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  Self Translation

  Self Translation Ouyang Yu

  Written in Chinese by Ouyang Yu

  Self-translated into English by Ouyang Yu

  MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA

  www.transitlounge.com.au

  Copyright ©Ouyang Yu 2012

  First Published 2012

  Transit Lounge Publishing

  This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Inquiries should be made to the publisher.

  Cover image: In Between the Water and the Cloud by They. Courtesy of the artist. Cover and book design: Peter Lo Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group

  This project has been assisted by the Australian government through the Australia Council for the Arts, its arts funding and advisory body.

  Cataloguing-in-publication entry is available from the

  National Library of Australia: http://catalogue.nla.gov.au

  9781921924279 (e-book)

  Bless thee, Ouyang, bless thee! Thou art self translated.

  Adapted from William Shakespeare

  ‘A translation is no translation,’ he said, ‘unless it will give you the music of a poem along with the words of it.’

  John Millington Synge

  Contents

  Foreword

  The One-Tree

  The Murray River

  Song for an Exile in Australia

  Spring at Kingsbury, Melbourne

  Untitled (Winter one August night)

  In a Wakeful Dream

  The Sound of Rain

  Great Ocean Road

  The Autumn Country

  The Double Man

  On a Sunny Noon

  Permanently Resident in an Alien Country

  Watching the Moon

  Variations of a Night

  Christmas, 1993

  Untitled (On those long long days)

  Untitled (Summer night, the sky laden)

  Island

  Untitled (My baby was crawling in bed)

  At Dusk

  Ashes

  Tonight is my Birth Night

  The Dog Outside the Door

  Untitled (Youthful days)

  The Train

  The Wanderer

  Beautiful Death

  The Bone of a Tree

  An Evening Scene

  The Mosquitoes

  Untitled (Standing alone)

  Morning Flowers

  Listening to Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata

  Wild Grass

  After the Evening Rain

  Moonrise

  The Evening Sun

  The Rain

  Low Voices

  I Shall Go To A Remote Place

  The Kite

  The Confessions of a Pig

  Untitled (I stood silent in darkness)

  Dusk in a Wuhan Suburb

  A Blind Fortune-teller Tells Me That

  Life

  Strangling

  An Illusion

  I Said to My Son

  Dusk in Shanghai

  Night

  The Shadow

  X

  Insomnia

  On an Autumn Night

  A Poem of the Moment

  Second Drifting

  Untitled (The poets on the earth)

  The Puzzle of an Unknown Poet

  Early Morning August

  Untitled (A person is a religion)

  My Country

  Solitude

  Declaration of Independence

  My Two Women

  Untitled (Some people are destined)

  Don’t Say

  Sinking into Darkness

  Flying Close to the Earth

  The Lights

  Winter

  It’s Going to Snow

  The Story

  Zero Distance

  No Title

  Chinese

  Red Green Yellow

  Memory

  The Bridge

  The Pig Incident

  Moon, Rain, Night, Summer, Frost, etc

  Untitled (So quiet under the moonlit shadow)

  “Nightingales Have Stopped Singing, Too”

  Untitled (The wind ferociously tears)

  Untitled (I take you)

  Untitled (Rain, I stood on the street)

  Untitled (My heart, high up there)

  Home

  Rain Stopped Late At Night

  In the Future

  Poem

  A Person is Gone

  Double

  My Sadness

  Two Roads

  Foreword

  Self-translation is a translation in which the poet plays the role of a translator turning his own work from one language into another. In my case, I wrote the poems first in Chinese and then translated them into English, often decades after and continents apart. When some of these poems were first turned into English and submitted to literary journals for consideration, both here and overseas, they were not presented as self-translations per se but as original writings, perhaps out of a fear that they might be less likely to be published. It has taken me almost two decades – and the world longer – to realise the value and importance of self-translation as a unique art form. It is only in recent times that artists have become increasingly versatile with new genres combining different forms of art.

  This collection is a bilingual one gathering together poems I have written in Chinese that go as far back as the 1970s when I was twenty years of age, which I subsequently turned into English, more so after my arrival in Australia in 1991. The collection can roughly be divided into my China period (1979-1991) and my Australia period (1991-2011), bringing up to date an output of select poems in both Chinese (original) and English (self-translated).

  As a bilingual writer and literary translator engaged in both the Chinese and English languages, I believe that the translation of my own work fully captures and recreates its original vitality and artistry. The collection will also let readers see the gradual growth of my poetic art in my Chinese poems over the decades as I have matured in my command of English and Chinese. This collection, one of the first of its kind in Australia and overseas, and certainly in the Chinese-speaking world, is hopefully path-breaking and may encourage other bilingual poets and self-translators. In joining the rank of such self translators as Rabindranath Tagore, Vladimir Nabokov, Samuel Beckett, Julien Green and many others, I hope it won’t be a disappointment.

  Ouyang Yu, Melbourne, April 2012

  The One-Tree

  1

  on a blank piece of paper where no poetry is yet born

  i pop up a pen

  and that is you

  the one-tree

  with no props and foils

  your world is a silent blue

  a constantly declining green

  with streams of dreams

  running in your shadow

  on a scorching summer day

  when the distant camera

  is taking you at a high speed

  you’ll strangely change your shape

  we look at you as a tree

  and you look at us as a miserable group

  strange beings of a mechanical civilization

  but you keep your silence

  an inky sign sculptured on the green wilderness

  in your vocabulary

  there never is such a word as loneliness

  2

  you are everywhere

  an exclamation mark that rises from the soil

  a lonely shadow that vanishes with the cars

  our postmodern speed

  cannot stay with you

  ev
en for a brief second

  with primeval tranquility

  you survey the surrounding plain like the wind

  never desiring

  the hubbub and noise of the forest

  the quietness deep from the heart

  is overflowing every bright green leaf in you

  your departure will leave in our hearts

  something to regret, to sigh for

  while you are entering my poetry

  you continue to think your thoughts no one can ever hope to know

  and merge with the dark night

  under a familiar moon

  The Murray River

  1

  i have read your name on a chinese map

  which leaves on me a heavy, murky impression

  but your tortuous, thin features in my eyes

  are so different from your chinese name

  deviously running through the ochre australian desert

  eventually disappearing into it

  you the wanderer that never returns to the sea

  as i am driving past tailem bend

  the Murray emerges, all of a sudden, with a leap

  from the monotonous kangaroo-coloured plain

  exposing its bright shadows of dark green

  flowing southward at the bend

  the freeway follows you to turn at the bend

  the narrowness of the river

  reminds me of the shallow inner river formed by the sandbar

  that stood between it and my childhood yangtze in winter

  the colour of your water is also greyish

  like the cloud-gathering, rainy sky

  with no sails

  no river banks

  except a deserted ferry

  that reveals its sign in the fleeting moment

  and an empty gap in the shades of the slanting trees

  2

  where there is a river

  there must be green embankments

  and rows of willow trees

  as well as fishing boats with smoke rising from kitchen chimneys at dusk

  but how can the chinese picture be inserted into this australian landscape?

  the murray river is a wanderer following his own instincts on the unobstructed plain

  whose bosom does not bear any burdens of history

  whose colour of water is that of the sky

  that turns grey when overcast

  and blue when clear

  and whose trees, reluctant to reside along the river banks

  stand bare and lonely in the water

  their trunks beheaded

  looking like charred limbs

  3

  the murray

  offers a resting place

  at mildura

  where there is the oldest steamboat on the australian continent

  and the eucalyptus whose age is unknown

  as my car could not penetrate

  the dense green bush on either side of the road

  i stood watching two australians fishing by the river

  the sandstorm on the great plain

  turned the air red

  the tilted fishing rod was pulling tight

  but the golden carp

  was abandoned on the sand

  for the fishermen by the Murray

  were waiting for more valuable gifts

  Song for an Exile in Australia

  in a loveless season in Australia

  the body is passing through the sun of spring

  decaying gradually disconnected with life

  so I cover up every face of clocks

  to forget time

  to forget every face that lifts up from under the white shrouds of corpses

  the spring has lost its power of medium

  and the body can’t understand its own meaning

  woodenly I wait for the coming of dusk

  knowing very well that nothing will come out of it

  like every disappearing season

  that will not leave her shadows

  in a poemless season in Australia

  I read my poems of the past

  like a stranger in hundreds of years

  reading books left to him by his ancestors

  I see thousands of lines

  shoot past the edge of dreams

  but my paralysed brain can’t pull itself out of the

  wheelchair of imagination

  like my decayed body

  in a riverless season in Australia

  the boundless grassland drives me crazy

  for my skin is thirsty for the baptism of murky rivers

  and my train of thoughts is chasing waves that can rush

  a thousand miles a second

  listen the lawn-mower next door starts its routine again cutting hair for the spring mourning for the season

  hoping to find a fault in the ground

  where there is a fault there is life running

  in a season without languages in Australia

  I have lost my weight in undeveloped no-person’s land

  like a wild devil roaming

  I sow my language into the alien soil

  where it sends forth such strange flowers that no one recognises

  and all of a sudden I find my tongue

  held between two languages like a vice

  in a season of self-exile in Australia

  I feel doubly alienated doubly illusioned

  the death of the old world has such weird attractions

  while the light of the new world has somehow

  darkened

  in a season without love in Australia

  my body my poetry

  in a season without languages in Australia

  my interference my waves of electricity

  in a season without death in Australia

  I see the black cat acquiring an eternal existence in the

  afternoon sun

  and I see the reflection of a car above the distant trees

  in a season without imagination

  in a desireless season

  in Australia

  in Australia

  in Australia

  Spring at Kingsbury, Melbourne

  on a long empty street in the suburb

  in October when rain comes and goes

  in spring

  in deep night when you stop saying things on the tip of your tongue

  at the edge of your dream

  at a moment when stillness is so loud

  at the point of your pen

  after all desires

  on a freeway

  a little after the future has just passed

  when you are looking back for things

  between two hemispheres

  at sea

  in a sky that belongs to none

  in exile

  with quotation marks on life

  and love in subjunctive mood

  with no perfect tense for memory

  and emotions in parentheses

  when telephones reach everywhere

  when bells remain mute

  when the sky is free of electronic waves

  when homeless

  in a continent that waits for no one

  in a lone island

  in a moment you can’t give vent to anything

  among small knives of grass

  in loneliness after loneliness

  in misery after misery

  when definition of words has been repeatedly redefined when you know nothing more about the Chinese-Chinese differences

  when life is only living

  and survival is the thing

  when thinking becomes thinking of home

  at which you are laughing

  in October when rain comes and goes

  in spring

  in a long empty street

  in the suburb

  Untitled

  winter

  one august night in melbourne

  a newspaper printed all over w
ith poetry

  stood up suddenly

  in a wild gust of wind that swept between the sky and the earth

  and died then and there

  i looked up in astonishment

  from the grassy path

  to see the orange lights

  once more slide across

  the eyelids of the city

  In A Wakeful Dream

  i would like to talk to them on another planet

  the night as vast as a graveyard

  my bed like the leaf of a boat floating on the edge of the earth

  i do not know whether they divide time into the

  ancient and the modern

  perhaps a petal of my soul

  will drift away like a meteor with spring water

  shooting out a flying arc in the steely darkness

  perhaps it will ignore waves of electricity in the universe

  and my life as free as these electrons

  with the other eyes

  the other emotions the other languages

  or is it someone else who is writing with this pen

  or has my brain been as empty as ether

  and my eyes but two imagined stars

  watching my own body

  dying away with the world

  but poetry is insistent

  with its obscure words

  on another planet

  against the glimmering light

  i see my leaf of a boat carrying my ashes

  down the big river made from the dust of the universe

  swallowed up by the vortex of the century

  is it true that the so-called mirage

  is but an unidentified smiling face?

  The Sound of Rain

  not the kind of dreamy haziness evoked in

  ‘dreaming in drizzles of the rooster frontier fortress remote’

  nor the sort of heavy obscurity in

  ‘the spring torrents that came urgent in the evening’

  you came as suddenly as you went

  washing the whole deserted continent

  clean of poetry

  your ghost if you are a ghost

  was a wind that had never even had a memory

  nights of the whole october suburb

  kept their ears open for your sleepwalking sound

  stillness, like the breath of a dead person

  was groping for ancient lines in the tunnel of my ears

  what did you see

  under an australian sky?

  near the devil-bone-like gum trees

  stood alone a cold river guest who was fishing in the snow

  or on the fast freeway

  were growing fat cape jasmines?

  the sound of rain was like a suggestion