Thursday, October 1, 2009

Happy Birthday PRC!

Today is the 60th birthday of the People's Republic of China, and in its honor I am printing a fourth poem by Chinese dissident poet Jiang Pingchao from his Chinese poetry anthology June Fourth Poems. He included my English translation of this poem in his June Fourth Tiananmen Masscre 20th Anniversary Memorial booklet that was published April 13, 2009. The English editing was done by my cousin Brian E. Hansen, to whom I am very grateful.
This poem is in some ways the most shocking because it reflects the terrible effects that Jiang's imprisonment had on the rest of his family. I have been going back and forth about posting it, but when I got up this morning and read in the New York Times online that our own US government is working on legislation to curb the rights of investigative reporters to keep their sources confidential, and after all our own human rights abuses and torturing, albeit on foreign soil, I decided that the message of this poem is too crucial to hide. We run the risk of losing our traditional freedoms, if we do not face the unpleasantness of what is happening in the world around us. We need to see it; we need to consider it; and we need to take a stand against all callousness, brutality, torture, and insensitivity to our fellow human beings.
I am also posting the Chinese version for my readers who like to practice their Chinese.
Tiananmen Aftershocks
By Jiang Pinchao

I fell into fog in the summer of 1991
thinking in my prison cell of
China and my little sister—
hanged by her own hand in the house where we grew up.
Her eyes and tongue protruded,
blood, urine, excrement dripped from her corpse for a week.
No one noticed, no one heard her sighs for me,
no one saw my tears, I could not go home to mourn for her.

That same ghastly summer, the blades
on the plastic toy machine mangled my finger.
My elder sister waited outside the prison thinking of me
not knowing that my chopped finger
gave the warden an excuse to prohibit visitation, a joy
denied my first two years in Hanyang.
My broken-off finger kept bleeding,
the prison doctors operated without anesthesia
but my finger could not be sewn back on,
I yelped like a dog in the prison operating room.

In my summer of anguish, my elder sister could not visit me.
She stayed with a farm family outside the prison and was
a stranger in the wilderness,
thinking of me. Long-serving felons freely
passed in and out of prison because they were
the government’s model prisoners,
thinking of my sister.

In the summer of 1991
my finger broke off
and I was thinking of China
but China was not thinking of me.
My finger was broken off
and I was broken off from people I loved
.
Los Angeles, 11/18/2002
漢陽監獄的那座吹塑車間裡我不知道我的斷指還有沒有在想着中國

1991年夏天,我是坠在关于中国的云雾里
我在想着中国,年轻的妹妹上吊了
在我们一同长大的家中,她想着关于我
她的尸首瞪圆眼吐出长长的舌头
尸水一星期在房间里滴,没有人注意
没有人听到她断气时因我绝望的最后一声叹息
我在监狱流泪,不能回去哭
1991年夏天,是我进监两年第一次允许被接见
吹塑机的割刀,想到了我的手指
姐姐在狱外想着关于我
她不知道割刀,给了政府我仍不可以被探监的理由
我的手指断着,太不雅观
我的手指断着,血流不止
狱医的手术不用麻药我在手术室里象狗一样尖嚎
1991年夏天,我的手指
没法缝合,姐姐不能看我
我的手指没法缝合 姐姐在监狱外的农舍求宿
她在陌生的郊野里,想着我
几个被囚数年的歹徒,狱内狱外
自由出入,是政府授予的模范囚犯想着她
1991年夏天 我的手指断着
我想着中国
中国没有想到我
我断着手指
断掉了我连心连肉的亲人
汉阳监狱的那座吹塑车间里
我的手指断着我不知道我的断指
还会不会在那里,在如我从前
想着中国
2002/11/8洛杉矶

6 comments:

Teresa said...

When the Chinese went up, for some reason, it lost all its formatting with respect to stanzas. The original Chinese was also in stanzas that match the English. For many of them, you can tell the first line in the stanza because it has 1991 in it.

Teresa

murat11 said...

Teresa:

Thank you for posting this; there is much to like:

"I fell into fog..." Not "a fog," just "fog." Wonderful.

No shirking on the revelation and contemplation of his sister's suicide, and then her ghost-like haunting of the poem: "thinking of my sister."

He thinks and feels, while his country is dead to him, and that wonderful enjambment of these lines:

"passed in and out of prison because they were /
the government’s model prisoners, /
thinking of my sister."

All this contemplation of others in his solitude. Beautiful.

Cloudia said...

Emperors come and go

there will always be

China...


Aloha, Friend!

Comfort Spiral

Teresa said...

Thank you for your kind words. Glad you enjoyed the sentiments. And glad that across the millenia the Chinese spirit continues to endure.

Barbara Martin said...

Very touching poetry, Teresa. People need to make their stand on rights issues.

Teresa said...

Thanks for stopping by, Barbara. I hope that more people will decide this world has too many abusers of human rights and stand up against the bullies.