http://s6/mw690/001h4Nj2gy6DGjiqQMR95&690Stalling在俄克拉荷马大学" TITLE="诗歌英语八首，与译者、美国诗人Jonathan Stalling在俄克拉荷马大学" />

Zheng Xiaoqiong  郑小琼

Translated by Jonathan Stalling  April

 

Daybreak was rubbed into a drop of rusted tears

She bent down as if to hear a slight sound 

 

April walks outside the window, lychee trees are blooming

Lilac is less than love, under the shade of iron

A rusted moon, someone who believes in love

Patiently shoulders endless grief

 

The past gradually fades, and memory falls into disorder

What is left inside spring’s furnace

Illuminates the cold, bare blueprint

 

Corrosion digests the dark’s recessed details

Exposed on the machine table by time’s passing, her humble thoughts

In April grow dark green as if seen from above, her love lying

On the exhausted factory floor. From Sichuan to Hunan

And more distant places, ideas arrive like products

A single green certification slip appears with her tears

 

In the illuminated factory daybreak stirs its wings

A splinter of rust wounds her heart. Outside the window

Love’s dew casts a luminous shadow over April

All of this forces her, like iron, to stiffly cling to

Her sliver of rushing love, this fragment of the rising sun

  

Grass Roots

Twilight spreads, a layer of ash-gray iron melts July

Returning to lychee woods, everything is empty and silent . . . flying bugs of July

And a drop of blood pools at the tip of a grass blade, a slanting red

When short, grass stalks drop their heads

And see a drifter’s heels

In Silver Lake Park, encountering a plume of grass with purple-blue flowers

Moonlight hears the sounds of flowers, blooming and fragrant

 

Pale flower of July cannot hold on to the moonlight over Silver Lake Park

By the lake at midnight I listen to a blade of grass weeping, it is a

Drifter on the road, briefly

Vanishing into the dark

 

A street lamp illuminates grass tips and my footprints

We share the same name, oh

 —Grass roots

 

In the depth of green grass, under the lychee trees

My friends and family

In this homeless strange land, I grow like a blade of grass

At the twilight when the universe falls silent, a night wind blows

But cannot blow down our heads

 

 

Iron Nails

How much love, how much pain, how many nails

Pin me to the machine table, blueprint, order form

Early morning dew, midday’s blood

 

Must have an iron nail to pin down overtime, industrial disease

And the nameless grief follows, the time of the working class

From the factory buildings unfolds an era of fortune and misery

 

How many exhausted shadows flash beneath the dull lamps

How many emaciated, frail young working-class women smile numbly

Their love and memory, like moss shaded by green trees, silent and vulnerable

 

How many soundless nails pass through their calm flesh

Their youth flows with virtue and purity, separated from profit, back pay

Labor law, homesickness, and an unknown love

 

The sky-blue assembly line dangles booth seats

One painful nail at a time, a momentary stop 

Outside the window, autumn passes by, someone right beside it lives

 

 

 

Singing

 

Inside the furnace singing iron, full of memory

It's bass or treble, painful and piercing life

Its dialect is draped in spring’s fire and autumn’s rain

This burning brilliance gives way to life's deterioration

Dying out, the young woman sitting by the furnace

Sings a folk song, she sees the setting sun cross the furnace

Walks into the industrial complex’s rush hour

In its engulfing glow reside my grief and prospects

Along with the iron’s frantic sobbing

My grief steadfast in the setting sun

My song passes by like the whisper of water passing through

What remains is white hope in a bucket of swaying flames

 

 

 

  Industrial Zones

Incandescent lamps burn bright, buildings burn bright, machines burn bright

Fatigue burns bright, blueprints burn bright . . .

This is Sunday night; this is the night of August fifteenth

The moon is a blank circle; in the lychee trees

A cool breeze sways inside the pure white body, so many wordless years

Silence, in the evergreen weeds insects cry out, the lamps of the whole city burn bright

Inside the factories, so many dialects, so much homesickness,

So many frail and skinny workers dwell there, so much moonlight falls upon

Sunday’s machines and blueprints. And now it is rising

Shining on my face. Slowly, I am loosing my heart

 

So many lamps are shining, so many people pass by

Place yourself inside the bright factories, memories, machines

The speechless moonlight, lamplights like me

Are so tiny, fragments of spare parts, filaments

Using their vulnerable bodies to warm the factory’s hustle and noise

And all the tears, joy, pain we have ever had

Those noble or humble ideas, spirits are

Illuminated, stored up by moonlight, and taken so far

To fade away as unnoticed rays of light

 

 

 

6

Sounds

Every sound I hear is stiff, perpendicular

Like massive iron hammers clanging and clanging upon anvil plates

And whispered sobs, so woeful, awkward, barely audible

“Ah, we can walk, even run

But cannot grab a hold of our own fate!”

Turning around I hear sounds like incised iron

Round, square, strips……that I cannot name

Life’s hammer beats and beats.

 “We are crying for they remain…..so removed 

In the bright light of the furnace fire and daylight

I see myself as a cast iron

Each little piece snagged and cut

And transformed into spare parts and unspeaking tools

Transformed into silence, into a dark, mute life!

 

“Blue”

A small blue cloud hangs in the sky, leaning toward peace

A little blue flame reaches the furnace, thoughtfully

A night blue appears on a sheet of iron, a blueprint, full of grease

The machines thundering blue, let something slip

A tranquil blue is another side of the Dagong living

A sliver of blue opens in someone’s love

 

Like fire, on the hammer’s iron sheet—its blue

Like a flower, opening on a pear tree outside—its blue

His secret colors remain so distant

In the lychee forest, white birds call out

Last year’s flowers are all blue in my eyes

 

Wavering , blue welding flames, their bodies

Sway back and forth, my obscure thoughts and clear feelings

Grow, a small piece of blue inside love

A quiet blue is on the other side of a laborer’s life

So slight and simple as this blue is,

so vulnerable to frost as the love,

In its(my) vagrant, wandering life, its(their) barely visible blue illuminating me

Besides love, besides blue starlight, a sigh

The machine table’s iron fillings and the scraps of paper

Their low voices erase the noise and the exhaustion of the workshop

Leaving only a piece of blue left in my love

Which open up a field of hope and a dream of future

 

 

 

Sunset

The small setting sun, an iron sheet of pain

It curls up into half-light, rolls as a breeze through lychee trees

Its blue flame burns inside the furnace

And then moves slowly across the roaring machine table

It awkwardly slips through my oily fingers

And casts its beading light onto golden needles

Behind it stands a frenzy of blown dust

Just as behind these iron products, stand

So many people: Zheng Xiao-qiong, Li Yan, Liu Xiao-ping ……

Dancing in the background like dust.”

 

We could not see the dust in the setting sun

Our love of the mortal life lethargic

They come from everywhere

Then disappear into the crowd         

And will return to where they come from

Only you, her, and me are left.         

We pack into the flood of human

And become dust trembling in the light

As we are pushed and walked slowly into the darkness

 

 

We could not see the dust in the setting sun

Our love of the mortal life lethargic

They disappear in the crowd,

Those people come from every where,

Then will return to else where,

Remain you, her, and me……

Packing into the flood of human

 

We are dust trembling in the light

Pushed, and walk slowly into the darkness