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
the cold never letting go of you
and your hunger aching inside you
day and night while you heard the voices
out of the starving mouths around you
old ones and infants and animals
those curtains of bones swaying on stilts
and you heard the faint cries of the birds
searching in the frozen mud for something
to swallow and you watched the migrants
trapped in the cold the great geese growing
weaker by the day until their wings
could barely lift them above the ground
so that a gang of boys could catch one
in a net and drag him to market
to be cooked and it was then that you
saw him in his own exile and you
paid for him and kept him until he
could fly again and you let him go
but then where could he go in the world
of your time with its wars everywhere
and the soldiers hungry the fires lit
the knives out twelve hundred years ago
I have been wanting to let you know
the goose is well he is here with me
you would recognize the old migrant
he has been with me for a long time
and is in no hurry to leave here
the wars are bigger now than ever
greed has reached numbers that you would not
believe and I will not tell you what
is done to geese before they kill them
now we are melting the very poles
of the earth but I have never known
where he would go after he leaves me
Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/poetry/2010/03/08/100308po_poem_merwin#ixzz0hBrTgi0z
I believe Mervin was answering to Bai Ju-yi’s Setting A Migrant Goose Free <放旅雁>:
九江十年冬大雪，
江水生冰樹枝折。
百鳥無食東西飛，
中有旅雁聲最饑。
雪中啄草冰上宿，
翅冷騰空飛動遲。
江童持網捕將去，
手攜入市生賣之。
我本北人今譴謫,
人鳥雖殊同是客。
見此客鳥傷客人,
贖汝放汝飛入雲。
雁雁汝飛向何處,
第一莫飛西北去。
淮西更賊討未帄,
百萬甲兵久屯聚。
官軍賊軍相孚老,
食盡兵窮將及汝。
健兒飢餓射汝吃,
拔汝翅翎為箭羽。
Setting A Migrant Goose Free
Translation: David Hinton
Snows heavy in Hsun-yang this tenth-year winter,
riverwater spawns ice, tree brunches break and fall;
and hungry birds flock east and west by the hundred,
a migrant goose crying starvation loudest among them.
Pecking through snow for grass, sleeping nights on ice,
its cold wings lumber slower and slower up into flight,
and soon it’s tangled in a river-boy’s net, carried away
snug in his arms, and put for sale alive in the market.
Once a man of the north, I’m accused and exiled here.
Man and bird: though different, we’re both visitors,
and it hurts a visiting man to see a visiting bird’s pain,
so I pay the ransom and set you free. Goose, o soaring
goose rising into the clouds – where will you fly now?
Don’t fly northwest: that’s the last place you should go.
There in Huai-hsi, rebels still loose, there’s no peace,
just a million armored soldiers long massed for battle:
imperial and rebel armies grown old facing each other.
Starved and exhaused – they’d love to get hold of you,
those tough soldiers. They’d shoot you and have a feast,
then pluck your wings clean to feather their arrows.
I got to know W.S.Merwin first through his translation of Paolo Neruda, then the Devine Comedy of Dante, then I read his For The Anniversary Of My Death:
Every year without knowing it I have passed the day
When the last fires will wave to me
And the silence will set out
Tireless traveller
Like the beam of a lightless star
Then I will no longer
Find myself in life as in a strange garment
Surprised at the earth
And the love of one woman
And the shamelessness of men
As today writing after three days of rain
Hearing the wren sing and the falling cease
And bowing not knowing to what
It immediately reminded me Tao Yuanming’s Self Funeral Oration, different tunes, but rendered with the same rhythm. What Mervin might have got wrong in Po Chu-i is that the poem was not written on the tenth year of his exile, but the tenth year of Yuanhe, the era name of Emperor Xianzong in Tang Dynasty, which was actually the first year Po was exiled from the capital city.
The first year or the tenth year, I still love Mervin’s poem nevertheless.
#1 by Susan on December 2, 2010 - 02:50
Thank you for your detailed comment on Merwin’s translation mistake. (Does he himself know Chinese?: He may have been relying on someone else’s mistranslation.)
Of more importance to me was the fact that Po may have been able to (poetically) send the goose to Merwin, but, because of current climate and political change, Merwin projects that (poetically) no one will be able, in a thousand or so years, to keep that creature alive since we are now in the process of”melting the very poles of the earth”.
So, the poem not only links civilizations, but makes an important statement about what the poet, a man who lives in a remote spot in Hawaii, sees as the beginning of the end of the natural world…as he knows it.
Merwin has written a prior poem that was a litany of important poets in his life who have died. And I read this one as a sad commentary on the transfer of a living creature, symbolically, from Po to Merwin, to…. no one, in Merwin’s mind, anyway..no poet in line in the far future because of the disintegration of our planet.
The poem was sparse, elegiac, and one that ought to be studied in lower level schools now–not only by poets.