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What gives one pause is not how the universe is, but that it is.

What moves you forward is thinking not that one is, but how one is.

The following is a translation of a poem by the 20th century Chinese poet, Xu Zhimo. What intrigued me most about this poem is its representation of the descent into nihilist despair that extreme pessimism induces. It’s a descent that inevitably goes so deep that it destroys itself or it destroys the pessimist… It’s the speaker’s interjection at the end, 休！休！Stop! Stop! (or perhaps, Rest! Rest!), which brilliantly illustrates this eventuality.

《悲观》

徐志摩 作

一

青草地，

牛吃草，

摇头掉尾，

天上的青云白云，

卷来卷去。

二

登山头，

望城里，

只见黑沉沉的屋顶，

鳞次栉比，

街道上尘烟里，生灵挤挤。

三

教堂前，

钟声里，

白衣的牧师，

和黑裙黑披的老妇女，

聚复散，散复聚。

四

歌舞场，

繁华地，

白的红的，黑的绿的，

高冠长裙，笑语依稀。

五

庙堂中，

柴堆里，

几块破烂的木头，

当年受香烟礼拜的的偶像，

面目未朽，未朽！

六

战场上，

壕沟里，

枪炮倒在败草间，

到处残破的房间，

肢体，血痕缕缕。

七

天灾国，

饥荒地，

草木尽稀，

小儿不啼，

黑灰色的空气。

八

心死国，

人荒境，

有影无行，

有声无气，

深谷里的规子，见月不啼。

九

噫！

噫！

十

幻想破，

上帝死，

半夜梦醒睡以尽，

但这黑昏昏，阴森森，

鬼棱棱。

十一

这心头，

压着全世界的重量，咳！全宇宙

这精神的宇宙，

这宇宙的宇宙，

都是空，空，空……

十二

休！

休！

----------

Pessimism

By Xu Zhimo

1

A field of fresh green grass,

A cow eats the grass,

It shakes its head and swishes its tail,

Clear white clouds in the sky

Spool together and fall away.

2

Climb to the top of a mountain,

Look at the city below,

All you can see is the sinking black of roofs

Row upon row of them,

On the streets and in the dust and smoke

Souls are squeezed tight.

3

Before a church,

At the ringing of a bell

Priests in white frocks

And old women in black skirts, black shawls

Come then go again, go then come again.

4

The ampitheaters,

The areas of great prosperty,

White and red, black and green,

Tall hats and long skirts, vague smiles and speech.

5

Inside a temple,

In the piles of incense,

Several pieces glow as they burn,

This year receives idols worshiped by incense,

Faces that shall not be forgotten, not forgotten!

6

On the fields of battle,

In the soggy ditches,

Guns and artillery lay on the fields of defeat,

In the crumbled wrecks of buildings,

Limbs, covered in bloody scars.

7

Kingdom of calamity,

Land of famine,

Grass gathering around the thinning trees,

Little children who do not cry,

The air of soot.

8

Kingdom where the soul dies,

Land of ruined men,

Shadows without form,

Sounds without breath,

The cuckoos in the deep valleys,

Do not call at the moon.

9

Oh!

Oh!

10

Phantom destroyer,

God of death,

Being awoken from midnight dreams is enough,

But this persistent dim, this forest of darkness

Demons sharpened on demons…

11

This heart

Pressed by the weight of the entire world, ack! The entire universe

This spirit of the universe

This universe of universes

Are nothing, nothing, nothing…

12

Stop!

Stop!

Technology is not progress;

It is amplification.

I do not speak.

I breathe in deeply and exhale slowly

Like it’s the middle of winter

Watching my breath dissipate into the air

Lit with the glow of a million fireworks

Taking to the heavens in unison

Banging on the dome of the sky

With the hopes of a million people

Shuffling through the streets of vermillion

Kicking up the ash and empty mortars with their toes.

Did I see it there?

Did I see the future of China

At the empty Expo site

Going over the Lupu Bridge

In the bright morning sun?

The pavilions of pleasantries were exhausted.

All commercial viability had been extracted from the shells

Of buildings, now crumbling like exoskeletons

Shed off in the promise of something new.

In a vacant lot beside the remains,

I saw mechanized infantries parading through parking lots.

The future was coming, rolling in with the morning sun.

I saw China on the face of an old woman eating with her son:

She suddenly glared at me while chewing on sauteed spinach,

Her visage a wrinkled whorl of pointed disdain;

She gave her son a radiant smile as she looked away,

Her teeth comforting, bright as new-fallen snow.

I’ve decided to start translating Chinese poetry. I’m not trained in this, so I have no idea about the traditions/shades of meaning in these words. I’m planning to learn as I go. Criticism is warmly welcomed. For my first attempt, I’ve started with a poem that I’ve been told is easy – “one you learn when you’re 10 years old.” Let’s see how it goes…

回乡偶书

（贺知章）

少小离家老大回，

乡音无改鬓毛衰。

儿童相见不相识，

笑问客从何处来。

+++

“A Homecoming, Some Thoughts”

(He Zhizhang)

I was young when I left home

Old when I returned again.

The way I spoke didn’t change,

Not like this hair behind my ears.

Children saw me

But they didn’t know who I was.

Smiling, they asked me like a stranger,

Where are you from?

I saw an ancient shadow play

In Shanghai, China, far away.

I could not understand the songs

The warble, clatter low and long;

The locals too had lost the words,

And told me so with smiles absurd.

They asked me how I came to see

This spectacle in front of me.

But I was lost in puppetry -

The flattened models hard to see

That flashed behind the stretch of skin

And bayed like ghosts above the din.

The form was strange, from long ago

And gave me stories I couldn’t know.

My Chinese tender, knowledge weak

I made up stories so they’d speak.

+++

I saw a man behind the screen,

Just his face and his hand

Clutched about a bow

Dragging across an erhu.

He rocked with the music

Lost in the melody,

Pentatonic, ebbing about the puppets

Projected on the skin.

But he didn’t see the stories either.

He didn’t see the intrigues of principates.

He had his own stories.

I couldn’t imagine them,

But they sat there on his face

And didn’t need to speak.

The following two poems were composed collectively by Ferret and his friends during a rained-out beach holiday. With little to do and a penchant for poetry, Ferret and his compatriots each wrote 1 1/2 lines of verse on a piece of paper, folded the paper over to hide the first line and passed it along. These are the results:

No One was Harmed in the Making of this Poem

Our tale begins in the steamy depths of a Turkish bath,

In his opening gambit, he figured the math was in his hardened heart

And it moved him to tears to see in that room

An unborn boy, smoking, riddled with gloom

Throat gargle tea milk, wormed silk tissues fettered

With darting, shaved sparrows’ victory tune,

The teething assassins beat a retreat with

The bonny boy who took the alien spawn in hand

And sent it off to Neverland to choke several whores

A fantastic tale! Told by drunkards and bores

The bell summons ladies of the night

And the Jesus whores.

They left by the side door, upon a frond of

Memories shorn into a cake which the alien pulled

Into its heart pumping black blood, churning with the sound of

A thousand crying babes aching on the inside

Got trampled in an orgy, and half of them died.

Oh wale! Oh woe! The dead victims’ mothers cried.

“When shall we meet on the dwarf toss slide?”

Said the cowgirls. The plasma night pushed

Against the Amazon fence the green, bug-eyed

Extraterrestrial spat its venom, turning the surrounding crowds sick

Making the mothers run for the doors, their heavy legs

Unshaven, moist, almost goat-like pegs

An ode to my spindle legs, a crash of smut and

Belly pork dregs brings footfall celebratory smacks,

Lying, lying the shaker stood down.

***

From the Cuff

What will you recall, and what will you forget?

What in one’s mind is gone, you can’t regret.

Note the shallow fucks or bad stares, not the lost retreats

Or the moneyed snares.

Beat upon the classic drip leaf womb, thrown out amid the original nut crackers’ snap!

You do not think of Mr. Toad or his wild ride, your children’s stories

And how these teatime fantasies lied.

Chewed on wet young beef, belief of blonde whine

Filled women cried to be a bride,

Because they couldn’t hide the Cinderella songs

Those Snow White slippers through the gasps of wedding vows.

So the flag was raised glorious amid the roses of love and success.

A lemon better cheer fills the throats of old men

And the young women make lemonade with their seductive, saccharine

Sacrifices before the altars.

A flash of blinding purple cowers the horned headed

Frothing beasts, their purpose suddenly dreadful,

With their eyes full and puffing like steam organs

Removed of every stop.

Through the graves the deer were barking,

As the dappled light of dawn breezed through the mist

And the chapel bells were screaming off like earthquakes

Reverberating through the catacombs.

A group of drunk Germans slammed their fists onto

The crossword puzzles in outrage. And all of the letters

Of language became spurious, indicating only the scribbles

Of mangled monkeys high on dope.

Groped the band stand, blue skirted flirted and dirted

The headlights, so I said “Goodnight!”

You want to know why poets suffer? Why they perversely grasp the sword of Damocles and bring it down upon their heads?

The greatest poets strike at what is most universal, and there is nothing more universal than suffering.