Sunday Sparrows (Jintian Series of Contemporary Chinese Poetry) - Softcover

Song, Lin

 
9781938890253: Sunday Sparrows (Jintian Series of Contemporary Chinese Poetry)
Softcover
ISBN 10: 1938890256 ISBN 13: 9781938890253
Verlag: Zephyr Press, 2020

Inhaltsangabe

Song Lin’s poems explore his sojourns in several countries, the natural world outside him, and his own inner landscape. His early imprisonment during the 1989 Tienanmen Square protests gave rise to the title poem, as well as a profound sense of yearning that pervades much of his work. He is a wanderer in the world and in the language of poetry, often finding beauty in others that are also on the move: birds, rivers, the wind. While his work is rooted in both contemporary and classical Chinese poetry, he incorporates American, French, and Latin-American literary traditions into his poems.

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Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Jami Proctor Xu is a poet, translator, artist, and mother who splits her time between Northern California and China, and writes in both English and Chinese. Her poems appear frequently in journals and anthologies in China and the US, and have been translated into Vietnamese, Bengali, and Spanish. Her full-length collection Suddenly Starting to Dance was published by Yi Press in 2016. She has read at international poetry festivals in China, India, Vietnam, Bangladesh, and the US, and her poems and translations have appeared in journals and anthologies in the US, China, and India. In 2016, she co-organized an international poetry event for the International Writing Center at Beijing Normal University. In 2013 she received a Zhujiang Poetry Award for a non-Chinese poet who has made a contribution to contemporary Chinese poetry.

Song Lin, born in Xiamen, China, has published five collections of poetry (two of which were translated into French and published in France), two books of prose, and has co-edited a contemporary poetry anthology. He began writing poetry in the 1980s as a “campus poet,” and was imprisoned for almost a year for participating in student protests. He married a French woman, moved to Paris in 1991, and subsequently lived in Singapore and Argentina, before returning to China in 2003. He has received Rotterdam and Romanian International Poetry Fellowships and the Shanghai Literature Prize. He is a poetry editor for the literary journal Jintian.

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SUNDAY SPARROWS


I really want to sing a sparrow’s song
That small body’s flame flies across the distance of a footstep
A risky idea
so agilely burrows itself into the clouds

After a gust of wind, innumerable points of light appear in the sky
as if abrupt sunlight is oppressing the trees
The trees sway then rapidly
regain control over wild vertigo

I really want to hold onto this moment
when the sparrow and I gaze at each other for the length
of time it takes to wait a lifetime. Let the allusions in the mirror
persist until the real dreamland arrives!

Commoners among birds
with short feathers covering clumsy determination
When premonitions of disaster draw near, claps
of thunder come ringing through the air

It’s as if all the angels who manage sleep
have asked for lodging beneath the eaves and they’re staring blankly
into a corner of long sky. O, sparrows, I want to sing a song for you
but I’ve been aching with hunger for so long


(Written while in prison for participating in the 1989 protests)



DEATH AND PRAISE (selections)


2
I can’t hear the buzzing hive in her heart―
the melancholy young woman in sunlight―I can only use my hands to listen.
At the end of the corridor that leads to spring
she stands like a flag asleep in the wind.

A crimson flag fills the sky
with gunpowder. And outside, the pure rose garden
disappears from the outlines of her shoulders.
Rose buds seem to adorn an even tenser atmosphere.

The hive and the buzzing sunlight confine
the young woman. Distress makes her become like earth’s milk
flowing into the hidden places of youth.

This sprightly profile of beauty passes back and forth.
The hive in the heart of the girl who signed a contract
with death pours out melancholy for her.


5
We know very little about the principles of death
just as we know almost nothing about the difficulties of objects.
When a hand grabs hold of bird shadows, it flies
but then measurement grabs that hand in its hand.

Sinking into deep defeat and crying in grief.
A lantern on the crane’s leg guides stones in flight
and quickly enters the forgotten realm. What brilliant measurement
will lead us back to our interest in listening?

The stones in the river dream of the stones on the riverbank.
The birds are far from the moon that stands on the water’s surface.
The beautiful woman of the silver-gray night uses her beauty to disperse darkness.

All creatures begin a graceful dance with snakes.
The great musician plays the flute as he walks
and measurement sheds gold feathers in daytime’s empty valley.


21
May makes us
forget spring. The first person collapses


in brilliant rays of light. His broad shoulders
are the deck of the warship Blue Hope.

They tilt sideways and sink into the song’s sound,
carrying his heart’s hunger for belief
and his mind’s final illusions. The air separates
as if a blade has cut deeply across it.

His body continues its collapse.
The others―his other bodies―are pulverized by light rays.
June’s tires loom, pitch black.

“Don’t castrate my lover!”
“Don’t take away my lover!” As she
pleaded, we all wept.



COMMEMORATION

At the mouth of the volcano
a group of karst-shaped people were burned to ashes.
These early saints replete with Christian melancholy
wanted to build a final martyrs village
in the domain of delusion.
The sun sets. Livestock are flipped like pages of a book.
The few remaining caves on the ruins
are like a school of belief that won’t ever open.



SELF-PORTRAIT OF A BARBARIAN

But I have scarce set foot in your dominion―
Laurence Stern


Because I’m standing below the sacred rod
I can’t see the great angel.

A Polish man plays a song on a saw.
The Seine River carries away secret good times.

Style is sacrificed every second.
A copper horse, a metal bridge, matted hair riding

on passion. A single drop of blood in the heart
banishes me to the night sky of emptiness.

Applause rings out in the theater.
Bhutanese gods don their masks.

I come from the ruins of a dark night.
I want to pray for all souls in mourning.

This one-horned monster
hasn’t yet been born in Europe’s line of sight.



LANDSCAPE SEEN THROUGH AN EAGLE’S EYE

1
There are only rocks and snow,
black and white
Deep in winter, the river no longer flows
Pine trees don glass nets

2
The rocks’ height,
the peaks’ height
can’t be replaced by anything
except what snow covers

3
Flocks of swifts sleep beneath the frozen river
In caves brown bears sleep soundly
and groundhogs and hedgehogs fall into deep sleep,
their bodies piled full of fat like snow

4
No words, no peddlers of words,
no paeans to marriage or power
In Tibet, an army sinks in snow
gets buried by the moon’s forgetting

5
The wind is inspiration; determination
is the speed at which blood flows in flight
The shadow moves, then
claws suddenly break the quiet

6
Necessary simplification, like fractured branches and withered leaves
simplified by the earth, the way rocks
tower alone, tower in splendor
and become the foundation of all feeling

7
Even the frozen plain of snow
is completely covered by the sun’s black fuse
A landscape seen through an eagle’s eye―
A poem about distance

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Verlag
Zephyr Press
Erscheinungsdatum
2020
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1938890256
ISBN 13 
9781938890253
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
144
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
preigu
mail@preigu.de

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