“有一天我要泄露你们隐秘的起源:”(让·尼古拉·阿尔蒂尔·兰波《元音》)。海在这里。海的秘密对于海来说,就是她无比轻盈的起源。凝结的,反射海之微光的,挂住眼角的泪水,和挂在衣角的露水,是同一种泄露。不同于你我之间易朽的结晶和约定,泄露首先是一种薤露。泄也是一种露。泄也必然是一种出路。展示了事物成型前最完美的启蒙变体。你在棋盘般的海面安放的每一枚船舶,循着既定的轨迹,出现与消失,如这露之盈亏,只是把滚圆的无声传递给我们起伏的峰谷了。回声折叠的未知旅程,扩散到波浪折叠的书卷里。脸上的印痕,被声音吻过。“大海是地球的一滴露”,“地球是宇宙的一滴露”,但在你我的异代之构中,悲欣交集也不过是一滴露。一滴,显而易见的不露。寥若星辰,但又寂寂无名的结局像观察到的一件幻象之衣,上面满是结痂的树液。海甸岛是这如电如露之核心,锥子般钉住这无尽展开的波浪之绸,潮汐的每一次回溯,都在吞噬自己吐出的沙与沫。,串起的贝壳,和住在贝壳里的日子,像蚕在织蛹,更像是蚕在坐禅,所有听到的风声都是关于风如何把塑造的排浪保留在涌动中。在海看来,这句号般徒具空壳的小岛,像一颗在巨大荷叶中心滚动的露珠,是波浪借口于面对风波之恶的一个微小的普罗透斯式的掩体,对称于那些沙聚的螺塔。
我要把这万千之水的任意一勺饮寄给你,顺着螺壳的盘旋之形幻化出无数歧路,一条条通到你的无数化身之酶中。当你陷入迷宫般的跌宕起伏中,凭一根箴言的绳子来引路,你的身影就是你的闪动的谎言。而你的谎言证实了你走过的路,也可能是,只是一根绳。大海为我们制造了那么多争论和误会,每枚礁石都挺出水面来解释他们的底部是如何崇山峻岭地构成了一个大陆共同体。但大海始终是平的,正如世界是平的。海的重量不是海水的重量,约等于空气在真空中的重量。但秘密是轻的,也许是最轻的灵魂。假如天使也有灵魂,那就是天使的秘密。当她飞起来,尤其是在夜空里,她的秘密就是夜的秘密:像一个饱满的弧线,不断向各个方向运动,变幻出无数彼此交叉、分割、重叠的弧线。夜何其大!秘密的关键始终在于:飞。但夜不是鸟。鸟在夜里的睡眠像大海安静的水面。海永远也不会飞,这是她诚实而痛苦的根源。“春鱼如鸟飞(汕头民谚)。”海的翅膀是鱼的刀鳍。她雕刻波浪,划伤那些雕刻波浪的波浪之手。当她低低地垂下来,收拢在身体两侧,像你在你的的名字旁收起了呼和吸的偏旁。海睡眠时,是个婴儿,光光的脑门像一片用于亲吻的沙滩。不一定有鸥鸟降临,她为这片海提供片刻的安宁。
Jiang Hao
“I shall tell, one day, of your mysterious origins” (Arthur Rimbaud, “Vowels”). The sea is here. To her, her inimitably buoyant origin is her secret. Condensation, reflections of the sea’s pale light, tears in eyes, dew on shirttails, are all a kind of release. Unlike the perishable pact crystallizing between us, release is first and foremost a real ease. Letting go is a word for getting low. Revealing is a type of feeling. Revealing the perfect and pluripotent germ that exists before an object takes shape. Each of the ships you place on the chessboard of the sea’s surface moves along fixed paths, its appearing and disappearing, like the waxing and waning of dew, transmitting the roundness of silence to our rolling hills. The echo’s uncharted and folding journey expands to the books with waves folded into them. The marks on your face have been kissed by sound. “The sea is a drop of dew on the planet,” “Earth is a drop of dew in the universe.” But in the generation gulf between us, joy and anguish are both drops of dew. A drop, a clearly visible drop of undew.
Scattered and nameless endings resemble the perceptible mirage of a cloak covered with the scars of sap. Haidian is a kernel like electricity, like dew, like an awl pinning down a boundless bolt of silk waves. Every time the tide recedes, it swallows the sand and foam it expelled. The sea gives birth to a coastline as long as the day and night. The shells strung together, and the days that live in those shells, are like silkworms spinning cocoons, or better yet, silkworms meditating, all you can hear in the wind is how it’s going to keep the waves it molded in a state of turbulence. The island has only an ineffectual empty shell like a Chinese full stop. From the sea’s point of view, the island is a drop of dew rolling in the center of a giant lotus leaf, a tiny Protean cover that the waves use as a pretext for confronting the evil storms, symmetrical to the shell towers in which sand collects.
I’ll mail you an arbitrary spoonful of this multitude of waters to drink. Along the spiral of the shell a mirage of countless paths forms, each one leading to the ferment of your countless incarnations. When you sink into maze-like free fall, counting on the rope of an aphorism to guide you along, your shadow is the flash of a lie. And your lie confirms that the path you’ve taken may be nothing more than a rope. The sea has generated so many controversies and misunderstandings for us, every rock protrudes from the sea to explain how, underwater, its base ruggedly forms a mainland. But the sea is flat, just as the world is flat. The weight of the sea is not the weight of its water, rather, it’s roughly equivalent to the weight of air in a vacuum. Secrets are light, perhaps the lightest souls of all. If angels had souls, that would be their secret. When one of them takes flight, particularly in the night sky, her secret is the secret of the night: like a plump curve, it constantly travels in all directions, generating countless curves that mutually intersect, bisect, overlap. The night is vast! The crux of any secret: flying. But the night is not a bird. The sleep of birds at night is like the peaceful surface of the sea. The sea will never fly, that’s the origin of her honesty and her pain. The proverb has it that spring fish fly like birds. The blade fins of fish are the sea’s wings. She carves out the waves, lacerating the rolling hands that carve out the waves. When she bends low, she gathers up her two sides, just as you gather up the prefixes of inhaling and exhaling from your name. When the sea sleeps, she’s a baby, her bald head like a beach for kissing. There may not be a seagull. She’s giving the sea a moment of peace.
(translated from the Chinese by Chenxin Jiang)
Jiang Hao was born in Chongqing in 1971. He has worked variously as a reporter, newspaper editor, university lecturer, and graphic designer in Beijing, Chengdu, Ürümqi, as well as Hainan Island, off China’s south coast, where he now lives. He is the author of six poetry collections, most recently Poems of a Wandering Immortal • Natural History Poems (2016).
Chenxin Jiang is Senior Editor (Chinese) at Asymptote. Her latest translation is Tears of Salt: A Doctor’s Story by Pietro Bartolo and Lidia Tilotta (Norton), also published as Lampedusa: Gateway to Europe by MacLehose Press.
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