Happiness inexpressive sometimes can be very simple: overhearing someone speaking the accent of your hometown in a metro station eight thousands miles away from the small village, or encountering W.S.Merwin’s new poem A Message to Po Chu-I on the front page of the New Yorker’s site.
A Message to Po Chu-I
by W. S. Merwin
In that tenth winter of your exile Read the rest of this entry »
Getting ready to go back to China with M for several months, saying bye to friends and family. While talking to grandpa this evening, the little chanting voice whispering in my mind again, “on and on, going on and on, xíng xíng fù xíng xíng, 行行复行行”…
Selection of Nineteen Ancient Poems from Han Dynasty
Author: Anonymous
Translation: Burton Watson
No. 1
On and On, Going On and On
When Senoo Kappa was working on his Indian Sketch book in India, he once asked many locals to describe Mahatma Gandhi in their minds, to his surprise the majority described Gandhi as someone tall and big, and it was to their surprise when Kappa showed them the photo of the short and skinny brown man.
Somehow we all tend of summarize people and image them to have a physical appearance corresponds with the characterized résumé, just like that we are all opt to keep selective memories about our own experiences. As Walter Benjamin said, memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theater. It is the medium of past experience as the ground is the medium in which dead cities lie interred. He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging.
My friend Edouard died of brain tumor on Saturday morning in Paris, he was 37.
Burial Songs
Tao Yuanming
Translation: David Hinton
1
Whatever will live will die. I died
young, though not shortchanged by fate.
Last night, I was like anyone else.
This morning I’m listed among ghosts.
It has been one of the most beautiful winters I have had. Boundless forest sheds its leaves shower by shower; endless snowfalls roll its waves hour after hour. Matsuo Bashō would be happy to say
“now then, let’s go out
to enjoy the snow… until
I slip and fall!”
いざさらば
雪見に転ぶ
所まで
Still lingering in Bohumil Hrabal’s Too Loud A Solitude, no wonder Confucius after a concert for three months did not know the taste of meat, “I never knew music could reach this level of excellence!”. Almost envy Haňt’a, the compacter of wastepaper and books who lived at the lowest at the low, and who knew Talmud, Hegel, Kant and Schopenhauer by heart, not to mention the appearance of Jesus and Lao-tze standing side by side in his dimly and musty cellar…