Good news: TV Series Part1 ep1-5 and Part2, ep1-4 just released .

诗词

A Letter to My Daughter

My daughter, when you went to study in England
you had just turned fifteen
Papa wasn’t used to your grown-up airs
I still treated you as a child
and loved you the way I always had

My daughter, do you remember the moment your Cambridge offer came
how proud I was of you
I counted you and the novel I had just finished
as the two works I am proudest of in my life
even though you never read my books

My daughter, three whole years
and in the blink of an eye you will graduate
yet not once have I come to Cambridge to see you
I may not be able to attend your graduation next year
and perhaps, from now on,
never be able to leave the country again

But my daughter, you are grown up now
you have the strength and the room to grow and live on your own
Papa does not expect great achievements of you
still less would I want you, like Papa, to lose your freedom for your beliefs
I only wish you health and happiness, and peace all your life

(Written in 2025, after Black and White was banned and I was barred from traveling abroad to visit family)

On the Closing of

the Human Realm Website

To the Tune “Spring in the Garden of Qin”

The sea of the web sinks under cloud,

the red banner withers in the wind,

the true son wakes from his dream with a start.

Grieving, I watch the red flags unfurl:

our first aspiration unchanged;

a lone lamp lights the wall:

hot blood that will not cool.

Each word an edge,

each voice a drum,

we once called up the dawn for all the people.

Tonight all is silent:

let cold mist lock the casket,

the lost wild goose stray from the shore.

Who says the right road is hard to walk?

Two years the ship of mercy sailed,

then all at once its lamp went out.

Alas, the Xiang River Review ran only four issues; Midstream too, only four.
Four issues,

a song of grief; four numbers,

a swan song; yet the torch of a hundred generations will not be put out.

Where I fix my gaze,

I see ranks forming in the cloud,

setting out on a new march.

To the Tune “Prelude to the Water Song”

I give my ink and brush to the common people,

and write the dust and toil of the world.
Two years the sparks gathered,

our spirit soaring past the clouds.
We dared record the people’s joys and sorrows,

speak plainly of the world’s warmth and cold,

and stand, sword in hand, in the world of letters.
Every word carried the sorrows and joys of all under heaven;

a single phrase weighed like a mountain.
The hard wind rises, the towers fall silent,

the inkstone grows cold.
In an instant the screens dissolve,

the chapters turn to cloud and smoke.
Do not lament our scattered ground,

nor fear the blows of frost and wind:

the seed of fire was never lost.
With a heart set on the blue clouds,

where is there that we cannot speak?

(September 9, 2026)

Translator’s notes

[1] Both poems are written in classical ci forms, to the set tune patterns named in their titles; they lament the closing of the Human Realm website (人境网), which Liu Jiming ran for two years. The Xiang River Review (《湘江评论》) was the journal the young Mao Zedong edited in 1919; it was banned after four issues. Midstream (《中流丛刊》) is the journal series Liu edited, which also ceased after four issues. “The ship of mercy” (慈航) is a Buddhist image; “the sorrows and joys of all under heaven” echoes Fan Zhongyan’s famous maxim on the scholar’s duty to the world. September 9, 2026, was the fiftieth anniversary of Mao’s death.

If One Day I Can’t Be Reached

If one day I can’t be reached
please tell my family
there’s no need to panic
no need to worry
I’ve only been “sent on leave”
sooner or later I’ll be back
—in an immaterial form

If one day I can’t be reached
and a string of baffling charges
is spun around me
please don’t be surprised
believe this: a lie in the end is a lie
and the truth will show itself one day

If one day I can’t be reached
don’t come looking for me
please tell my readers
and everyone who has cared for and supported me
that they are always in my heart
just as they have always remembered me

(April 17, 2025)

Translator’s notes

[1] “Sent on leave” (被休假) uses the Chinese passive 被, which since the late 2000s has been used ironically for things done to a person against his will.

Footprints Abroad

(a sequence)

Victoria Square

Britain has many squares
named after Victoria
The one I write of
is in Leeds, one of Britain’s largest cities
right next to the University of Leeds
In Black and White, Zong Da’s wife Anna
graduated from this university
She once revered Rosa Luxemburg
and later followed Zong Da into the Chinese revolution
For taking part in the Cultural Revolution
she was sent to prison by her ex-husband
on charges of being a British spy

In the northwest corner of the square
stands a statue of Victoria
cast in bronze
I lived for a year
in the Yading neighborhood nearby
and finished the first part of Black and White
Every morning and every evening
when I was tired of writing, I would walk in the square
Sometimes I went shopping in the city center with my family
crossing the square’s winding paths
By the path stood an umbrella-shaped viburnum
taller than the one outside my door
In autumn
it was covered with fiery red berries
and from far off
looked like a burning torch

On the green lawns of the square
sat crowds of people, packed close
a group here, a cluster there
talking in low voices
some singing, some playing jazz
like an illegal assembly
yet no police came to break them up
I realized
that though only a few steps away
I was very far from them
In their eyes
perhaps I was a bona fide “foreign force”

(April 18, 2025)

Cambridge

That spring
my family and I went to Cambridge
to visit that world-famous university
On the way from Leeds to London
I got into a fierce argument
with our taxi driver
a young man from northern China
because he spoke insultingly of Mao Zedong
and everything he cited came from Yuan Tengfei
When I learned that his grandfather
had been an old revolutionary who fought in the War of Liberation
I grew angrier still
and couldn’t help giving him a good dressing-down

In London
I visited Dickens’s house
I had meant to pay my respects at Marx’s grave in north London
or go to Hyde Park
to see the statue of Marx and Engels together
but in the end neither wish came true

Later we went to Cambridge
At the market not far from Trinity College and the Cam
we went for lunch
into a plain little eatery full of everyday bustle
I saw several portraits on the wall
and recognized the figures at once:
Marx, Engels, Lenin, Mao Zedong
simple in style
like the paper-cuts of northern China and the embroidery of the south
Those portraits
were like a beam of light
that lit up my heart
and made up for the disappointment of London
I ate that meal with great relish
and on the way out I glanced at the owner a few more times
wanting to strike up a conversation
but because of the language barrier
I let the idea go
Because of those portraits
a warm feeling for Cambridge welled up in me
Perhaps it was at that very moment
that I decided my daughter should apply to Cambridge
And in the end she was admitted

(April 18, 2025)

Bolin Park

From the Yading neighborhood where I lived
it was a walk of twenty minutes or so
to Bolin Park
The park is small, utterly unremarkable
hardly worthy of its famous name
You can walk from one end to the other
in less time than it takes to smoke a cigarette
Few people come
especially in the early morning or at dusk
when all around is empty and still
like a beach washed clean by the sea

Once
passing a pavilion
I saw a Black man playing guitar
singing in a hoarse voice
a desolate song
with no one around him at all

Right beside Bolin Park
runs a railway
an hour from Leeds to Manchester
where, more than a century ago, Engels worked in a factory
and wrote The Condition of the Working Class in England
From Leeds to York is also an hour
where my daughter was then in high school

That day, just as I entered the park
a sudden rainstorm broke
and I had to take shelter under a railway bridge
The rain soon flooded in under the bridge
the whole world seemed about to drown
Then a train came from far away
slowly at first
as if out of the nineteenth century
faster and faster
roaring past over my head
my scalp went numb
and I couldn’t help closing my eyes
When I opened them
the rain had stopped
and the park lay in perfect stillness
like a newborn child
My heart turned very soft
as if it too had been soaked by the rain

(April 18, 2025)

Auckland Notes

The Auckland I write of
is not the one in America
but the largest city in New Zealand
In 2010 I lived there for half a year
in a neighborhood called Northcote
From Northcote to the University of Auckland
was about half an hour by bus
Once, after I got on
I saw the woman driver, while waiting for passengers,
holding a thick book
reading with complete absorption
as if she were in a library
I had seen scenes like this in Russia
never in China

Each time I went to the University of Auckland
I would read for a while in the library
Its Chinese collection was very rich
with many books hard to find at home
among them quite a few on the Cultural Revolution
such as The Cultural Revolution in Inner Mongolia and A Record of the Cultural Revolution in Hunan
which showed me many details of history the mainstream had hidden
Winston, a young scholar from Britain,
was working on his doctorate at the university
He and I held a series of conversations
on revolutionary China and reforming China,
on liberalism and the New Left,
and on “Sing Red, Strike Black”
which was drawing so much attention at the time

Soon after arriving in Auckland
I visited Waiheke Island
the “Island of Torrents” where the Chinese poet Gu Cheng killed his wife Xie Ye
From Auckland’s fishermen’s wharf to the island
is a ferry ride of more than forty minutes
After landing, and asking around again and again,
I found the house where Gu Cheng, Xie Ye and Ying’er
and their child Little Mu’er had lived
set among a tangle of trees
looking somewhat desolate
My eyes blurred
that bloody scene flashed through my mind
and suddenly I wondered:
how old would Little Mu’er be now?

One weekend, visiting a friend’s home
I got to know his neighbor
Douglas, a tall old man with a kindly face
When he heard I was from China
he warmly invited me over
Douglas was a bachelor
in his sixties
a clockmaker before he retired
His plain, cluttered home
was crowded with old clocks and watches of every kind
and on the walls hung several
old photographs of Auckland from the first half of the twentieth century
I felt I had walked into a museum
We talked for a while
about New Zealand, about China
and every so often Douglas would say a single English syllable:
“Mao”—what most foreigners call Mao Zedong
Perhaps it was all that Douglas could remember
of China
the one
and only
symbol

In Auckland
I also met a Chinese tycoon
English name Paul
a few years younger than me
who once told me his legendary story—
Paul graduated from Peking University
and ran a cultural communications company
with a registered capital of one million yuan
Through a fellow townsman who was a senior official at the Securities Regulatory Commission
he had a hand in taking a certain securities company public
and his assets went from one million to one billion
a thousandfold rise overnight
Later his patron at the commission was exposed
and he himself fled China
I was once invited to Paul’s home
a seaside villa with nearly a hundred mu of lawn
swimming pool, gym, luxury cars, a yacht
all there
dizzying in its luxury
Looking far out
you could see Auckland’s landmark, the Sky Tower
and One Tree Hill
Paul’s rise to riches
is no isolated case among China’s tycoons
Though they are not even one percent of the population
the wealth they hold
is sixty percent of the nation’s
I am not one who hates the rich
but this figure cut me deep

Half a year later
I left Auckland
went back to China
and founded a journal of ideas and the humanities, Tianxia
Once it was launched
it was called, along with Dushu and Tianya,
a stronghold of the “New Left”
In 2012
Tianxia ceased publication
Like the Xiang River Review
it ran only four issues in all
By then
“Sing Red, Strike Black” had just come to an end

(April 22, 2025)

To Tolstoy’s Grave

In 2005
I went with a delegation of writers
to Russia
We visited the homes of many writers
Dostoevsky’s, Chekhov’s, Gorky’s
but what left the deepest mark on me
was Tolstoy’s estate
From Moscow to Tula Province
is a drive of over three hours
vast land and forest all the way
with straight, tall birches lining the road
as if drawn up in ranks to welcome us
When we reached the estate
it was nearly noon
After a simple lunch
at a market near the restaurant
I bought a portrait of Tolstoy in a wooden frame
and, carrying it,
walked into his estate
The estate is vast
over a thousand desyatinas of land
Here Tolstoy was born and grew up
from here he went out to Moscow
and to the world
and then came back here
until his death
We saw the cottage
where Tolstoy did farm work
the study where he wrote Resurrection
and the rooms of the count and countess
Here
he wrote primers for illiterate peasants
and drafted papers to give the land to the peasants
In the end, after a quarrel with his wife,
he left home
and died of illness at a small railway station
far from the estate
From the house to Tolstoy’s grave
you pass through a great, dense forest
tall trees
with a rich fragrance
rushing to meet you
it was like walking into nineteenth-century Russia
We seemed to walk a long, long way
before we came at last to the grave
a small grassy mound beside the path
without even a headstone
Were it not for the flowers laid on the ground
it would be hard to believe
that here lies a great soul
called “the conscience of Russia”
I stood before the grave a long time
my mind full of my youth
reading War and Peace, Anna Karenina
and Resurrection
as if receiving a second baptism of the soul
In reverence
I left the grave
After walking a while
I found the portrait I had bought at the estate was gone
I went back to the grave
and in the grass beside the path
found the framed portrait of Tolstoy
In the stillness
I felt a kind of mysterious summons
and so, facing that mound of earth,
I bowed deeply once more
Today that framed portrait of Tolstoy
still hangs in my study
and whenever I write or meditate
I can feel his gaze upon me

Translator’s notes

[1] Victoria Square: Zong Da and Anna are characters in Liu Jiming’s novel Black and White. Liu lived in Leeds for a year, where he finished the first part of the novel.

[2] Cambridge: Yuan Tengfei is a Chinese television history lecturer known for his mockery of Mao. Marx is buried in Highgate Cemetery in north London. The statue of Marx and Engels together that the poem associates with Hyde Park actually stands in Berlin; London’s Hyde Park is best known on the left for Speakers’ Corner.

[3] Bolin Park: the author’s own note says the park shares its name with the British philosopher Isaiah Berlin, whose name is written 伯林 (Bólín) in Chinese. Engels worked in his family’s cotton mill in Manchester in the 1840s, where he wrote The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845).

[4] Auckland Notes: “Sing Red, Strike Black” (唱红打黑) was the campaign of red songs and anti-gang crackdowns led by Bo Xilai in Chongqing from 2009 until his fall in 2012; the original writes it as 唱h打黑 to evade censorship filters. The poet Gu Cheng killed his wife, Xie Ye, and then himself on Waiheke Island, which he called the “Island of Torrents” (激流岛), in 1993; Ying’er was the name he gave his lover Li Ying, and “Little Mu’er” was the couple’s son. A mu is about one-fifteenth of a hectare. Tianxia, Dushu, and Tianya were journals associated with the New Left; the Xiang River Review was Mao’s 1919 journal, banned after four issues.

[5] To Tolstoy’s Grave: Tolstoy’s estate, Yasnaya Polyana, lies in Tula Province. In November 1910, after leaving home, he died at the railway station of Astapovo, far from the estate. His grave, as the poem says, is an unmarked mound in the forest. A desyatina is an old Russian measure of land, about 1.1 hectares.

Twenty-Six Sonnets for Sun Yuan

Sonnet 1

Water sets out in spring, with a dream for a boat
passing through our bodies
the throat gripped by a giant hand
Death or rebirth
raises a boundary stone on the shore
our gaze cannot pass beyond it
fantasy and reality, impossible to tell apart
as if water and mud were cast in one mold
Winter is bound to come
water its only rival
and who will be the final victor?
Is it one person longing to merge with the crowd, or the crowd
longing to merge with one person? Is this perfect
union to be found within arm’s reach?

Sonnet 2

God keeps watch on the hillside over what is drowned
the fruit of Eden and the beads of real sweat
peeled apart, segment by segment
The houses spared climb upward
while our gaze falls straight down
Human dwellings may be nearer to heaven, or perhaps
farther. It depends on how
some essential balance is struck between the two
I always miss the people and things
moved away and drowned. Because they
are bound to us at the root
I look back again and again, as if gazing
at a lover in another world, and hope
at some hour to meet again

[Photo: Sun Yuan, 1995]

Sonnet 3

Following a river upstream
is like stroking, in the imagination,
a perfect body. It is at once
a journey of the mind and a journey of feeling
What you touch first is her diamond
ankle, then, slender and supple,
smooth and full, revealed in turn
like “the grapes of a fruitful year” in memory…
Our lives are undergoing
a rebirth rich in meaning. The dust peels away
like skin wrinkled and pickled by time
I cannot hold a lifetime of joy
but I can hold a drop of water, a wisp of wind
and to be held by water and wind is happiness too

Sonnet 4

To board a boat is to board
another fate. The water and the scenery
on its banks are not seen for the first time, but long
since ordained, met with in a former life
down to the few fellow passengers
the clear or rainy weather
the ancient yawns full of the smell of the soil
I must accept each one. Like an infant
setting out on the road of years: his little hands
only just reaching out, fingers not yet open, not yet learned
to grasp things, and already his parents and kin have gone far away
And this is the only keepsake time leaves us
not even a fleck of spray, a tuft of cotton, a pebble
can we refuse

Sonnet 5

Disasters and accidents come as often
as summer thunderstorms. Complaining is easy
what matters is learning gratitude, accepting what all things
bestow, even in the face of death
Life is a thing like this:
more tender than a rose, harder than rock
what a mountain flood cannot break, a single drop of water
can bring crashing down
How narrow the vessel of our heart
yet the spirit is vast beyond measure
like the starry sky and the plains of the universe
imagination cannot reach its edge
Thought is like a tray of jumbled, disordered sand
and whose hand can restore its order?

Sonnet 6

The garbage boat moves off. I smell decay
from the inside of the fruit to the outside; from the human body
to the soul. I see the ants and maggots of desire
gnawing at the base of a statue
while the water scours and clears
the marrow of the age, and its tangled
nerves, like a knife
of matchless sharpness; the house within me is made new
If Medusa’s gaze
should turn me into a stone
that never decays, I would rather be the foundation stone of a dam
and contend with the waters of time: singing, enduring,
embracing them, becoming one with them
This is my fate, or the fate of a stone

Sonnet 7

“Man dwells in dreams as
a bird rests in its nest…”
And a real suspension bridge
hangs high above the river of dreams
how frail and dark the swaying path
beneath it a bottomless void!
One man crosses, two men cross
mist in the air; foam on the water
Both hands gripping the edge of the dream, my nails
torn by rock, blood pouring. Then
a pair of gentle hands in the dark held me fast
When I look back, my footprints have been deleted by fate
the bridge is a blank. The footsteps of youth
draw near from afar: do they come from memory, or imagination?

[Photo: Sun Yuan, 1996, East Lake, Wuchang]

Sonnet 8

Water and the past flow away together, gone in an instant
past recall; words and sentences in mutiny
like the crash of collapsing banks, wave upon wave
The river is changing course, the world is coming apart
Language is the only boat, and my oar
has already been swallowed by the waves
I struggle on through foam and fragments
He who wields language is trapped by language in turn
an inescapable fate:
you have lost the noble plateau
and must still be cast off by boat and oar
Yet if language were as hard as stone
and stone as full of life as language
perhaps we would have lost nothing at all

Sonnet 9

“O man, you must raise
your own monument upon the earth…”
God’s charge
sounds like a lover’s whisper
Between language and stone
which is more eternal?
Between dream and reality
which is more real?
I am sunk in it, unable to pull free
unable to tell the great from the small
as I cannot measure the length of a life
And death is not the final judge either. We
wander on the river of eternity, just stepping off one boat
to board another, and set out again

Sonnet 10

From one river, stepping into another
from one person, entering another
Take me in, blood of the universe
coursing in my pupils
I am not the only one wounded
more fragile than water is man
is the anchor in the water
is the blood in the water
I swim inside my own body
I am my own language
I am my own boatman
When shall I come ashore?
When shall I be done with myself? When shall I
redeem myself from suffering?

Sonnet 11

I am fated to fall behind on the journey
and soon be forgotten by my companions
but the scenery of both banks
and the nameless people will take me in
I wake up in poverty
gazing up at a strange roof
the night and the river recede
like a clan from under the earth
trampling me at will
I must, like a branch,
hold fast to my own roots
I would rather be grateful to a grain of sand
or a stone
than to the gifts of the age

Sonnet 12

Floating palace!
Song and dance revived from dead ashes!
Bloated motherland!
The doddering pleasure boat
drunk and dreaming! A kind and clumsy
painter carves an old dragon
the fortune-teller, for his own prophecies,
has lost his vital force
In the eyes of a scrawny monkey I see
a bare and empty land
Folk customs and relics are torn up by the roots
by a dam. I am the traveler
returned from foreign lands
I have come to auction off my grave

Sonnet 13

How much farther is my journey?
Is the scenery looking at me
or am I looking at the scenery?
In a channel soon to be drowned
I see my fate held
in the hands of a captain I have never met
The binoculars I bought for fifteen yuan
show only myself, and the heart
of one other person. I stand on a mountaintop
frozen into a postcard
while another part of me
is washed away in a moment by wind and water
My face will be remembered
and treasured by my own gaze

[Photo: Liu Jiming and Sun Yuan, 1995]

Sonnet 14

I keep far from the crowds I long craved
only one person stays by my side
for me
she is the only scenery
This gives me time enough
to think about what true immortality is
Snow, the spray of waves,
and a woman called Dickinson
are rediscovered and renamed in my dictionary
Yes, “a winter not covered by snow
cannot be called winter.”
And a river without love is not a river
a journey without purpose
is not a journey

[Photo: Sun Yuan, 1996, East Lake, Wuchang]

Sonnet 15

And we are all traitors to the land
prisoners of the water
all our life’s labor
only lets us flow away east, to nothing
what we leave on the sand is only shadow
the great mirror of the river
has swallowed how many nouns
how many headless verbs exiled and cast away?
Since wandering is our fate
why do we
build and buy houses of our own?
When did the game of chess with death begin?
When will it end? When shall we
meet our long-lost kin again at the graveside?

Sonnet 16

If the wedding and the funeral are held at once
what is there to celebrate?
If God took my rib
to leave me crippled for life
why should I give thanks?
If language grows ever fuller
and the spirit ever more shriveled
why should I write?
If fine food and delicacies
only burden the stomach
why should I go to the feast?
In dreams I forgave my body
but the body will not spare me
When I wake, I will be drowned by myself!

Sonnet 17

I refuse to tour the ghost city of this world
where I long to arrive
I cannot arrive. The flesh
always walks ahead of the idea
When the phone book is lost
there is nowhere to report it.
To whom can I speak?
Whom can I call?
The line has been cut
I cannot hide my
glee at the misfortune
Truly, in an age that prizes
speech, I would gladly be
a pessimistic, world-weary mute

Sonnet 18

An oar can never catch hold of
the orchards on the bank
those who long for long life
will in the end be harmed by it
When everyone
vies to call himself a genius
I would rather believe in
a handful of earth
To talk with the dead takes
honest words; this is our
only way to defeat death
Blessed are those who love every mile of dust
and every wave; when you step from the boat onto land
you return from the dream to reality

Sonnet 19

The dead think beneath the ground
and what is a martyr? What is a dead man?
In a magnificent cemetery
I lose my way once more
Children like tadpoles
learned scholars
let me moor my gaze in your
tears, but I cannot draw near
those silent statues. When
the meaning of death is merely
to draw in visiting tourists
how can you wash the wind and sand from your body?
If space should crack like a wall
where shall I seek your true trace?

[Photo: Liu Jiming and Sun Yuan, spring 1996, Nanjing]

Sonnet 20

My soles are full of sand
and the stones in my body pile up more and more
a silted channel
makes my breathing harder day by day
When water weighs more than the human soul
and less than a book
I am in the same time and space
as the dead
In made-up stories
I deceive myself, wreck myself
I am a blind man sleepwalking
like a hungry earthworm, a cicada shedding its shell
straining to push its head out from the earth’s core
while the sky is still beyond reach

Sonnet 21

The pebbles and sand that cover the riverbed
multiply without end
like words; while the fish below,
starved of oxygen, grow fewer day by day
Before the hard cold comes
our memory is on the verge of running dry
The fisherman by the fire pit wonders
how to get through this winter
Yes, grain from the water
has grown rarer than snow
You have to shoulder your oar
like some petty grave robber
waiting for a miracle; or else
pawn yourself to an unexpected death

Sonnet 22

The man who once kept the night
and winter as his herd has turned and gone
We wait all day at the door of the years
for the lost ships to surface
The waters ahead are strung with bandages
like white bones; the decorated sailors
bear the sores of four seasons on their legs, their eyes
like the lights on both banks, running with confusion and dejection
Restless, I live
on the pitching deck, pacing back and forth
as if weighed down by heavy gambling debts
setting out on the road again and again
fleeing again and again. But I know
one day the flood will overtake me

Sonnet 23

Helen and Beatrice
I miss you
as I miss my love!
I love you!
I am a wandering bard with empty sleeves
death has carried off my only wealth
I linger on the road, drifting with the current
hoping to fight the wind and sand to a draw
Dreaming inside my own coffin
a pair of hands long vanished
help me turn the pages of time
grapevines climb onto my brow
and my gaze keeps growing, joint by joint,
until it links arms with your beautiful arm!

[Photo: Liu Jiming and Sun Yuan, 1996, East Lake, Wuchang]

Sonnet 24

Since I have already missed
spring, summer and autumn
why care about the port
where the next century will moor?
Why care about losing one another in the crowd?
I am used to peering at life
through yellowed books; confusing myself with flowing water
like an aged pilgrim
dozing in an imaginary temple
conspiring with archaic script
Only the dead can wake me
stubborn, unrepentant masters
I wash my heels in your ink
but I am fated not to go farther than you

Sonnet 25

Gulls on the water, hares
in the woods, take in
my feelings, grown old before their time
circle my ruined knees
Let me, in the name of the river,
receive and kiss your precious promise
let me, like the spray, dwell above
your heads; let me be your fellow traveler in the next life
in a small boat, rounding
history that has been rewritten, camping out
on lush grassland, sunk in sleep
let me wake under the stars, and crumple
my own name. Whoever picks it up will be either my
friend, or my rival

Sonnet 26

Facing the burning sunset, I pray
for the day that is gone: let dewdrops and wildflowers
cover her; I take down a door
from the theater to mend the wounds of memory
I tell myself: “You are no more
unfortunate than a clump of waterweed or a scrap of duckweed
Lie in the barren field and curse the truth
and you will see gold everywhere, and withered plants…”
Back from afar to an unfamiliar homeland
carrying the pitiable smell
of eels, like a failed craftsman
I kneel by a riverbed long dried up
and say: “I am back. I am your enemy
I am your incorrigible son.”

(Written on December 2, 1997, the third anniversary of my first meeting with Sun Yuan. First published under the title “Flowing Water Sonnets” in Writers’ Gazette and Yangtze River Literature and Art; collected in Volume 8 of The Collected Works of Liu Jiming.)

Translator’s notes

[1] Sun Yuan was the poet’s wife, who died of cancer at the age of twenty-five, less than two years after their marriage (see “Requiem for Xiaoyu”). The sequence follows a journey up the Yangtze through the Three Gorges, in the years when towns along the river were being moved and drowned to make way for the great dam. The “ghost city” of Sonnet 17 alludes to Fengdu, the riverside “City of Ghosts.” Helen is Helen of Troy; Beatrice is Dante’s beloved in The Divine Comedy; Medusa is the Gorgon whose gaze turns men to stone. The short quotations in Sonnets 3, 7, 9, and 14 are translated from the poet’s Chinese.

Requiem for Xiaoyu

Now I will sing it to you, Xiaoyu. I believe you can surely hear:

Now, let us set out
The rain stopped long ago, stopped
Let me hold over you an umbrella made of newspaper
notes dance on it; grief dances on it
time dances on it; joy taken by surprise dances
on it; stones dance; rain boots dance; the journey of July
dances. Only your heart sleeps. Your fantasies and dreams sleep
from September to March. From winter to spring. From day to night. Xiaoyu
my shadow keeps you company, my limping words support you through your twenty-six years
grammar and rhetoric scatter on the wind. In spring the leaves fall rustling. Our steps more
solemn than dance steps, more classical. Like the dusk panpipe tune “The Lonely Shepherd”
we pass through an old age drawn in advance, receiving God’s grace ahead of time: forsaken by God
and consoled by God. This is our fate beyond measure. Who
is more wretched? Who is happier? Beneath the boundless gray sky
we walk, walk unsteadily, and little by little in
this world we lose each other: the story of you and me, like a
perfect sentence split in two
by a stroke of lightning. My severed arm reaches out and grasps only
a wisp of breeze. Xiaoyu, go on
ahead. Walk slowly, or else
the green grass behind you will cover
my footsteps
that follow

(1998)

Translator’s notes

[1] The note: Xiaoyu (“Little Fish”) was his beloved wife Sun Yuan, who had died of cancer a year earlier at twenty-five, after they had lived together for less than two years. “The Lonely Shepherd” is a well-known instrumental piece for panpipes.

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