I shall pause several times to echo you.
Different flights, those with an “I” and those without.
Rhetoric of another kind. Mocking lyricism. Anti-abstract.
Yan Rong
Yan Rong is a key contemporary Chinese poet and poetry theorist, Doctor of Letters, Distinguished Professor at Hangzhou Normal University, and Director of the Center for International Poetry Exchange and Research. Starting serious independent writing in 1983, he has written thousands of poems including over thirty long poems. His books include poetry collections Feast: Selected Poems of Yan Rong 1986–2007, Duets and Meditations, Drawer Manuscripts of Poetry, East Wind Breaks (a sequence of 300 poems); academic monographs The Resurrection of Poetry, Post-Poetics; the translation The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, and critical essays totalling more than four million words. He has originated theories such as Presentational Poetics, Process Poetics, Loose Poetics and Neo-Futurism. The interplay between his poetry and poetics is said to “open new frontiers for modern poetry”.
晏榕，当代汉语诗歌的重要代表、诗歌理论家，文学博士，杭州师范大学“卓越”人才教授，国际诗歌交流与研究中心主任。晏榕自1983年开始严肃的独立写作，作品数千首，其中长诗30余首。代表著作有《欢宴：晏榕诗选1986-2007》《俪歌与沉思》《抽屉诗稿》《东风破》（组诗300首）等，并有《诗的复活：诗意现实的现代构成与新诗学》《后诗学》等专著、《菊与刀》等译著及系列诗论共四百多万字出版和发表。晏榕倡导构建21世纪的新诗学，提出了“呈现诗学”“过程诗学”“散漫诗学”“新未来主义”等一系列原创性理论。其诗作与诗论的互证互构被读者认为“开拓了现代诗歌的新边界”。
Translated by Ma Yongbo
My Language Poems (Excerpts)
32
I shall pause several times to echo you.
Different flights, those with an “I” and those without.
Rhetoric of another kind. Mocking lyricism. Anti-abstract.
Regard them as contiguous base areas,
The small hours after high fever, skin raw from allergy, new pastures.
Not one death but many, this is like
Creation, like language.
Like the letter paper after snow back then, every night
I cup them out, linking phonation and meaning,
From one center to another, never
Imagining there is only one center.
Now we grow anxious between two snowfalls,
Sometimes wishing to delay, sometimes to erase,
Leaning on em dashes and ellipses to cover
Wonder at a single refraction.
Yet that unextinguished glimmer hides beneath
Branches and snow. Strokes. Letters.
Discarded dry batteries, one after another.
Fragmented yet resolute keystrokes.
The worn rim of a phone case.
The stubborn tremor of air compressed in digital audio tracks.
These are recompense, flickering in reversal.
Flight continues, along a track with no trace,
Saluting our new birth.
40
Eat them all. Eat the heart whole.
Eat the gestures, eat the lips.
Eat beauty and the birds.
But bypass slaughter, bypass the lore of harm.
So when we hold a bucket of water, we hold the sea.
When we shape sound with our tongues, we hold candles
And last testaments. Eat the windows too, the snow, the small woods,
Foot shackles and ropes laid bare by running streams.
Eat with redoubled frenzy, with the fangs of words, the siphon of grammar,
The esophagus and stomach of an aesthetics of silence.
Eat with books, with walls and guitars, with safety pins,
Eat with our burning postures. Eat the shouts,
Thoughts of the left and the right. Eat surplus value,
Withered bonsai factories, girls’ uniforms,
The prayers of delivery riders speeding through street corners.
Eat the dust as well, eating while letting it spread,
Letting it be like fear and the wandering feline clan
(Here lies a dangerous symmetry formed
By one verb and one noun). Treat concrete and sliced networks
As cabbages and potatoes at a farmers’ market.
Expert sit on television like a block of tofu,
Professorial titles are green scallions.
Behind the lenses steams delicious haze.
Come, eat all of it: the metaphors of wine, the discipline of salt,
Garlic cloves and prickly ash caskets passing in and out,
Smoke curling from the crematorium.
Fields, paths, pots and firewood. Juxtaposed kitchens.
Bottles of all sorts. Prisons.
Overtime hours. Strings lined up neatly.
Splendid rhetoric. Narcotics.
Consolations in cell phones. Vinegar. Or
Patches upon patches. Pockets within pockets.
With the last strength eat the ruins, eat the false pulses,
Eat the quilts and black muzzles of guns,
Eat the rust that creeps quietly toward
The overlapping shadows of spring behind the white curtain.
51
Here are two valleys. Within the crevices of language lie
Mountain streams and blooming flowers, yet in the gaps between words
Nothing but thorns!
And we are barefoot travelers, forced to leap over
Smooth nouns and traps of transitive verbs,
Carefully skirting the beautiful, tempting
Or grim and ghastly
Vines of grammar.
They often let their arms fall casually,
Slipping from one crevice into the next: slow dances
And spurting blood.
We must adapt to two tempos, as breathing
Within two Junes separated by spring, as hesitation
Before turning a page, choosing treetops and soil —
Resisting the tightening of the magic cage
With flickering refraction and creeping writhing.
76
Come examine our new subject: this is a poem
That is half-written. Not the completion of the unfinished,
Nor the unfinished state of the completed.
Almost top secret. Sentinels posted without cease,
Alarms ringing, yet accompanied by soft music.
Burial carries the scent of mint. Reading
Accompanies two straight weeks of coughing. French fries on street corners
More meager than February, just as when the wife pushes open the door
And the first half of life comes to a halt, instruments break out in sweat.
Midway through writing, I send you an email,
Wasting no fugue.
And wait for new species, ready at any moment
To make an arrest, by my instinct of genius I guarantee,
A rainstorm is dangerous, any climate
Between the lines is dangerous. Boundaries are too.
This is like deconstructing two -isms in a blurred zone,
Composing poetry at winter’s end rather than summer’s end,
With your polyglossia and my silence,
With our story of mutual salvation, endlessly swirling eddies,
New medicines and old wine laid on the table.
So hold fast to this state of incompletion,
With our ever-expanding fields and paths, our mockery of
Computer crashes, hexameter dance plus the song of four tones,
And the bleating of Saba’s goat.
我的语言诗（节选）
32
我要用好几次停顿和你呼应。
不同的飞行，有“我”的和没有“我”的。
另一种修辞的。嘲笑抒情的。反抽象的。
把它们看成连成片的根据地，
发过高烧的凌晨，过敏后的皮肤，新牧场。
不是一次死去而是好几次，这和
创世一样，和语言一样。
和当年雪后的信笺一样，我在每个夜里
捧出它们，连缀语音和语义，
从一个中心到另一个中心，从来
没想过只有一个中心。
现在我们焦虑于两场雪之间，
有时想延迟，有时想删除，
想依赖破折号和省略号，去覆盖
对一丝折射的惊叹。
可是啊，那并未熄灭的微光，正匿身于
枝桠和雪之下。笔划。字母。
不断废弃的干电池。
零碎而坚定的键盘声。
手机壳磨损的边沿。
压缩于数字音轨的气流的倔强颤抖。
这些即是补偿，颠倒着闪烁。
飞行仍在持续，以没有轨迹的轨迹，
向我们的新生致敬。
40
把它们全吃光。把心全吃光。
把手势吃光，把嘴唇吃光。
把美和鸟吃光。
但要绕过屠宰，绕过伤害的学问。
这样，当我们有了一桶水，就有了大海。
我们用舌头发出声音，就有了蜡烛
和遗书。也要把窗户吃光，雪，小树林，
溪水冲刷着裸露出来的脚镣和绳索。
要加倍疯狂地吃，用词语的牙，语法的虹吸器，
沉默美学的食管和胃。
用书吃，用墙和吉他，用别针，
用我们燃烧的姿势吃。把喊叫吃光，
左边的和右边的思想，把剩余价值吃光，
枯萎的盆景厂房，女孩儿的制服，
外卖员疾驰在街口的祷文。
还要把灰尘吃光，边吃边让它们扩散，
让它们如同恐惧和流浪的猫族
（这里是一个动词和一个名词构成的
危险的对称）。把混凝土和切开的网络
当成农贸市场里的卷心菜和土豆。
专家坐在电视里像一块豆腐，
教授的头衔儿是青绿的葱。
镜片后是美味的蒸汽。
来，把它们全吃光，那酒的暗喻，盐的规训，
蒜瓣和花椒的灵柩进进出出，
殡葬场冒着烟儿。
田野、小路，锅和柴。并置的厨房。
各种瓶子。监狱。
加班时段。琴弦整齐地排列。
美妙的修辞。毒品。
手机里的安慰。醋。或者
补丁上的补丁。口袋里的口袋。
最后的力气要把废墟吃掉，把虚伪的
脉搏吃掉，把被子和黑洞洞的枪口吃掉，
把锈迹斑斑吃掉，它们正悄悄爬向
白色帷幕后春天的叠影。
51
这是两个山谷。语言的缝隙里藏着
溪水繁花，但词语的缝隙里
尽是荆棘！
而我们是赤足而行的人，须跳过
表面光滑的名词和及物动词的陷阱，
小心翼翼地绕开美丽诱人
或阴森可怖的
语法的藤蔓。
它们常常若无其事地垂下手臂，
从一个缝隙潜入另一个：迟缓的舞蹈
和飞迸的鲜血。
须适应两种速率，如同在六月隔开的
两个春天里呼吸，如同翻页前的
思忖，选择树尖和土层——
以闪烁的折光和匍匐的蠕动来抗拒
魔笼的收紧。
76
来看看我们的新课题：这是一首
一半的诗。不是未完成的完成，
也不是完成的未完成。
几乎是最高机密，不断安设哨兵，
警报阵阵，但伴着舒缓的琴声。
埋葬伴着薄荷味儿。阅读
伴着连续两周的咳嗽。街角的炸薯条
比二月还要菲薄，就像妻子推门而入时
恰好前半生中止，乐器们浸出汗来。
我在写到快一半时和你发邮件，
不荒废任何一个赋格。
并等待那些新物种时刻可能发起的
抓捕，我以天才的直觉保证，
一场雨也是危险的，字里行间的任何一种
气候都是危险的。界限也是。
这如同在模糊地带解构两种主义，
在冬之末梢写诗而不是夏之末梢，
以你的多语症和我的沉默，
以我们互相拯救的故事，不断流动的
漩涡，摆到桌面的新药和老酒。
就这样坚持一种未完成吧，
以我们不断扩充的田野，小路，对电脑
死机的嘲讽，六音步的舞蹈加上四声之歌，
和着萨巴的那只山羊咩咩咩的叫声。
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