Six Wartime Sonnets (I)
Huiwen Zhang
A ‘wanderer-poet’ in wartime exile, Feng Zhi (1905-1993) perceives and approaches the Grenzsituation of 1940s China from a reflective and introspective distance. Behind the semi-collective standpoint of his Collection of 27 Sonnets (Shisihang ji, 1941) lies his real curiosity and concern about each individual being—about their solidity and fragility, gravity and lightness, infinity and limits, liberty and fate. In addition, his poetry also exemplifies the uncanny sense of hope and despair, bewilderment and determination characteristic of China’s “lost generation.”
15
Look at the horde of loaded horses
Bringing goods from far-off places;
Water also brings in sands
From distant nameless lands;
Wind from a thousand miles away
Brings sighs of foreign towns:
We’ve wandered hills and streams,
Now owning them, now giving them up.
Like a bird flying in the sky,
Now ruling the cosmos,
Now feeling its utter lack.
In what consists our being?
From afar nothing can we bring,
From here nothing can we take.
(tr. Huiwen Zhang)
The first three images of Sonnet 15—“horse,” “water,” and “wind”—all convey a message of ‘transport.’ Their nearly eternal movements seem to ensure or at least promise steady and smooth, albeit silent and secret, communication. What is brought in—“goods,” “sands,” or “sighs”—does not matter; it is the ‘bringing in of something’ and the ‘blurring of here and there’ that matters. Hence, “far-off places,” “distant nameless lands,” and “foreign towns” can be and actually are seen, heard, and touched ‘on spot.’
This optimistic tone, however, is tuned down in the second half of the 2nd stanza. A new moving image—“we” or the (semi-collective) wanderer—enters the reader’s sight and interrupts the comfort: “We’ve wandered hills and streams” like the loaded horses, the flowing water, and the blowing wind; but we cannot forever “own” anything we once brought, took, or passed by; after all we have to “give up” and bid farewell to everything we’ve seen, heard, and touched.
An even more disturbing message is delivered by the “bird” in the 3rd stanza. For Feng Zhi, “bird” has always been a significant metaphor: During his early wanderings in 1920s China and 1930s Germany he invents for himself the pen name of “bird shadow,” stressing the loneliness and Weltschmertz characteristic of a homeless wanderer. In his preface to the 2nd edition of Sonnet Feng Zhi attributes the origin of his poem series to Zhuangzi, an ancient Daoist philosopher, whose dream of the giant Peng bird would inspire him to compose the first of the 27 sonnets.
The “bird flying in the sky” in Sonnet 15 combines both dimensions: “Now ruling the cosmos” immediately reminds of Zhuangzi’s extravagant dream:
The back of the Peng measures I don’t know how many thousand li across and, when he rises up and flies off, his wings are like clouds all over the sky.
(tr. Burton Watson)
“Now feeling its utter lack,” however, reverses at once the feelings of the bird, the observing wanderer, and the reader: The prompt and drastic fall (of all three!) from the king of heaven to a particle in the air is utterly shocking.
Yet the poem refuses to end in a shocking moment. The 4th stanza raises a question that, despite—or exactly because of—its seriousness and profoundness, softens the crucial situation that otherwise might have led to radical nihilism: “In what consists our being?”
Curiously—and this is the trick of Sonnet 15, the last two lines do not answer the question. They rather build an echo of what has been discovered and addressed: Unlike horses, water, and wind, “we” the wanderer (both inside and outside of the poem, including the author and the reader) cannot really “bring” or “take” anything and thus blur here and there—not to mention past and future, self and other.
Then what do we innately “own?” What mustn’t we “give up?” And finally, back to the unanswered questions: “In what consists our being?” That is to ask: What enables and backs up our “being” despite our “utter lack?”
(to be continued)
Inspired by your reading of the poem, I would like to share with you mine. I find myself placed in direct dialogue.
ReplyDeleteSomeone close at hand directs me to observe: a horde of loaded horses. Not a herd. They would be without burden, without trappings, free. But unlike the barbarian horde, the Mongol horde on horse come to take from us our land, our harvest, our freedom, this horde brings us imports: necessities, perhaps, but also exotica.
The speaker comments, however, that water “also” imports something: sands. Our land itself is being built up, added to. The water, like the horde, is at our service.
The wind, I am told, brings sighs from afar. Are those in the far-off towns so sad? Sad in love? Sad in war? Sad in need? Their goods gone? Their sands depleted?
The speaker and I are fellows, having wandered, I am reminded, up and down the country. At times the lands were ours. Had we acquired them literally, or did we simply feel that way due to a buoyancy of spirit, perhaps due to success we had had in trade, in service, or simply in finding food and shelter? But we chose to leave these possessions behind. Why? Were we not content with them? Or were we too content? Were they perhaps through our ownership coming into possession of us?
Our freedom, the freedom we gave ourselves by breaking our dependence and theirs, allows us to soar on high, and so to gain anew the feeling of possession, of control, of domination. This perception alternates with its opposite: the bird has nothing at all, the universe it felt it owned was a universe of nothingness, of emptiness.
Thus we ask what we are: what it means to be. This we know: we can carry nothing in, can carry nothing out. Our being, then, consists neither in what we can carry nor in what may be carried to us, as by the horde of horses, by the water, and by the air. It consists not in the lands we’ve visited and made our own nor in those we’ve left behind to start again, to be on our own.
What do we have? We have this conversation—these words and the fact that we are at one another’s elbow. We have the interest we take in one another to share this perception, not out of sentimentality and not out of practicality, but because it is that in which consists our being: our only being, (or as Wallace Stevens says) our “mere” being.
Are your rhymes on lines three and four intentional or are they a glücklich coincidence?
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