————中译外————

一、欧阳江河的诗（5首）……………………………………BH, LMK译

1.from Thanksgiving Day

2.One Minute, Oh, Heaven And Men

3.Have Grown Old

4.So, How About Venice?

5.Who Leaves, Who Stays

欧阳江河

男，汉族，1956生于四川省泸州市，原名江河。

1979年开始发表诗歌作品，1983年至1984年间，他创作了长诗《悬棺》。其代表作有《玻璃工厂》《计划经济时代的爱情》《傍晚穿过广场》《最后的幻象》《椅中人的倾听与交谈》《咖啡馆》《雪》等。著有诗集《透过词语的玻璃》《谁去谁留》《事物的眼泪》、评论集《站在虚构这边》，其写作理念对20世纪90年代以来的中国诗坛有较大的影响，现居北京，中国作家协会会员。

from Thanksgiving Day

From the Martian’s window it’s not possible to make out whether snow

is really falling or if it’s a paper backdrop hanging behind

a honeymoon trip. This is Thanksgiving

when the dead bestir themselves to leave for dyspeptic Mars

and their pre-mortem turkey marriage. According to the theory of relativity

time flutters in the wind at two speeds, frozen and salted.

God is a telephone operator: from the local telephone counter

you can call aliens. The police car, quick as an executioner,

has almost caught up with the bullet when it turns

everything within range of a toy gun into an oxymoron. The thief

has stolen

the wheels from the crash, but with the feet of a sparrow

you can bundle up your metrics, step over the vote of a scarecrow

and see the Catapult King directly. For the whole thing

simply multiply any majority including the ghosts’ majority

by the zero of the minority. Handcuffs will be worn two times

once as zero, twice as infinity.

But both hands can always work free: you’ve given the dead

a stage but left the house seats empty.

The locals have taken those seats out. The football park

flies toward the sky, which is paid monthly, and there’s no goalkeeper.

What a weird game: birds whack into the net

and the nature of soaring is changed. Fish fling themselves from water,

take rhetoric’s bait. You really are going to Mars

but stop off to go fishing. Oh transforming scene,

one female body becoming so many mermaids

who have never in their lives worn a dress

preferring to be seen from a distance by clouds in trousers

as dancing waters: a kind of gaze on tiptoe

above an understanding of change versus changelessness

No one would deny you’re so lucky to be totally immersed in the

beauty of the senses

because beauty always carries an air of the childish. On the wedding night

the groom pretends to be an old man, so he really becomes old

unless the bride separates out from the sway of the narcissus

queen from canary,

both bring the unreal loveliness of hand-made things

but more real than real, not subject to the rule of alchemy.

[BH, LMK, WNH]

One Minute, Oh, Heaven and Men Have Grown Old

One minute later, bicycles have grown old.

Do you really think clouds in trousers are faster cycling than walking?

Do you really think rain in a skirt is a high school teacher?

One minute, enough to have finished primary school.

One minute of Peking U, two minutes’ reading in primary school.

One minute of English class, two minutes’ teaching spoken Chinese.

One minute of Contemporary History, two minutes back in ancient history.

A semi-feudal minute. A semi-colonial minute. A Confucian

Or Socialist minute.

One minute, enough for you to complete a doctorate?

One hour, one semester, one year or one hundred years

Are all within this one minute.

Even a gold Rolex cannot stop this one minute in an instant.

A minute of spring will be autumn just winding the clock.

If the Chinese Studies professor on heat doesn’t wear a Swiss watch

Will he wander in a fugue wearing a Chinese one?

One minute later, taxis have grown old.

One minute of buses, jammed a thousand years in half a minute.

One minute of Beijing City, half a minute in Changping district. 

One minute of the American dream, half a minute of Made in China.

One minute of Global Calling, hung up in half a minute.

This one minute of hello, a minute of Wei! Wei!¹

Space

Has become smaller and sweeter in a trade-marked apple.

An apple, one mouthful bitten out, tallies with

Local people’s views on globalisation. Just this tiny bit of sweetness,

with apples and tomatoes inside, Indian curry, and Italian cheese all inside.

David Beckham is inside, too.

One minute of hot chicks, sweetened for half a minute.

One minute of speed, slowed down for half a minute.

One minute of OKE, KARA-ed for half a minute.

One minute, songs have grown old, why bother to sing?

But how come unsung songs have grown old too?

What should I do with incomers who have been OKE-ed

When they did not manage to KARA?

After a minute, trains have grown old.

After another minute, scheduled flights have grown old too.

Do you really think one minute of BBQ chicken wings

Can make the nibbled stuff fly away?

One minute, not enough to love a woman,

But enough to love two or more.

One minute of sunset, it gives another minute of early dawn.

One minute of this present life, it owes one minute of your next life.

One minute, oh, heaven and men have grown old.

[BH, LMK]

注释

1.Interjection, Hey!Also used to answer the phone: Chinese equivalent ofItalian Pronto!

So, How About Venice?

1

Consider such a change: life is bitterly short –

do not leave Venice in such haste,

a place where you’re heading to. On the train,

you overslept, though it seemed you were sleepless all night.

Sleep, made up mostly of compressed air,

shrivelled like a balloon. You woke up, like the collar of a light-

coloured shirt

turned outward, even dirtier than the cuffs. All along the road,

locksmiths’ stalls everywhere, Chengdu, locked,

will be Venice opened: emptiness was opened, too.

The whole of Venice was emptied somewhere, a vocabulary chart,

emptied.

2

‘Sir, yours is a ticket for the local.’ The train

runs on blunt knives. Can they be changed into razors

So the journey can be faster: is the next stop Venice?

‘There’s no next stop, Sir.’ Blade-like scenery,

flashing at the throat. Solomon’s judgement was right,

after a meaning gives up its tail, it will escape like a gecko.

Unless time has turned its blade, seconds fall behind minutes,

and you do not ask what e’en is this e’en? The sense of reality

is borrowed from the good old times, you might

borrow good ears from Orpheus, or a swollen heel from Achilles.

3

A footsore journey to Venice. A blistered feeling

pushes right from the bronchia to the syringe, and right to the vein,

on that bone-freezing needle’s tip. ‘Painful?’

the nurse asks from a thousand miles away. The syringes are disposable,

disposed after use, but what can you do with the surplus mercurochrome?

It takes days to wash off if you happen to get it on your hands

Near the clinic the barefoot doctors’ shoes are laid out at random,

but nobody is actually barefoot: even scarecrows are wearing shoes

to walk around Human Resources. Drought, pushed open by an umbrella;

the rain, in Chengdu, has just started to fall, as we arrive at Venice.²

[BH, LMK]

注释

2.Author’s Note: ‘Unfinished’.

Who Leaves, Who Stays

Dusk, the little boy hid inside a plant,

Eavesdropping on insects’ internal organs. What he heard, in fact,

was the world beyond the insects, such as the internal organs of machines.

The setting sun tumbled under the boy’s feet like van wheels:

the Boy’s father was a van driver,

the van was unloaded,

parked in the wilderness.

The father left the van, dumbfounded by the beauty of sunset’s absolute silence.

He hung up on the mobile phone that kept ringing,

said to the Boy: every single thing that tumbles along the skyline has lips,

but they only talk to things themselves,

only build ears and words upon these talks.

In order to deny those ears the Boy eavesdropped on other ears.

He was not in fact hearing,

but he accidentally heard a totally different way of listening –

the Boy invented his own deafness

And became a soaring, visionary deaf boy.

Will there be, behind the mortal sunset,

Another clamorous world of miracles?

Will there be another person listening, another setting sun sinking?

Oh stumbling sky –

the world is unusually quiet because of an unanswered phone.

Machines and insects do not hear each other’s heartbeat,

plants are also pulled up by the roots.

The deafness of the Boy became scenery, order, nostalgia.The van wouldn’t start,

so Father buried his head fixing it,

while Mother embraced the sunset and slept for a while, just a while,

not knowing the sky was darkening, not knowing that old age was coming.

[BH, LMK]