We Present Several Poems by This Year’s Winner of the Zbigniew Herbert International Literary Award, Yang Lian
Joanna Krenz is responsible for their translation. As critics write, Yang Lian's poetry combines Western, modernist sensitivity with almost shamanic, Chinese tradition, becoming a bridge between Western and Eastern culture.
Impersonal snow
无人称的雪
1.
Dry snow hasty imitating human uplift
Animal twilight and dawn
Snow on small paws climbs on tree branches
Delicate skeleton
Glass skeleton tempered in a powerful fire
The snow always buzzes sharply in the ears
Long after he stops
What can the deceased remember from death
Secretly scattered silver inside the body
A thousand pregnant women giving birth in the heavens
Cold orphans without permission
The pale red ladder of the body leads to a tiny attic
At the attic of the white night where the corpse is stored
You don't exist, that's why your days are drowning in snow all year round
2.
On the snowy earth from horizon to horizon, blind people can't see
The poem that died in the hotel
Nor the valley in which the sinister light reproduces
All of them under one cliff are deprived of shadows
Turn into a sun clock needle in the garden
They wash their feet with laughter
They use ornate vessels intricately folded by a dead bird
At the picnic they greedily slap red spring water
From a stream of secretions from the bodies of blind people at noon
They don't see the tourist from the poem
Lying naked on the hotel bed
You don't have to collapse at all to penetrate the depths of a snow avalanche
3.
A clay lamp is your gift for darkness
At the sound of raindrops rubbing against each other
Snow is born in your name
Snow meaning your body tattoo
Pain frees birds trapped in stone for years
One bird is one word but you have no words
Snowflake is a hanging cemetery on the roofs of the city
Even angels in nests lick wounds
How golden beasts crouched in the old days
The man who came to light from the water in the water must disappear
A snowstorm is a music that resounds through death
After the daily death of the name
You reveal a body that a man cannot touch
And you make yourself touch the sheave
From snow to blood, touring each of the fiery tongues
Until the moment when the darkness returns who knows whose time
4.
Night as the thought of a madman beats
To our skulls forces us to confront
With dangerous snow coming from a non-existent distance
Is like a horse cwałem conquering a mountain in the light of two stars
Tied sideways to a pile driven on a summer evening
You can hear ghosts pouring water on the moon to wash it
You can hear the lies of graves praising human artistry
We are all snow sliding down from the mountains
From birth impersonal without number and gender carelessly we death
When the night on the bed of illness spreads hope
In the village of madmen there is a lute
Immortal candles are burning, bells are shedding tears
Hunchbacked steppe with white bones sheds his daytime robes
And we freeze on the stone
5.
You must not venture into this valley
Just like to your interior for this attic of the white night
When the snow invites you, the plants are silent
The horizon is like wine poured behind the collar of darkness
To light up in another place
When snow repels you you lose colour
The hawk that sat in your wound begins to quietly squirk with light
The rock is slowly devouring you
And your gender flashes with an unprecedented glow
You become the only impossible
The snow of my life has fallen
In the attic of the white night, the pliers tighten
In the ephemeral dreams of birds, the sky rejoices dispassionately
Sweet pears on the girls' breasts roll
In the rainy season, the sound of rain chases you along the trails of your entrails
A naked man is a snowflake nothing more
Whiteness in the valley is eye-playing
You've been walking for a thousand years and you still haven't managed to get through this room where you're not
6.
People who live in time know that time is not time
The stone itself is a poem
The shadow is carved into a bench on the riverbank
Every year in June, the grass recites here
Snow silver book of the dead
While a sharp brush of bristles and barbed wire tirelessly draws landscapes
Muddy coffin shoes
Paper handcuffs fill the convict with fear
These words become errors when they are written
Signs engraved on the cliffs slide down the derailed lift
Day after day they turn to dust
In imaginations more real than death
Snow is a walk the only one not to repeat
June rots chorously bells ring on the bodies of the dead
All people call the bells of the loneliness filled at this moment
They die more realistic than imagination
The snow has gone too much, I'm inevitably burying everything
At the grave of Tranströmer
在特朗斯特罗默墓前
The frozen northern sea sat down next to me on a stone bench
Eye to eye with the grave leaving behind a cool amber
The snowball follows the crack of the broken ice
Through the beak Łódź I hear a left-handed melody
Resounding slower and slower and slower, a signature with difficulty submitted like a coastline
Candles and white roses are hanging in the air as if just now
They have emerged from the deepths of the sea, the epitaph breaks the silence with a question
Thomas, where will this poetic pedantry lead us?
You frown and look at me
As if the horizon of water finally ran through my eyes
Someone had to stay to continue crossing your multiplied seas at night
Thomas March soil is a soft tombstone
Motionless like a sail on a windless day where it leads us
Silence of the island of Runmarö? Monika read
A pair of crystal glances in a retreating wave
In front of the stone bench, the stone pier gives a semaphore
Schubert's grievances filter out the filth of the whole century
Merging with the regret of the fog with the regret of the estuary snow white
Extends to the opposite shore, the movement of water, we know that under the layer of ice
You also moved a new story loads the ballast Łódź
Zuri swan
一只苏黎世的天鹅
According to him, happiness takes the form of an elegy
He snags to an unknown beauty
Danced water that slepped a fake dream for seven centuries
He casts a fleeting glance at a man on a stone bridge
According to her, what cannot be recovered must be chewed bite by bite
Snow is piling up under the armpits again
The orange beak leans again and again towards the seemingly well-known shore
Fervor of the body fervor of abandonment
A trembling pen, even if I don't know how many deaths it signed
He said he would remain single while standing on the surface of the water
She saw in the cool mirror the reflection of a single swan
She said the sun is already digesting, flapping her double wings
The beauty of fingers lies in tightening around the confusion
And the leaking of blue from the human interior against which the silver chain is all the more blinding
Formed into its own blood-stained ornament
Confirming the wildness of the bird elegiac calm
Shadow Theatre
影戏
Pain, like beauty, is an end in itself
The wall is the scene on which a cat walks
And the dance of the screaming extravaganza of colours
A hand from behind the scenes knocks down the setting sun between the shadows
Organs in love tighten around the squeak of bats
Parting twilight is on the pillow of the hand
In the cat's eye, moments jump over and over again
Homeland was cut out
A wound tattoo remained after her
The endlessly skinned character becomes a drama
The light of the lamp skinning the evening aurora catches the reality turned sideways
Shadows sloppyly impose human characters on each other
Every day holes are sewn up here after bursts of laughter under cat's claws
Sunsets lick their wounds
Holding themselves under the arm, they enter the blackness of the applause and fall asleep hugged to the gifts
Anti-requiem
反安魂曲
- for my younger brother Yang Yue, who died on December 14, 20221
The afterlife is infinitely vast, but can souls find rest here?
No tool will say this cold hollow day yazes with emptiness2
Brother, you blended into the boundless crowd
Another car rushes with a terrible scream is acceleration
In the dead end of the SOR, it will inevitably derail
It exposes countless ends of the eyes in which the movement has gone out
Brother, where are the smallest of the words spoken before death stuck?
With the last breath, the dry phlegm was thrown out
How many lives did she take? The sheet is spread
Like the seabed outlining the contour of the body
This emirization of the 1960 year with an agonous moan tears
This deaf silence leaks through the unclosed year 2022
Your thin rope from both ends is broken
A drop of water not from the sea contains all the saltiness of the sea in a helpless embrace
Brother, death does not hurt, disaster causes suffering
The entire expanse suddenly erased by the abyssal emptiness blows from it
Soaked in the smell of drugs for which the future will not find a remedy
Your poisoned fate is affectionately called a tragic event
Blinded winter on the side held in the unaware of whose hand
I don't know by whom she was stuck in an impossible rebirth
The Devil and the Yama3 In human bodies they descend to earth
To close the streets throughout the city
Cut off the paths of life, the path of death, damn every drop
The flowing blood between hell and hell black and white are the same
The disgrace of words in the mother's eyes snows
Wuhan Nights Jiabingou4 Siberia
White and black are one brother, the underlying disease is called our times
On the bridge between worlds5 Pinned padlocks of approaching tragedies
Zero sense swallows another zero fate
Zero turns voices of opposition in his fingers and hearts freeze
Your horizon is a flat line on the electrocardiogram
Zero hour turns the day and night of the past and present into dust
The first seven armored gates of the following weeks have passed6
They are waiting for you to look back with piercingly empty eyes
Unechoed falling seal of history
Brother, the cursed dawn accompanies your loneliness
Your wood your wood their pile rises to the sky
I see the fire of the burning soul and the ashes that escape
Soaked with bitterness from the trap of grief
The urn does not fall asleep, there is no refuge for her
Requiem sings only heaps of fragments that cannot be smoothed
The last final goodbye like a heap of melancholy
Petal by petal plucked withering flower
A cold iron bed plunders the world
Your death reveals the horizons of subsequent deaths
The native language of pain takes ghosts under its roof
The scream of oblivion sweeps the future like the wind
Brother, this pile of garbage will not rest, this pile of garbage must not rest
Behind the iron door, the ridges of angry waves foam
Written on December 24, 2022 on the day of brother's cremation
_
Footnotes:
1. The poem is written in the form of a traditional Chinese requiem consisting of seven stanzas of seven verses each, rhymed according to the AABAABA pattern [author's note]. In the original, however, the author does not strictly adhere to this convention, hence in the translation some of the rhymes have been replaced by more distant asonances [trans.
2. Reference to the poem W.H. Audena "In memory of W.B. Yeats”:
“[...] Each of the devices we use for measurements,
He states: the day of his death was a dark and frosty day" (transl. Stanisław Barańczak) [author's note].
3. In the Chinese tradition, the ruler of the world of the dead.
4. A labor camp in Gansu province, China, where political prisoners sentenced to "re-education through labor" were held between 1957 and 1861; most of the 3,000 convicts died of starvation.
5. It's about a bridge through which dead souls must pass to be reborn in the next incarnation [ed.]
6. A reference to Chinese beliefs and mourning customs. In the Buddhist tradition, there is a belief that the soul returns to earth in another incarnation within 49 days of death. This period is divided into seven weeks, each of which ends with a day of prayer for the soul of the deceased.
Yang Lian, a Chinese poet born in 1955, lives in Berlin. It is one of the most important representatives of the so-called Foggy Poets, creators who, since the 1970s, writing in modernist poetics, smuggled in their work what was officially banned after the Chinese Cultural Revolution. His poetry is close to Herbert's understanding of art through creative references to tradition and constant dialogue with old poetry. As written by Ai Weiwei, Yang Lian's poetry "It is rigorously and precisely thought out: it combines history and reality with metaphysical considerations, layer by layer it goes deeper and deeper until it crosses tradition".
Raised in Beijing in his early youth, he understood the power of oppression of the totalitarian system, when as a young man he was forced to stop his studies, because he was sent to re-education through manual labor in the provinces. After the bloody suppression of the Tian'anmen Square protests in 1989, he decided to emigrate, but he is still a Chinese language poet. To this day, he remains a critic of oppressive governments and an advocate of freedom of speech.
Photo. Foundation named after Zbigniew Herbert