When writing this title,
I face the peaks of Little Liangshan
I am unable to relate these beautiful peaks
to the Cologne Cathedral
as in my dank memory
incessantly flash
the beggars curled up at the foot of the cathedral
They wrap themselves up in black cloth
and if you don’t look carefully
they appear just like a pile of discarded things
Everyone deposits large handfuls
of money into the cathedral’s tithe boxes
but isn’t willing to give them even one coin
My elders
all clearly remember
how many teeth their cows and sheep
have lost
but don’t know which day their sons and daughters’ birthdays
are on
In Liangshan
cows and sheep are the elders’ banknotes
are their bricks for weighing fortunes
Compared to the age of their cows and sheep
the children’s birthdays
are trifles not worth mentioning
But I have to remember my son’s birthday
because now the cows and sheep
are few
Occasionally thinking of them________it’s best to
take those bills penned up in my pocket
and rush off to the pastures of the countryside
to while away withdrawal
A night in Chang’an
What is it since ancient times that floats between heaven and earth?
I say it’s purple mist
Someone else says
it’s haze
你这个鼻子
给我下去
一只凶恶的手来要变平我的脸
这是我妻子说的话而动的手
好像每一次我想跟她接吻
表现一些爱情
我白人血统的高级塔
就攻击她浮浅的微妙眼睛
她是中国来的神美女脸
而我是外来的野蛮高尖鼻
但是呢
谁动手？
谁温柔？
Make your nose
smaller!
An angry hand comes to flatten my face
These are my wife’s words and actions
Every time I want to kiss her
to express my love
my white person’s tower
invades her two delicately shallow eyes
She has the face of a Chinese goddess
and I have a foreigner’s barbarian nose
Yet, which one of us lifts a hand in anger
and which one is truly gentle?
In that night
not just one person swam across the river
On the other shore fire mounds crackled
Trees’ shadows
floated as if imperceptible
A person spoke loudly,
all eyes silently shut
The tree of myth all at once lost its leaves
The river was deep and serene
whose eyesight could penetrate it,
who believed sour dates and fish's sleep-talk?
On top of the precipice
only mountain spirits
chants that repeated again and again
The people, soles dancing wildly
after trampling the withered tree roots
suddenly halted
The flint was continuously struck,
many faces never made out clearly
In that night
not just one person swam across the river
For a long long time
the sound of arms plowing through the water carried on
In order to beautify the environment, the university fabricated a bunch of what looks like sawed-off tree stumps out of cement. Both big and smalls trees were copied — they’re quite real looking — and then they used these cement stumps as fences, benches, etc. It gives people the impression that there was once a forest here, but now it has all been cut down leaving the stumps all over the place. This is what’s called teaching through the environment. These tree stumps lead me to believe that a constituency of lumberjacks runs this university.
July, 1999
Yu Jian 于坚
from Brown-cover Notebook - Loose-leaf Binder
The weather
like a lemon
is souring my fruitless journey
through the icy
terrain
现在的天气
像一个柠檬
使我无结果地
穿过冰冷城市
的路程
变酸
