far?
The horizon that grew to adulthood with you
Still has to go through a struggle
Before it disappears underfoot
You carry them on your shoulders
As if you were bearing your mother tongue
So you and your language can grow familiar
With alien birdsong and sunlight
On its surface bearing every boat ticket
The sky is forever merciless
It grants no admittance to any person’s soul
Are the feelings of a certain one
Darker than the dark of night
Are the eyes of a certain human type
Unable to determine his place of refuge
His legs will forever be paired drumsticks
Held in the tight grip of fate
Whatever the time and place
They sound a tattoo on earth’s weary drumhead
Further away than the further shore is truth
Dragging out longer than exile is his torment
The Motherland is still the native ground of dreams
Homesickness begins at the dock
The mother tongue only ends with death
DEATH OF A BUTTERFLY
In glorious autumn sunshine
My busy steps were brought up short
By a butterfly I nearly crushed underfoot
At first I thought she was resting by the road
I bent down for a look
Only to find her breath had ceased
Her two antennae still wavered in the wind
Her fine legs still had strength to grip the ground
Sunlight shone straight through her dark-lensed eyes
Her spotted wings refracted a forlorn deathly color
Her beauty lay in a serenity
More complete than when she lived
But no beautiful words could describe her death
Without thinking I took her in my fingers
And put her on the lawn, where people aren’t allowed
This burial was most fitting for her
On the east-west street before the Station
At the first crossing, beneath a high-voltage pole
A few chirping birds
Startle the surrounding stillness
And settle on a grave
Under gust after gust of cool wind
Stroke after stroke of an unseen comb
From then on sorrow and memory
Settled in and took root here
Before it the make gestures of prayer
Then walk off, leaving their footprints
The ocean is the grave of a sailor
The earth is the grave of a civilization
Like a shapely breast
Bulging from the earth’s chest
But never shifts its position
Even when floods and dunes efface it
Like an ear on the horizon
Listening for the sound of familiar footsteps
MEMORY
Like a subterranean river
A person’s memory purls along
Never knowing weariness
It flows beyond death
Is like a great ocean never disappearing
Though earth itself may be destroyed
It will flow off toward other planets
Is like the ever-silent sky
Never uttering a word
Even when truth is under attack
Is a graveyard covered with shifting sands
Even when shrapnel rusts away
Sorrow will remain in that place
Though all is concealed in their growth rings
It will be exposed by a steel saw, without mercy
Hushed whisper of sparkling stars as always
Like a past event rendered transparent
Dashes outside the wall, a headstrong feral donkey
His yawp makes the doctor keel over
Like a victim of something terminal
A fisherman at the prow undoes a cormorant’s halter
He ties a line to its leg, loops it on a sternpost
The cormorant shakes its wings dry
Flinging star-like beads of water
Yearn for the dock of its native land
Clouds are fast asleep within clouds
Dreaming of blossoms from downy pillows
Blooming with colors of the season
Its bottomless silence is like forgiveness
Accepting the vagaries of winds that belly sails
A river flows on its riverine course
Mountains corrugate their mountainous terrain
Arms of water and stone
Lay across the good earth
And sounds of gritting teeth
Laced-up trouser legs of a scarecrow
Strike up a dance with no partner
Summing up profound news from cracks in the earth
Out of desire engulfed in sweat
Oppressed voices of women
Make the night later and deeper
Like a fruitful blessing in ripe autumn
Like the heart of a fetus dozing in the womb
When I think of a piano
It reminds me of a strange beast’s skeleton
Aristocratically occupying one corner of our city
In fact, it was a commoner by birth
Once it had nothing to do with domes or window glass
Or tuxedoes and floor-length gowns
Its bone structure and nerves, its breath and gaze
Are tightly bound to a country village
From sounds of a great spreading tree, and they resemble
The songs of insects in a meadow
The earth’s wastelands and the sky’s brooding clouds
Are also hiding places for its dreams
When the wind expires against a sail
When an anchor rusts away underwater
When flexing fingers make a sound
That can be called music
It is driven to break free from those who would own and control it…
Being caught in a predicament of vain display
Will cause its plangent notes to hoarsen
Much like an urbanite taken to be cremated
There will be nothing but ashen remains at the end
Its keys are teeth
Its sound chamber is a mouth
And after a tree is felled, the wide open sky
And when a tree is torn up by the root
A hole in the ground
The city seems to be nothing but an ornamented jail
The piano wants to become a chimerical beast
To grow wings and fly away
Tian Yuan
Born in 1965 in Henan Province, China, he first came to Japan as a government-financed student
early in the 1990’s. In 2003 he received a Doctorate in Literature for his study of the poetry of
Shuntarô Tanikawa. He now teaches in Josai International University in Japan, and is chiefly engaged
in the translation of contemporary Japanese poetry. His books of translation into Chinese so far
include Selected Poems of Shuntarô Tanikawa (6 volumes) which have been published in mainland of
China, Hongkong, Taiwan and An Alien: Selected Poems of Takashi Tsujii. He has also translated
some poems of Ryûichi Tamura and Katsuei Kitazono. He has published six volumes of his own
poetry in Chinese and English. He has been awarded literary prizes for poetry in China, America and
Taiwan, and in 2001 he was awarded the first “Japanese Literary Award for Foreign Students”. His
book of poetry in Japanese And So the Shore Was Born (Sôshite Kishi ga Tanjôshita) was published in
2004. He is the editor of the 3 volumes of The Selected Poems of Shuntarô Tanikawa (Shûeisha,
2005). The second poetry anthology of The Memory of Stone was awarded the 60 th session of H-shi
Prize(2010). He also edited the Japanese version of The Anthology of Chinese New Generation Poets
translated by Shin Takeuchi. Selected Poems of Tian Yuan (Renmin Wenxue, 2007) in Chinese was
published in 2007. Tian Yuan was awarded the 10 th Shanghai Literature Prize in 2013. And in 2014
the anthology of Tian Yuan in Japanese was also published.
Born in 1965 in Henan Province, China, he first came to Japan as a government-financed student
early in the 1990’s. In 2003 he received a Doctorate in Literature for his study of the poetry of
Shuntarô Tanikawa. He now teaches in Josai International University in Japan, and is chiefly engaged
in the translation of contemporary Japanese poetry. His books of translation into Chinese so far
include Selected Poems of Shuntarô Tanikawa (6 volumes) which have been published in mainland of
China, Hongkong, Taiwan and An Alien: Selected Poems of Takashi Tsujii. He has also translated
some poems of Ryûichi Tamura and Katsuei Kitazono. He has published six volumes of his own
poetry in Chinese and English. He has been awarded literary prizes for poetry in China, America and
Taiwan, and in 2001 he was awarded the first “Japanese Literary Award for Foreign Students”. His
book of poetry in Japanese And So the Shore Was Born (Sôshite Kishi ga Tanjôshita) was published in
2004. He is the editor of the 3 volumes of The Selected Poems of Shuntarô Tanikawa (Shûeisha,
2005). The second poetry anthology of The Memory of Stone was awarded the 60 th session of H-shi
Prize(2010). He also edited the Japanese version of The Anthology of Chinese New Generation Poets
translated by Shin Takeuchi. Selected Poems of Tian Yuan (Renmin Wenxue, 2007) in Chinese was
published in 2007. Tian Yuan was awarded the 10 th Shanghai Literature Prize in 2013. And in 2014
the anthology of Tian Yuan in Japanese was also published.
Tian Yuan