Chinese Literature Readings and Answer Questions

1

Sonnets 1943

Feng Zhi

2.

What falls from our bodies

We allow to turn into dust:

We align ourselves in time like

Autumn trees, each

Offering leaves and belated blossoms

To the autumn wind, that our

Trunks may stretch into frigid winters;

We align ourselves with nature: molted cicada

Leaving its discarded skin in soil and mud;

We arrange ourselves for that

Coming death, a passage of song,

Falling from the corpse of music

And only the body remains,

Transformed, a series of silent mountains.

5.

I shall never forget

That water city in the west,

It’s a symbol of the human world,

A collection of thousands of loneliness.

2

One loneliness is one island,

All are connected as friends.

When you give me your hand,

It is as if a bridge has formed on the water;

When you smile at me,

It is as if on the island across the water

There has suddenly opened a window.

I’m only afraid that when it gets late at night,

The window will be closed,

And there will be nobody on the bridge.

16.

We stand on the top of the mountain

And are transformed into the boundless panorama,

Into the vast plain in front of us,

Into the criss-crossing paths on the plain.

Which road, which river, doesn’t have correlation,

Which wind, which cloud, doesn’t have correspondence:

The cities, mountains, and rivers we have been through,

Have all been transformed into our lives.

Our growth, our sorrow

Are a pine tree on a certain hill,

A thick fog over a certain town;

We blow with the wind, flow with the water,

And are transformed into the criss-crossing roads on the plain,

3

Into the lives of the travelers on the paths.

22.

Deep night, deep mountain,

Listen to the heavy night rain.

Ten miles away, a mountain village,

Twenty miles away, a tumultuous city.

Do they still exist?

Rivers, mountains, ten years ago,

Dreams, fancies, twenty years ago

All buried in the rain.

Narrow surroundings

A return to the womb;

Deep in the night a prayer

Like a primal man:

God, give my narrow heart

A vast universe.

26.

Every day we take the same old path

Back to the place where we live;

But in this forest there hide

Many trails, which are veiled, and foreign.

When taking an unfamiliar path, we feel anxious,

Anxious that we would go farther and farther, and get lost,

Yet suddenly from between the tree branches

4

We see the place where we live,

Like a new island appearing on the horizon.

How many things around us

Request new discoveries by us:

Don’t be convinced that we’re already familiar with everything,

Upon death we touch our skin and hair

Wondering: Whose body is it?

27.

From a flow of shapeless water,

The water carrier fills his oval bottle,

Thus this water obtains a definite shape;

Look, the banner that waves in the autumn wind,

Holds things that can’t be held,

And it grasps the distant light, the distant night,

The wax and wane of distant grasses and trees,

And that wish to run toward the infinite,

And preserves them on this banner.

We have listened to a whole night of winds

And watched a whole day of yellow grasses and red leaves,

All in vain, where shall we dispose of our ideas?

I hope that these poems hold like a banner

Certain things that cannot be held.