Selected Poems of Wang Zuoliang
Wang Zuoliang (1916-1995) was a native of Shangyu, Zhejiang Province, who graduated from the Foreign Languages Department of Tsinghua University in 1939. He was a lecturer at the Southwest United University and Tsinghua University, and studied at the University of Oxford in 1947, and after returning to China in 1949, he became a professor, the head of the English Department, and vice president of the Beijing Foreign Languages College, the first vice president of the Shakespeare Society of China and the Chinese Society for the Study of Foreign Languages, the first president of the Chinese Society for the Study of English Language Teaching, the editor-in-chief of Foreign Literature, and a member of the first and second disciplinary review group of the Academic Degrees Committee of the State Council. He is a member of the Sixth National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference. He is a member of the Sixth National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference. He specializes in the study of English literature. He is the author of The Literary Reputation of the British Seventeenth-Century Playwright Webster (in English), Collected Essays on English Literature, and translations of The Selected Poetry of Burns, and Thunderstorm (by Cao Yu) into Chinese and English.
One
Let us tear our hair, and with cold cheeks
Prove that we are thin, and that the days of your double-braided braids
Are far away. Let us say: once upon a time our eyes,
once upon a time how thin our waists used to be.
But the tricks of time make us happy:
Tears should be shed but for secret gladness.
You, you are the too-white coat-tails in the dusk,
frolicsome, but with a strange reticence.
We no longer need to wait by the trees,
No need to have the parting of the sleepless street corners,
We are side by side, we look at the laughter in our respective eyes.
Or embarrassed, we go to the food market
To be bullied in the same way. We come back
and triumph all the same - because we have transcended.
bis
Tonight this wild land frightens me. Only
love is as strange and beautiful as it is, as
wild and primitive. I want to find you,
and let your body warm mine.
Neither of us had much breeding,
cultivated as the private meadow that gave the fence
a safe stop. We are the river,
In the long woods and grass, and back in the rocks.
Thus and I am more infatuated, your eyes are darker,
yours, too, are mine, and the tears are more numerous and joyous.
We were capricious and proud, and with heads held high
we walked through these straitjacketed crowds of sheep.
Yet our simplicity is tainted,
Look at your clothes and my dust.
ter
I love to put out the light and see the calmness and loneliness of your face in the candlelight
and
your gestures. So strong, yet
strangely shy. This is your truth.
I have seen you in all the books.
The illusion was purer, with the heat of your chest,
comforting in my cold hunger
all that I had lost in the dust.
But neither of us wanted to walk into this caravan,
to see the thick-necked mothers, bickering
at the vegetable market, or glad of the extra stolen yams.
We wanted to sing, but all the sophistication
and spectacles stopped you, made me behave, and
discouraged me. You then became my religion.
Quater
We are going to step out of this door together,
but at the same time hesitate. We're both going to step out of this door,
but at the same time we're hesitating.
You returned speechless with your child in your arms,
while I balked at clichéd metaphors.
Your body to be thick and fat, and I
also have to put on the eyes, close to the fireplace,
hurt the wind and tantrums, in the long afternoon
pulled the guest, forced him to warm my past fifty times.
But yesterday we spoke of sea-walks and mountains,
and strolls and sitting side by side in green meadows,
and that of all the pedestrians there was not one
infatuated as I am, or with a fine brow as thine.
Existence is just a holiday, coming far away,
going. But it is alarmingly close.
Fifth
For the world, we have
Sentimental love affair, since ancient times is cowardice,
melancholy but a color, your
Lipstick red, my vulgar tie and lie.
Look at the advertisements, splendid and rich,
Those white-painted boats and lamplit loungers,
And add that flirtatious smile. So we
danced to the music of the negroes.
Boredom is over-sensitivity, and that's the same as
the city taking all the goods and the wife's face and
shining the lights in the big windows for the beggars to see.
And we fall into the trap. Yet we clap our hands again,
For the land still stinks to the touch,
And we shall pass, and the attachment is everlasting.
Sixth
You surprised me with a change. You laughed,
you cried, you had the turn of a flock of garments trailing to the ground,
you wore my pants again in front of the horse's head
breaking the whip, or tying on a girth to go down to the kitchen.
But I have one format. I am forever distracted
between you and your shadow, because your
shadow is stupid me.
Critic, you read into yourself!
Say that the red and white plaid does not set off your face,
say that your laughter is not sweet in the lamp,
say that your friends do not make me jealous,
say what you have to say. I stood up,
stroked the silky black hair, and burned a
red flower of imagination on your temples.
Seven
My three points of falsehood completed your love of love,
completed your victory.
You, however, in
the gyrations of growth and spring,
open your eyes in agonized horror.
All give and take is past,
And you resume your demented smile.
May's sleep and September's long skies and waters,
Thou turn'st, and how clear is thy brow!
So the last conquest is mine. I fall off
The dust, but still I have the heartbeat of the dark night;
For I love to pull back my clothes, and show
My white breast, and let the wilderness rains drench it,
And drench it to sickness or death. But we covet
this freshness, this endless joy.
Eighth
Our love was never pure. Heaven and earth,
The grass and the rain, after the charming lyricism,
Are the roots of that clay. Your eyes are like water,
but I am a fish, flowing into your biology textbook.
But a child is not considered a punishment. A kind of victory,
we suddenly light up and shine in the weeping of our senses.
The past, the demanded, rendezvoused on the birthing bed,
but rejecting immortality, we embrace in boredom.
Why do you cover your face with your hands, why do you not look
At my frowning melancholy, my hesitation?
Thy loins have saved me, my godless heart.
Yet you dream of mountains and hills!
Let us ride in a carriage and go out of the gates of the Eastern Ghats,
and look at the endless, endless green grass, while shedding tears.
Of long
He has wise eyes, a straight nose,
He speaks several languages, and is good at tea-table talk,
A generous man who will confess to you what he believes in, and what he confesses in the middle of the night,
But, neighbors, do you know him?
Eighteenth-century elegance and moderation,
woman and sex, man and beast, time and stone, cobwebs,
factions and atoms, all split up, leaving only the reports of Happy Valley and the editorials of geopolitics.
But, neighbors, did you know him?
What's in his drawer?
Does he secretly kiss or beat his wife?
Behind his closed door
What maps, what sketches of landscapes?
Suddenly he stops, his habitually posed hand hangs in mid-air and catches the hollow echo ......
He looks at you and crosses to you, an unfinished smile frozen on his lips.
Alluring city, millions of bright windows, all dark at once.
Losing his safety, he hears the sound of tearing,
of stripping, piercing, burning,
of shaking, flattening, collapsing, the sound of renunciation and death,
of all times and all fears, and within the cloisters,
he hears the breathing of all the people and of himself.
By the quayside of Paris
Was it this gaze at the bridge,
Facing the white water in the smoke,
Listening to a thousand cars pass by beside him,
Silently gazing at the water under the bridge,
Was it this eternal pose
That gave Sartre his joy and his despair?
The walkers are all respectable citizens,
each looking forward to an afternoon of aperitifs and napping.
One day the staring eyes suddenly let go:
She was short and pale, he smoked incessantly,
without speaking, and walked slowly to the dockside,
suffering made them generously tender.
So ready to go as a little woman,
Surrendered to the food market and the grocery store,
Began to laugh, began to think of locking the door,
Bought table lamps and drapery cloths,
And he died under the wheel. There were no tears,
just children and lung disease growing in his body.
Perhaps saved, she becomes an old hunchback,
With a black scarf wrapped around her head, to serve a cross-dresser,
See her show her white chest over her black gown,
And hang a necklace of diamonds at her fingertips.
Do you think she saw herself, or
did she come face to face with the man of thirty years ago?
Instead, she just snuggled up to the little fireplace and
dozed like a cat without a memory.
The bones have long since turned to mud, the children have grown up to be sailors,
and the holes in their lungs have crusted over.
Only at the end of this tiny harbor that leads to the water's edge,
have I seen others gazing at the bridge.
Long Night Walk
What he wanted to look at was just a watercolor box,
trying to paint the loneliness on the cold river,
but then let the imagination rendering,
and then painted a warm red and green.
I like to listen to the whimpering of the pipe organ in the church,
I want to trace the splendor and sweetness of the stained glass under the dark high dome,
but it is the tiredness of the city that springs up.
The boredom has a moving profile,
so lazy, gently turn,
but like a long dress on the fashion,
trailing seductive gray
Heavy is the middle of the night in the fog of the footsteps,
Walking to the dawn, hanging his head,
Sit down in the damp steps,
Thinking of the spring that once existed. I'm not going to be able to do that.
Spring, ah, spring is no longer the wind of the big field,
or black hair under the red and white face.
The coughs of April are most painful,
and May brings only hanged jealousy.
In the high heat the eyes are suddenly and dreadfully bright,
As if everything were burning,
As if everything were consuming,
As if the world were aging.