QING PING
FOUR POEMS
translated by Samantha Toh
Glittering Dust
Glittering dust shivering fingernails
cloak the sturdy body in the night
mid-air dissolving the human form.
A statue, like an outline that will never reveal itself,
wears away past the limited window of my vision,
with all its might, for my soft, wrinkled eyes.
The east and west side’s photons are cute.
Floating coils of wire are about to take the stage.
In another pavilion’s colourful walkway,
the night rolls downward,
bundling the loose fingernails into its motor.
The pretty man and woman rise and bow,
depart for a faraway, imposing marsh,
stuff their welcomed unknowns into
an expensive, hardwood cuckoo clock.
Ha, the world’s bell tolls,
not a single fingernail can keep from listening.
Early Summer Poem
A country enters early summer,
like the unruly, disparate masses.
On the banks of countless rivers,
the sweltering military camps, like earthworms,
take most of the year to take stock of their shit.
Life relies on this strange planet’s craters, its arms outstretched,
taking some plants, taking some animals,
even taking a few crafts from skulls, big and small.
There is no change of heart in the air of May
beyond the splendid stream of bacteria
beyond a vast and empty burial.
These are not the two sides of the gorge: aesthetics, economics,
from which elated apes roll down their logs...
—or maybe there is only one, busy on both sides,
but his mind, filled with the madness of two million years,
transfigures itself upon this cosmos-enveloped bullet.
Winds From Many Years Ago
The winds of many years ago have grown in strength.
So much rain has fallen, though not yet in torrents.
The scenes I see will never, in my iris,
turn into another sliver of screen,
split into three mysterious plains of grass,
and after the storm, send forth a cruel streak of rainbow.
Everything wants to vanish before it appears,
in the few hundred years it takes the golden eagle to skim across my mind and back.
After the movie, midnight wraps around my back,
dispels the chill into the gods’ final battle, one that may never come.
In the meeting room the size of a basketball court
jostling human heads queue to enter my dreams.
The Designer (For Juan Juan)
The water lilies are still on the train,
hiding like a milkmaid from the forest’s eagles.
Something’s just gone wrong with a distant water body:
the angle doesn’t suit its pitiful reflection;
all anguish throws open its arms
with the designer’s every stride,
the way clouds can never be cotton.
Yet even without the water lilies,
the flower garden must appear before the circus does;
the orchid cactus, the spurge, that enrage the designer,
the stupidly twitching salamanders and water snakes,
must all, for a gun that does not belong only to the designer,
do what they can to silence a shot.
This is before the train pulls into the station, the night
when the setting sun hurries home to catch sight
of tomorrow’s timesheet, and if there is another source of light
to help him set the swaying designer’s pond alight.
author’s note
These poems, such as “Glittering Dust” are, to speak generally, poems contemplating the era. But different poems have different directions of time, different contact with space, and different structures in which rhetoric and fantasy reinforce or weaken one another. An “era” in a poem simultaneously contains the future, past, and present—their binds either lax or intimate, it’s not important. What’s important is how the poem is manifested through the transformation of an imagined language, speech, and tone. The poetic era is much more expansive than the existing, unambiguous definition of “era”.
As translator, I’m supposed to give my audience an understanding that would otherwise be unknowable, but Qing Ping, in the original Chinese, is already unknowable. He doesn’t seem content with narration, but is, instead, what I’d call an atmospheric poet. His poems are a series of images, screens through which he wants readers to look, and—one imagines—derive meaning. But the images, not always in themselves clear, simultaneously create an otherworldliness, a haunting, a dystopia… and a suspicion that the only person in the world meant to truly understand the poem is Qing Ping himself. What are the “fingernails” Qing Ping refers to to Glittering Dust, and why is there a “motor,” a “floating coil”? What does the “golden eagle” refer to in Winds From Many Years Ago, or “the meeting room the size of a basketball court”?
At the start of the process, I spoke to Qing Ping to understand his thinking and approach. I wanted answers to all these questions. But I realised soon after if I told the little voice in my head that demands constant clarity to shut up for a moment, it was possible to enjoy Qing Ping for his images. They were powering the poetry. In the process of letting go, my faithful translation -- with just a rough understanding of Qing Ping’s intentions -- depended much on a leap of faith. Sometimes conversational, sometimes poetic, sometimes downright hazy, the poems, like in Qing Ping’s own Winds From Many Years Ago, vanished before they appeared. I just captured, screaming the whole time, the sliver I could see of his dreams.