杨炼

                周年之雪‍

更早的幽暗　形成于酷似你
又不是你的冬日后面

更急切坍塌的白　更像博物馆的大理石台阶
你走不下来的台阶

两座花园齐齐跌入
一丛灌木　一个冻红女孩的怀抱

周年　路灯注册每片经过的雪　返回的雪
纷飞的指尖　戳中你　烫伤你

指挥家那么窈窕的地点上
两次鼻息都悬浮在空中

彼此是一本读不完的书　你拿着
倚着大理石渗出的　淹没博物馆的融水声

一枚冻红的耳垂预约了暮色
无所不在地等　一颗寒冷雕刻的星球

风声哭嚎着认出你　伫立
也在飘落　六棱形的嫩嫩签名

按住女孩隐秘浑圆的肩头
你无须走下　石像们激溅的皎洁正升上来

酷似想象中你的骸骨
被捧着灰烬的小手一点点搓碎

小女巫什么也不纪念　只袅袅再分娩一次
凛冽得恰似美本身
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Yang Lian

Anniversary Snow

Translation by Brian Holton, winner of the Sarah Maguire Prize 2021, awarded by the Poetry Translation Centre.

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earlier dark     formed up behind winter is so similar
but isn’t you

more hastily collapsing white     more like the museum’s marble steps
steps you can’t come down

two gardens neatly fall into
a shrubbery    a freezing pink girl’s embrace

anniversary    streetlamps register each passing snowflake    returning snow
fingers flying thick and fast     stab you   scald you 

on the so graceful place of the conductor
two breaths float in air

each an unfinishable book    you take on your hand
leaning on the trickle of melt water that oozes from marble     floods the museum

an earlobe pink with cold trysted with the twilight
waiting everywhere     a planet carved from the cold

the wind’s wailing knows you     stands still
and floating down too     tender six-sided signatures

press the girl’s secret curved shoulder
you need not walk down   moon-white stone statues splashes are rising now

the very likeness of your imagined skeleton
tattered a bit by small hands carrying ashes

the small seer commemorated nothing     but swirling upward gave birth again
chilled to the bone like beauty itself

Chinese, like English, is an analytic SVO language (man bites dog/dog bites man), although nouns don’t decline, verbs don’t conjugate, and tense, number, definiteness, gender, are all unmarked. There is one irregular verb. Verbs can be marked for aspect, but don’t have tobe; similarly, nouns can be pluralised, but it’s not compulsory, as it is with pronouns, which do have a plural suffix; but Yang Lian sometimes adds that to nouns, forcing me to write things like oysterses.

The writing system leans toward sense rather than sound, and because Chinese is very parsimonious with syllable sounds, it rhymes easily for many more lines than are possible in English. It’s also well-equipped for puns and wordplay.

Modifiers come only before nouns, so sentences are often complex structures of adjective, noun, or verb phrases in apposition, with none clearly dominant. Yang Lian likes both piled-up modifiers and ambiguity: a Chinese editor once told me she saw five different ways of reading one of his lines.

At first reading, I have to put who did what to whom and when to one side, and by the time I reach a pre-final draft, every article, every tense, almost every singular or plural are mine, and not the poet’s. Yang praises the Chinese verb for its tenseless timelessness, and much of his poetry does seem to operate in eternity, but those of us who work in a language burdened by the need to mark for definiteness, time, number, and so on, have to make tough decisions in the knowledge that we are flying in the face of the poet’s intention.

In this poem, lines 1-2

        earlier dark     formed up behind winter is sosimilar

        but isn’tyou

are literally

        更早的幽暗　gengzao de you’an

        more early [subordinating particle] gloomy/darkness/darknesses

        形成于酷似你 xingchengyu kusi ni

        shape[d]-become to very like you [enjambement]

        又不是你的冬日后面 you bushi ni de dongri houmian

        and not is/was you[sing.] [subordinating particle] winter(day) behind [postposition]

Chinese word order has to be inverted here, as does the relation between headword winter and its modifiers. The verb xingcheng is rendered as a participle: Chinese verbs are not necessarily marked for voice, and since they don’t conjugate, an infinitive is indistinguishable from a participle, past tense from present, active from middle or passive, and so on.

Chinese tends to trochees, and English to iambs, but I try to keep the same number of beats in my line as Yang has in his, and I build a sound structure out of chains of echoic devices like alliteration, or half-rhyme, for example: in lines 3-4, this includes hastily/steps/collapsing, or more/museum’s/ marble. When he asks me to rhyme, I will comply as far as I can: adding form while keeping content is difficult and often impossible, but it’s great fun to try.

After nearly thirty years of working together, the voice I have found for Yang Lian feels like my own voice now.

Brian Holton

Melrose

3-4 March 2021

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