Zhu-Yu
Two poems translated from the Chinese by Stephen Nashef
Rocks Beneath the Covered Bridge
graffiti floats in and out of the brown and gray of the covered bridge
the same color as the rocks that rise and sink below
the river spittle has no idea of the gentle flow the bridge demands
as if its influence extended no further than its narrow corridor
hunching your center of gravity nearer to the ground you
slide your way down the slope to the water’s edge
until your hand is satisfied with the gift that it receives
from contact with the icy water and then you
take off your shoes and socks and step into the river
one after the other scattered colored rocks unsettle you
and cause your hand to grasp them as you make your crossing
over their moss that commandeers your step to draw
from it that charming drunken stagger the one that wets
the fibers of your clothes with what you go through
you take care striding through this torrent always
prepared to pounce onto the nudity of some beached rock
clutching shrubs you ascend the wooded bank south of the bridge
through which you hear a car call out to something far offstage
Shen Fu: Old Stories of a Raft Which Drifts*
Who saw the mortal massives of the blooms
Of water moving on the water-floor?
—Wallace Stevens, “Sea Surface Full of Clouds”
Once the sea-peering mountain, the land’s pointed finger,
with forger’s brawn hooked back in the shoals, we became
each other’s lonely islands. And yet, a poem’s compulsion
to forget is at most a means for salving shame; our flight from here
has only neared the edgy brink, our dreams ahead—
The hardest step is waking from unwilled fatigue, grief grows
fate’s fuel, and what you wrote of life which drifts
seems no closer to the stuff of things than shipmen’s logs.
A skiff now floats securely moored in middle age,
the subsiding mass. The distant scene, more than time
in cabins, gardens or mid-voyage, is fitted with a higher joy.
Prose plots the course. As the 1800s took their leave your works
were nearly lost to nameless piles in quiet stalls. Yet
‘fore casting off, all writers have to meet the storms
of life ashore. It’s said another’s jottings still harbor ink:
rotting proof you travelled seas to far-off states
and pursued a science of health for life ahead.
Some take these exploits for a lighter pleasure, it seems far safer
than to gaze out from a ridge into the southward sea.
The crisis now is what our peers resent. They lose
themselves to false expressions, fired-up cliché. The fruit
engulfs the stone, the dumpling its filling, and the feast
wraps our frailer parts in its minutiae, drunkens those who softly
talk at ocean’s edge, on your tales and their discreet reveal.
* On re-reading Six Records of a Life Which Drifts. The case of its two missing chapters, Sea Voy- age and Maintaining Health, inspired this poem, as well as a trip to the coast at Xichong, Shenzhen two years ago with fellow poets including Meng Yifei. This poem is for each of that occasion’s fellow travellers and friends.
TRANSLATOR’S NOTE: Shen Fu (1763–1825?) was a government clerk during the Qing dynasty. In his autobiographical collection of essays entitled Six Records of a Life Which Drifts he writes touchingly and candidly of his childhood, his happy marriage and his travels. It was more than fifty years after his death that four of the six chapters were discovered in a second-hand book store in Suzhou. Despite the humility of the opening paragraph in which he writes, “Unfortunately, as a youth, I did not complete my studies and my learning is limited; this thus aims no higher than to be a truthful record of my life and my feelings,” his writing is now considered a classic of Qing dynasty literature.