Encrypting Chinese Poetry
Today marks my first venture into contemporary Chinese poetry, it is less enigmatic then those parchment-ancient Tang dynasty odes, but still cryptic enough to scare me into bringing down my hefty Chinese-English dictionary to the local coffee shop. The goal of my caffeine jolt was to read my newly purchased Chinese Contemporary Poetry Anthology. Trusting a fellow buyer, the poet Xu Zhimo shines among the firmament of contemporary Chinese poets. I hear attempt to properly unfold his masterpiece (Bidding Farewell to the Bridge) into English.
Softly I leave
Just as softly I came
My hand traces an ethereal fermata
As I bid farewell to the prismatic mist.
Willows gild the river's banks
As young brides do the evening glow
And the shimmering colors within their deep reflections
Dance upon the surface of my thoughts.
Innocent water plants
Caress the tender mud under the grass sprouts
and undulate into the water's down
Under the bridge, they silently dance in the blossoming waves.
Oh how willingly I would dance among them.
The stream that whispers under the bowers
Is not an enigmatic crystal, it is a heavenly waterfall of hues
softly shattered among the swimming green
precipitating into rainbow tinted dreams.
Are you a dream seeker?
Grab one of those mighty oars
and row towards the deepest green
igniting a shimmering trail of stars
and cast your song in that aqueous trail.
But I cannot cast my song
for silence is adieu's hymn
and gnats silently hum for me
in the silence of the godlike bridge.
Silently I leave
Just as silently I came
I give my sleeves the shake of a staccato
to make sure I do not take with me a fragment of that heavenly prism.
