The Beer Bottle-top Luo Jiasheng Mouse Opus 112 A Fruit Full of Heart-broken Juices Rivers Speed The Naming of a Crow
Translated by Simon Patton unsure of how to address it it was still sitting at the head of the table only a moment ago the custodian of a bottle of stout absolutely indispensable it has a sense of its own status signifying conviviality as the sun goes down and the depth of froth in a glass opened with a pop at the start of the evening meal the action strikingly similar to that of a bullfrog the waiter even believes that it really is a frog believes that something on the table covered with cooked food has unexpectedly been brought back to life he is vexed by his misunderstanding and immediately shifts his attention to a toothpick he is the last one after him the world gives it no further thought with no other entries on it in the dictionary no original meanings extended meanings transferred meanings but those dishes originally arranged in submission before it signify nothing less than the flavours of Sichuan cuisine the napkin is touched by the hand of a general the roses in full bloom an allusion to privilege in an eccentric arc it exited this gathering an arc not its own the brewery never designed such a line for its product it now lies on the floor with the cigarette butts footprints bones and other rubbish an unrelated jumble an impromptu design of no use to anyone but its plight is even more wretched a butt reminds the world of a slob a bone brings to mind a dog or a cat and footprints of course allude to a human life it is waste its whiteness being nothing more than its whiteness and its shape nothing more than its shape it falls beyond the reach of our adjectives I wasn't a drinker then it was I who opened the bottle of beer and for this reason I noticed its strange leap its simple disappearance I suddenly tried to imagine the pop it made jumping out into space but was unable mine was the body of an author of a collection of poetry and sixty kilograms of corporeal existence all I did was bend down and pick up this alluring small white object it was hard with a serrated rim which cut into my finger and made me feel a sharpness unlike that of knives February 1991
every day as the chimneys belch smoke he comes riding to work on his old “Bell”-brand bicycle past the administration building past the forging shop past the perimeter wall of the storehouse to that small hut workers standing in workshop doorways say when they see him Luo Jiasheng’s here no one knows anything about him no one asks him anything about himself the whole factory calls him Luo Jiasheng the workers are always knocking on his door wanting their watches repaired electric meters repaired their radios repaired during the Cultural Revolution he was expelled from the factory: in a suitcase belonging to him someone had found a tie when he was allowed to come back to work he still rode that old “Bell” Luo Jiasheng got married without anyone knowing he invited no one to the wedding at the age of forty-two he became a father in the same year he died an electric furnace opened an enormous gash in his head it was shocking on the day of the funeral his wife did not attend a few workers carried his coffin up into the hills they said he was short he wasn’t heavy the watches he repaired were better than new the chimneys belch smoke workers stand in the workshop doorways Luo Jiasheng hasn’t come to work 1982
you, little uninvited pest made your stronghold in my room sneaking in, creeping out never stopping to say “hello” it was only this evening when I saw your illustrious name listed beside that of Donald Duck on the TV that I realized you were a movie star that was the end of my peace of mind there was a mouse in my room like a lump growing inside my body many times I’d been to the hospital but they’d never found anything half a steamed bread bun had been sawn away there were suspicious black specks in my rice who, after all, was the culprit? I became more cautious ears straining to hear the slightest noise listening to cupboards listening to floorboards of course, I tracked down those small but solid sounds but I had no way of knowing for sure whether the little runt was nibbling on my favourite clothes or gnawing away at antiques left to me by my grandfather you were always so light on your feet it was almost as if you wanted to spare my feelings my mother’s mother used to be like this in the middle of windy nights she would quietly get out of bed and close all the windows you dance on cakes piss on tablets the books I like are riddled with gaping wounds but when it came to the crunch, you had no idea what made a noise and what didn’t so when you knocked over my chinaware which then jumped to the ground from a great height you triggered, much to your surprise, an earthquake that startled me from dreams on tip-toes unable to fly into a rage having to be lighter on my feet than you I felt my way from the bed-head to the book-shelf worried that you would hear me like you were in the middle of writing something not to be disturbed but I was clumsier than you in the end, I knocked over a chair panicked, I looked left and right ashamed of something, it seemed in fact, you, you little runt, were probably already fast asleep after a drink of milk and a change of bedroom hiding in your hole eyes like a couple of black beans, twitching in your head watching me, big and lumbering stark naked stripped of all poise and learning about what I looked like at night you kept quiet in this you were different from your father this quality of yours put me in an unbearable position I couldn’t stand it any longer I knocked and poked at random hell-bent on a thorough search to arrest you and to put you to death but when I saw the massive articles of furniture around me and the bunkers concealed within countless household odds and ends frustration got the better of me and not knowing what to do I called off the hunt outsiders were under the mistaken impression that I had the room to myself that I was calm and steady devoted to study actually, I was a nervous wreck I avoided going out I’d hurry home as soon as work was over and, once inside, start opening cupboards and cases checking up on that rotten bastard who always kept me guessing to see what new tricks he’d played on me
whoever notices how many leaves the wind knocks from these trees and whoever sees this many leaves on such a beautiful, sun-lit afternoon suddenly falling all of them dying is bound to shudder 1988
a fruit full of heart-broken juices placed on morning’s table Cézanne tablecloth diamond of beasts’ dreaming the sunlight spins moving shadows directing the fruit’s blue face into the light-source plunging its red face into deep darkness its green face into mirrors three flags covert in the spectrum no discernible relation to any tree, ever no moving creature near it its existence an education china dish, immobile knives and forks, immobile milk, immobile a Sunday of the aristocracy in that moment of enjoyment its heart-broken juices are linked to a troupe of bears but those bears have yet to come together right now a thousand miles away they’re asleep under trees dreaming of this diamond full of unsweet, broken-hearted juices 1994
there are many rivers in the mountains where I grew up in deep gorges they flow they rarely catch a glimpse of sky there are no expansive sails hoisted high over their surfaces nor huge flocks of river gulls drawn on by boat-songs it’s only when you’ve climbed endless ridges and hills that you hear this river sound it’s only on rafts made of great tree-trunks lashed together that you dare ride upon these waves some areas will stay forever unknown to humankind the freedom of those places belongs to the eagles alone in the rainy season the waters turn brutal gale winds on the high plateau push boulders down into valleys mud dyes the rivers red as if the mountains were actually bleeding only when it’s calm do you see the plateau’s bulging veins those people who live on either side of these rivers may never come to know of one another’s existence but wherever you go in the place I grew up in you will here people talking about these rivers as if discussing their gods
the people planting potatoes are infected by dawn infected by the sun as it rises quickly they work the world is quick at this time quickly the dew dries quickly the field voles scamper off at times like this you need to be quick labourers are quick to remove their jackets to bare their arms a whole day's work depends on a good morning start this is how primary school teachers educate their students they react with speed the invisible world in their classrooms the morning’s Chinese lesson is understood on paper as a few set phrases left over from yesterday at dusk the world slows right down the ranks of the earth slow down facing westwards formations of corn-fields and low hills formations of rivers and forests formations of villages and sunflowers everything slows down facing westward all those shadows dragged over things slow right down like silk wrapped round the body of night slipping away, bolt by bolt the potato planters carrying their tools mingle with the kids coming home from school they walk slowly over the uplands home ahead of them not worried about time the children dawdle no more homework to do the adults dawdle because the potatoes have all been planted they’re all so slow as if the earth had somehow got into their bodies but those things planted at speed have in no sense slowed down nor have they ever gained speed incapable both of speed and slowness they’ve simply begun and all they have to do is grow is be from morning to night from spring to autumn neither hurried nor slow right to the very end
from somewhere invisible the crow kicks aside blocks of autumn cloud with its toes and dives into the sky in my eyes hung with the wind and the light the sign of the crow sulphur brew of a nun of black night croaking and piercing a hole in a flocking bird mattress to perch on a branch in my heart just as in the days of my youth conquering crows’ nests in the treetops of my home town my hands will never again touch that autumn landscape hands scaling another tall tree intending to pluck another crow from its darkness crow once it was a kind of bird meat a pile of feathers and entrails now a desire for narrative the impulse to speech and perhaps it is self-consolation in the face of adversity escape from a mass of inauspicious shadow this kind of labour is invisible compared to childhood days reaching with my bravest hand into black nests full of pointed beaks this is even more difficult when a crow perches in the wilds of my heart what I wish to give voice to is not is symbol not its metaphor or its mythology what I wish to give voice to is crow just as in years gone by I never found dove in a crow’s nest since childhood my hands have been covered in the thick calluses of language but as a poet I have never given voice to a crow with the circumspection and far-sightedness of age proficiency in various inspirations styles and rhymes just as when one begins to write dipping the brush deep into the ink-well I thought that the syllables had to be drenched in black from the very start to handle this crow skin flesh and bones the flows of the blood as well as the flight-paths disclosed in the sky all drenched in black a crow begins in this blackness in flight towards an outcome drenched in black from the moment of birth it enters into solitude and prejudice into universal persecution, pursuit and capture no bird it is crow in a world full of evil every single second ticks its ten thousand pretexts in the name of the forces of light or beauty guns are trained on this living representative of the powers of darkness and fired but for all that it cannot escape beyond the bounds of crow-being neither fly higher encroaching on eagle territory nor condescend to the lowly realm of the ants cave-maker of the skies both its own black hole and black drill-bit on high and alone from the heights of a crow it sets a course according to its bearings its time its passengers it is one happy-go-lucky big-mouthed crow and outside it the world is a mere fabrication no more than the boundless inspiration of crow you people the vastness of the land and the sky the vastness beyond the vastness you people Yu Jian and ensuing generations of readers are nothing but food in the nest of a crow I thought that a few dozen words would be enough to handle this crow description has made it a black box in words but I do not know who holds the key to the box who thinks up secret codes in crow-darkness in another description it appeared as a priest wearing puttees beneath the mighty walls of Heaven, this holy one in search of an entrance but I know now that the abode of the crow is closer to God than the priest’s perhaps while perched on the spire of a church one day it saw the fair body of the Nazarene when I describe the crow as a swan nourished on the everlasting blackness of night the actual bird shining with the light of a swan flies past that radiant swamp beside me and at once I lose all faith in this metaphor I attach the verb to descend to its wings yet it soars to the Ninth Heaven like a jet I call it taciturn and it immediately comes to rest on wordless as I look at this lawless wild witch-bird a swarm of verbs is drawn to my head crow verbs I cannot utter tongue fastened down with rivets I see them speeding up into the sky vaulting diving down into the sunlight then gathering again above the clouds leisurely and carefree forming crow-motion pictures that day like a hollow-hearted scarecrow I stood in an empty field and all my thoughts were steeped in crow I clearly sensed that crow felt its dark flesh its dark heart but I could not escape the sunless fortress as it soared so I soared how would I ever get back out of crow in order to catch it that day when I looked up into the blue sky each crow was already drenched in darkness a corpse-eating crowd I should have turned a blind eye earlier in the sky of my home town I stalked them once so innocent then a whiff of the stink of death and I’d panic and loosen my grip as for the sky I should have kept my eyes on the skylarks white cranes how I love and understand those beautiful angels but one day I saw a bird an ugly bird the colour of crow hanging from the grey ropes of the sky with mangled legs stiff and straight as the limbs of a puppet in crooked flight on the slopes of the sky circling a centre of some kind out tracing an enormous insubstantial circle and I heard a chorus of ominous cawings suspended somewhere out of sight and I wanted to say something to declare to the world that I was not afraid of those invisible sounds