The Quivering of Shattering
Lines
Lu
Xun, June 29, 1925
Translation
by Huiwen (Helen) Zhang, Jan 30 2015
She walks
persistently in the depths of night, walking all the way to the boundless wilderness;
all around is wilderness, overhead only the tall sky, not even a single bird
flying past. She is naked, standing like a stone statue in the middle of
the wilderness, in an instant seeing illuminated everything that has passed:
hunger, pain, shock, shame, joy—thus trembling; victimization, wrongfulness,
implications—thus spasming; slash—thus quieting. ... Then in
an instant again fusing everything: loving with forsaking, caring with
avenging, nurturing with annihilating, blessing with damning… She thus
raises two hands as far as possible toward the sky, from between lips
leaking—human fused with beast, not of this human world, therefore
wordless—language.
As she utters the
wordless language, her body, mighty like a stone statue yet already desolate
and shattered, quivers in its entirety. Each of these quivers like a fish
scale, each scale undulating like boiling water over raging fire; in the air
vibrations instantly echo, as if the waves of a desolate sea amidst storms.
She thus lifts eyes toward
the sky, and the wordless language also ceases in silence; only the quivering,
radiant like sunlight, makes the waves in the air immediately whirl, as if
confronting a hurricane, surging and leaping in the boundless wilderness.
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