Sonnet Gallery 1: Love, Freedom, Rage.
2008/2/13 16:40:11
The world is harmonious, so let us be brutal — otherwise it would be far too disharmonious. this ID feels the language used on this blog before was far too gentle, far too harmonious, and such language simply cannot "world" the world. So from now on, when brutality is called for, be brutal — language, after all, is humanity's violence against the world.
Right now there are too many people on this blog — seems like nearly 20 million clicks. Hopefully some brutal language will thin the herd a bit.
this ID has too many hobbies. In the realm of Chinese, this ID's greatest hope is to extend the classical poetic tradition into every conceivable modern domain. And there's another: to prove that the reason vernacular poetry since the May Fourth Movement ended up a dead end is not a problem with the vernacular itself, but that the poets were all insects chirping in the grass. Vernacular Chinese is indeed the shoddiest writing system there is, yet the expression of thought can transcend all of that.
During the Spring Festival, bored with nothing to do, I browsed through the complete or selected works of the most important vernacular poets. Of course, there were passable pieces among them — just as the worst prostitute can spontaneously manage a few decent climaxes in her lifetime. But the biggest defect of all these people is that they had no voice of their own; their voices were nothing but copies of worn-out trash produced by the West or their various other daddies.
This was never a game I particularly wanted to play, but since the idea arose, let's play. Shakespeare left English with a truckload of sonnets, so this ID will go all Shakespeare too and leave vernacular Chinese some sonnets — hoping to finish over the next N years.
Why sonnets? At least they're metered. this ID despises all trash who can only write free verse. That is all.
Sonnets of Love
Chán Zhōng Shuō Chán
My love, forsake me to desolation amid splendor.
A sky that has lost its sun, spurting blood, streaming clouds of rose.
All wind burns only within wind.
Galaxies polish galaxies; yellow sands ignite yellow sands.
Starlight like tombs, planted across the mountain ranges of years.
Earth's palm-lines — the last yellow streamers of summer days,
you are the most solemn village among all days,
incomparably radiant, just like my corpse across ten thousand lifetimes.
A sea of stone flowers drowns the bountiful mausoleum.
Ninety thousand miles of sorrow and joy and agony, ninety thousand miles of Gobi glaciers,
my love, forsake me to splendor amid desolation,
a sun that has lost its sky — soul vivid, flesh boundless.
Time is lost; all light imprisoned in spaceless space, grinding and surging,
nursing all worlds, all existence, and all death.
Sonnets of Freedom
Chán Zhōng Shuō Chán
My stringless lute shall never sing of you, Freedom.
One flower, one world — who roams free after the blossom wilts?
You — poisonous heat of thought, phlegmatic nodule of language,
a face seduced and abandoned by the three Fates.
The wind of freedom can never escape the wind of freedom.
Free by nature, yet freedom shackles you within freedom.
Those who can be free are forever the slaves of being freed —
behold six billion suns blazing across the eternal sky.
Without the "self," whence the "reason"? Freedom has always been authored by the self alone.
All your roads lead only to a corpse that will never be eternal.
On a snowy night in December, cats in heat freely bloom,
and every cry of blooming weaves the final shroud.
On the battlefield of ants, ten million peaks grow in madness. Earth that cannot escape the earth — moonlight, cool and clear.
Sonnets of Rage
Chán Zhōng Shuō Chán
Ninety thousand years of lightning condensed into swords of light, leveling ninety thousand peaks,
rousing wild waves and thundering tides of four oceans to batter the starry sky of all four seasons.
Whips lash down upon the planets of a hundred billion galaxies, smashing a hundred billion billion times,
destroying every patch of gold, destroying every patch of green.
Zeus, my hopelessly useless fool of a child:
let Olympia's thunderbolts sow the lure of death,
let life's devouring bring surging, climactic death,
every planet crawling with jeweled and pearl-gleaming hearses.
Yahweh, my eternally impotent old face:
let every flower in your world become a man-devouring maw,
every apple harbor a green-eyed serpent spitting purple slander,
every inch of sunlight transform into a skull-splitting, mountain-cleaving axe.
Sun and moon — go drift upon the deluge; Milky Way — go scorch in heaven's fire.
Space-time shatters; the shards of the cosmos dissolve in an endless tempest of fury.
All right, that's it for today — can't write any more. One must not write too many poems at once; excess shortens your lifespan. Just look at how many poets die young — this is no joke.