——中译外——

3、玉梯：

翟永明诗（5首）………………………BH, LMK, WNH，Pascale Petit & Zhai Yongming等译

抒情诗：

The Sorrow of Submarines

The Patient Turned Doctor 


The Chrysanthemum Lantern Is Floating Over Me 


Fledgling Tart

组诗：

Jing An Village, June

.                   

翟永明, 女，1955年出生于四川成都。大学毕业于成都电讯工程学院，1981年开始发表诗作。1984年其组诗《女人》以独特奇诡的语言与惊世骇俗的女性立场震撼文坛。1998年于成都开设“白夜”酒吧文化沙龙，策划举办了一系列文学、艺术及民间影像活动。代表作品有《女人》、《在一切玫瑰之上》、《纽约，纽约以西》等诗歌、散文集10多部。2005年入选“中国魅力50人”，2010年入选“中国十佳女诗人”。2007年获“中坤国际诗歌奖·A奖”；2011年获意大利Ceppo Pistoia国际文学奖，该奖评委会主席称翟永明为“当今国际最伟大的诗人之一”。

LYRIC POEMS

The Sorrow of Submarines

9:00 a.m. at work


I get coffee and pen and ink ready


then crane my neck to check how high the typhoon signal is

coming in from far away


whether it’s in or out of use


my submarine is always on watch


its lead-grey body


hides in a shallow windless pond

at first I wanted to write that way –


now that wars aren’t quite coming


now that cursing  has changed its form

when I listen in  I can hear


the clatter of silver spilling out

I still lose my heart  scarlet seafood


in amongst all life’s hardships   gets redder and redder

we eat it   shuffling hands process information

as I begin to write   I see


lovely fish   have surrounded the shipyard

state-run enterprises’ bad debts   and also

neighbouring countries’ slack economies as well as

young girls’ make-up trends


these erratic receipts   have surrounded

my shallow pond

so, this is how I’m writing it:


better check out


my submarine   where it last set sail


inside whose blood vessel did it anchor


the star stalkers, the hip, the heavy metal disco crew

have analysed the periscope of writing

alcohol, nutrients, high calories


like prepositions, pronouns, interjections


lock the composition of my skin


submarine  it has to dive on down to the ocean floor

urgently   yet uselessly diving down


no single code will ever control it again

I’ve written it before  I’m still writing it like this:

it’s all already so irrelevant


but you’re still building your submarine

it will be a war memorial

it will be a war grave   it will take its long sleep on the ocean floor

yet it will also be so much further and further away from us


a state of mind suitable for solitary confinement

just what you see:


now   I’ve got my submarine built


but   where is the water?


the water is slapping on the world


so right now I must invent water


and for the sorrow and sadness in every single thing

contrive a rarely-found perfection

[BH, LMK, WNH]

By Sickness Turned Doctor

looking at those poached, cloud-steamed people

looking at those bloodsucking, malignant people

some pan-fried...some stewed...


some plucked...some mended...

German doctors never understand


the coordination of the Chinese Five Elements

neither do they understand


Chinese lungs, Chinese stomachs and other organs

why they need no anaesthesia

as I was broken-heartedly watching


200cc of fresh blood


being drawn through the syringe


in the end the blameless began to whimper

faced with the doctors’ do-gooder eyes

I could only submit to their ness


That global conviction it saves the dying and serves the suffering

in the end they had to pour a whole bottle of red


into this violently bloated blood vessel


in the end they had to observe smell listen diagnose

so they could see through my heart


so they could constrict my days and nights


(German doctors specialise in only one discipline


how inconvenient for them)

this is an era for applying the emetic method

this is an era of collective apoplexy


this is also a world of learnt imbalance

doctors too late for dialectics

prescriptions flown and gone

patients panicky and short of breath

their pulses chaotic with terror

unavoidably there will be vomiting
before a blood

transfusion new blood flowing toward the ecosystem

unavoidably there will be the bone-chilling touch of a scalpel

so they can penetrate so they can x-ray the marrow


and directly take the life away from germs

was there any proof I was surrounded by fevers and comas?

they dined on germs eliminated cells


while racing and flying with the wind underfoot


pulsing and passing away like dawn bells and twilight drums[1]

they were truly addicted

were the symptoms of seasonal illness simply a pretence?

they recounted to me the small fevers of the fin-de-siècle

they despaired of each and every heartbeat in the world

and the rises and falls in tribulations

they either lacked certainty in the steps they took

or suffered from long-term sleep deprivation

and I by sickness turned doctor


both assailant and defender in order to

preserve a sensibility


like keeping a newborn alive in an incubator

I stir up her heart’s energy


to make her complexion rosy


rouse her channels and meridians until

warm as toast I hold her in my arms

2 April 2000 [BH, LMK, WNH]

The Chrysanthemum Lantern Is Floating Over Me

A chrysanthemum lantern is floating towards me.


In the enveloping silence of pitch darkness –


a low murmur of children on the riverbank.


The lantern is so sheer a bird’s shadow shows through it.

The children’s chorus floats over with the lantern.

There’s no fear, no pain,


only the lantern, the lightness of chrysanthemums

and the red glow of its candle.

A young girl also floats over –


a girl and her maids,


their hair up,


their luxurious clothes nothing but silk,

ribbons and buttons,

nothing but tinkling tassels when they walk –

tassels, earrings, phoenix hairpins.

The young girl and her wet nurse


have known death.


They are both searching for something leisuredly.

They face the midnight moon.


The girl is gentle and the light soft.


They float towards me


transforming the ordinary night


into a somnambulist trance.

Every night


the lantern floats over me.


Its owner wanders to the end of heaven,

his pace sometimes fast, sometimes slow.

No one can catch up with him,


the children grow up with him.

This is the story of the changing world and of the lantern.

If I sit on the floor


the chrysanthemum’s shadow, the light’s shadow and the shadows of people

frighten me


and I sometimes slowly, sometimes quickly


make a silvery sound in my room.

If I sit on the bed


I can enjoy this sensation


while I gradually turn transparent,

gradually change colour.


All night I merge into mist


then rise into the air.

[Pascale Petit & Zhai Yongming]

Fledgling Tart

the fledgling tart was also called Pretty Babe

she was wearing a ruffled lace mini-blouse

her thighs were already appetising


but her mother was more beautiful

they were like sisters ‘one of them is like a gazelle...’

this is the kind of babe that every man likes


and the babe likes the feeling of looking into the lens

the fledgling tart I saw wasn’t like this though


she was twelve skinny, her clothes weren’t clean

with eyes that could contain a whole world


or maybe they couldn’t even hold a single tear

her father was a farm worker young

but his hair was already grey

her father spent three months

step by step, looking for

his missing babe

three months for a fledgling tart


would be close to a hundred-odd days


three hundred-odd men


but this was not simple maths


she never could understand why


so many old, ugly and dirty men


wanted to sprawl on her belly


neither could she understand what all this really was

only knew that her body


turned light, turned empty had something taken away

fledgling tarts were also known to be beautiful and brainless

of this she knew nothing at all


only at night she counted it up


in her maths jotter there were three hundred-odd

nameless addressless shapes and bodies


together they were called consumers


those numbers were like ancient symbols in a graveyard

before the sun rose they were consumed

reading the newspapers, I’d been thinking:

can’t write poems for this


can’t turn out poems like this


can’t chew poetry and creak away

can’t knock words into teeth to worry at it

those illnesses those operations


those statistics added to twelve years old

poetry, bandages, photos, memories


abraded my eyeballs


(this is the zone where light and shade connect in the retina)

everything states this: it’s all useless


all harm that nobody cares about


the everyday data


creating a whole life of sorrow for some

in part she was just a news photo

twelve years old
standing with the other girls

you couldn’t tell
she had an ovary missing

generally speaking
that was just a news report

every day our eyes collect thousands and millions of images

these control the consumers’ pleasures

they’re gone in a flash ‘it’ is just like that too


the volume of information hotlines and the international viewpoint

like giant linen wipe away one person’s lowly pain

people like us
it was crumpled

to have seen is to have seen stuffed into the black iron bin

21 April 2002 [BH, LMK]

SEQUENCES

Jing An Village, June

Moonless night – the wind is high and boys practise killing.

Desire stirs in the wild wheatfield –


I can smell the drunkenness of the village.

For half a year I stare at the moon


until this twisted body of mine melts


and the spinning moon is a rusted hinge.

 Everybody is drinking, having fun – no one

notices me. At the garbage heap


I can feel an echo from the very heart of the earth.

A dusty farmer touches a fissure


in the old ebony table.


I think of legends from the great dynasties.

Tonight there’ll be a lunar eclipse


and the farmer’s wife will take a bath,


her eyes full of blind fear.

The veiled sky shivers and shapeshifts.


In the graveyard where ancestors lie


the baked mud walls crack open with dead eyes.

At dawn, tomb diggers will find


the coffins crawling with termites.


My body – all the bodies we are born with

decay in the dark and the light.

[Pascale Petit & Zhai Yongming]