Mascara Literary Review

Issue 10 October 2011 Prose Poetry

Chang Fen-Ling translates Chen Li


Chen Li (1954- ) was born and raised in Hualien, Taiwan. After graduating from the English Department of National Taiwan Normal University in 1976, he returned to his hometown and taught in junior high school. In recent years he has taught creative writing at NationalDongHwaUniversity and has been the organizer of the annual Pacific Poetry Festival in his hometown. Chen Li started writing poetry in the 1970s, under the influence of modernism. He turned to social and political themes in the 1980s, and from the 1990s onward, has explored a wide range of subjects and styles, combining formal and linguistic experiments with concern for indigenous culture and formation of a new Taiwanese identity. He has published over ten books of poetry. Chen Li not only borrows and learns from both Western and Oriental (Japanese) poetics, but also cherishes the heritage of Chinese poetry and redefines the culture of Taiwan. He is also a prolific prose writer and translator. In collaboration with his wife Chang Fen-ling, he has translated into Chinese the works of many poets, such as Plath, Heaney, Neruda, Paz, Sachs and Szymborska, and has published over a dozen volumes of translations. His poems have been translated into English, French, Dutch, Japanese and Croatian, among other languages.

 

 

〈陳黎散文詩兩首〉

 

黑羊

 

高中沒讀完就在外遊蕩的小弟是三兄弟中的黑羊，雖然他腿上

刺了一條青龍而他的心和母親一樣柔弱。一輩子騎腳踏車上下

班的母親一輩子都在還債。她一直希望她最小的兒子能回到正

途。在為他買過幾次摩托車、汽車最後都不見了以後，她又瞞

著我為他借錢買了一輛汽車。那是一輛白色的汽車，白得如同

冬日的晨霧。那一天早晨，我回到上海街，看到她拿著一塊抹

布，偷偷走近停在路旁的白色汽車，彷彿想要把一隻黑色的羊

擦成白色般，用力，輕輕地擦拭著車身。她不斷地擦。因為，

她知道，白色的汽車也許很快就要不見，而她必須在黑羊睡醒

之前趕快給他縫上白皮。

 

 

 

Black Sheep

Dropping out of senior high and fooling around, my youngest brother is the black sheep of us three brothers. Although he has a blue dragon tattooed on his leg, his heart is as gentle and weak as our mother’s. Mother, who has been riding a bike to and from work all her life, has been paying off debts all her life. She has wished her youngest son to stop going astray. After the several motorcycles and cars she had bought for him were all gone, she borrowed money and bought him another car without my knowledge. That was a white car, white as the morning fog on winter days. That morning when I returned to Shanghai Street, I saw her, with cleaning cloth in hand, sneaking toward the white car parked on the roadside and wiping its body forcefully but gently, as if to rub the black sheep into a white one. She rubbed and rubbed, because she knew the white car might soon be gone, and she had to sew the white skin on quickly before the black sheep woke up.

 

 

 

舌頭

 

我把一節舌頭放在她的鉛筆盒裡。是以，每次她打開筆盒，要

寫信給她的新戀人時，總聽到囁嚅不清的我的話語，像一行潦

草的字，在逗點與逗點間，隨她新削好的筆沙沙作響。然後她

就停了下來。她不知道那是我的聲音，她以為從上次見面後不

曾在她耳際說話的我，已永遠保持沉默了。她又寫了一行，發

現那個筆劃繁多的「愛」寫得有點亂。她順手拿起了我的舌頭

，以為那是橡皮擦，重重重重地往紙上擦去，在愛字消失的地

方留下一沱血。

 

 

 

The Tongue

I left a segment of my tongue in her pencil box. Consequently, every time she opened it to write a letter to her new lover, she would hear my mumbling words, which were like a line of scribbles, chafing among commas with the movement of her newly sharpened pencil. Then she would stop writing, not knowing it was my voice. She thought that I, who had never spoken to her since we last met, had kept silent for good. She wrote another line, finding the Chinese character 愛 (love), which consisted of so many strokes, was carelessly written. She handily picked up my tongue. Mistaking it for an eraser, she rubbed it forcefully on the paper, leaving a considerable drop of blood on the spot where the character 愛 disappeared.