New Translation of “For Tomas Transtromer” [Chinese]

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Mary Tang wrote me today to share a Chinese translation of my poem “For Tomas Transtromer.” For more information about my call for translations of this work, see the Translate This Poem page. On the composition of the translation, Mary writes, “My translation of your poem from English to Chinese was spontaneous and took little time. To me some poems translate themselves into Chinese; other can never be.” Find out more about Mary on her site here. Thanks Mary!

*

路上的冰
影出你我
眼中所見
一般無奈
無法轉向
南部遠冬水盡
跪倒一行古柏
像一隊累了的兵人
失去了重舉的志願
他們背後
鱷寇稱王
我在千里之外的寒春麥田
望見無聲未覺的風暴逼近
深信萬物可失
像腦中的浮現
像夢中的呼叫
–縁盡
風以暴力
能否聽到
你我心聲？
與我同在
面向將來
(c) Mary Tang

The Roots

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The Roots

Under your house, in the middle of the night
the roots are spreading across your foundation.

The roots are not a solid base for the visible,
they have never claimed to be that, they have

never even spoken to you. What roots do
is reach out for available space, where roots reach

Is a place you cannot see but which you feel
pulled towards but you are not being pulled,

you are reaching further and further. Up above
your head in the unseen inside you are also reaching.

In the middle of the day the sky’s foundation
is laid again and you are reaching across it

without knowing because you are distracted
by an oak tree’s afterthought ankling out of the earth

And back in where the world is constantly displaced
by the unseen middle, unstraight path.

Untitled Moment in the Middle of the First Night of April

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Untitled Moment in the Middle of the First Night of April

Incense rises up the wall
in front of my mother’s painting

A village clings to a cliff a thousand
white rooms open to the sun

No separation of inside or outside
to me this painting is a memory

Of her, about memory about how something
no longer exists but still exists

Like smoke from an incense stick
it is entirely spent lighter than air

More solid than the air we breathe
my mother painted it from a photograph

To learn perspective

DMSpainting

After a Late Afternoon Run in Thornrose Cemetery on the Last Day of March

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After a Late Afternoon Run in Thornrose Cemetery on the Last Day of March

 

I lie on my back on the eastern slope.
The clouds are close. Moving as if on an escalator.

When I get up, ten thousand blades of grass
do the same, rising slowly, bent in the middle

But straightening, unburdened.

The Other Ones

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The Other Ones

 

When the ground is soft enough for the spirit to stretch
beyond the numbers of endings and the numbers of beginnings

And the numbers stiff in stone grow warm in the spring sun
the cemetery down the hill fills with people walking.

I can tell the ones who aren’t ghosts because they notice my children
playing on the one patch of stoneless level grass just inside the gates.

The other ones are distracted by an old song in their ears.
The other ones, the ones carrying a large number in their arms

that is always one number larger than the last number they had
when the number was invisible and weightless and fit in a back pocket.

Some numbers are meant to catch, it is why they are shaped like lures.
Zero doesn’t catch, zero falls out of your pocket and you never miss it

And when you see it fall out of the laundry with the dryer sheet
you don’t worry that it’s ruined the rest of the clothes.  A young

couple walk past us, hop over a stone wall on the way
to photograph tombstones. We see them come back, leaving

a trail of decimal points like breadcrumbs. When you’re a ghost
that stops you in your tracks, and you pick one up like a penny

and then spend the rest of your life trying to decide if the point
goes to the left or the right of your number.

March 27

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March 27

The one way sign can point in any direction.
At day’s end I find myself looking to the east

down my street to the city’s end and mountains
above the shadowed valley flaring up

like the texture of your hand’s palm
seen under a microscope for the first time.

From here you can see the ridges but not the lines
that determine health, love, children, fortune,

retreat, duration. Only at a distance
does a line put up a compelling argument.

Tonight a spring flurry is coming and though
nothing will accumulate there is more

than one way to measure the countless departures.
The one way sign can point in any direction.

For Tomas Tranströmer

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For Tomas Tranströmer

The ice on the road sees us with our own eyes
and is no better than we are at helping ourselves

as direction changes. In a winter far south of here,
the edge of still water is guarded by cypress knees,

like a tired army that lay on their backs for a nap
and never found a reason to get up. Beyond them

I heard the bellow of a bull alligator claiming the world.
By a cold spring corn field a thousand miles

away, watching the storm’s wind sprint across
before it could be heard or felt, I know everything

can be claimed, like these memories—are the endless
chances to say hello merely a shout over the slumbering?

Is the wind with its violence finally hearing us with our ears?
I will sit here with you for awhile and see what comes.

*

Re-posting this in light of the news of Tomas Tranströmer’s death. I consider it a privilege that this poem actually found its way into the poet’s hands earlier this year. See here for the translation of this poem into Swedish by film-maker (and Tranströmer’s longtime friend) James Wine, done spontaneously as he and Tomas read the poem together.

I could say a million things this night, but Elin Thor (@elinmiothor) said it best on Twitter today:

Saknar ord.

 

Spring Wind

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Spring Wind

Old pine tree seems the only one
excited by the first warm wind

Empty-handed, the others barely nod
at his hundred foot tall child’s soul

Who remembers the world with no flowers
no leaves no bees who knows

What was and knows what’s coming