Meditation on the Road [6/6]

Six Wartime Sonnets (VI)

 

          26

Feng Zhi, 1941

tr. Huiwen Zhang

Every day we walk a well-known path

Going back to the place we live,

But in these woods lie hidden yet

Many narrow paths, deep and strange.

Walking an unknown path our heart shies

Fearing the further gone, the further lost,

When unawares from a clearing in the woods

Catching sudden sight of the place we live

Like a new island against the sky’s edge

How many things around us yearn

To be new found:

Think not all is well-known,

At death stroking hair and skin

A question’s born:  Whose body is this?

Interpretation follows! 

Meditation on the Road [5/6]

Six Wartime Sonnets (V)

Feng Zhi, 1941
tr. Huiwen Zhang

18

We often spend an intimate night

In a foreign house whose daytime

Look we can never know

Let alone its past and future.  A field

Spreads endlessly outside our window.

We faintly recall the path by which we came

At dusk; we know nothing more.

Tomorrow we’ll leave, and never come back.

Close our eyes! Have these intimate nights and

Foreign places woven into our hearts.

Our lives are like the field outside the window

In whose twilight we recognize

A tree, a shimmer on the lake.  It spreads endlessly

Concealing a past forgotten, a future only glimpsed.

               

Interpretation follows!