伊沙《越南的忧郁》
The Melancholy of Vietnam (excerpts)
Yi Sha (1966-) tr. Fan Jinghua
I
Raindrops on banana leaves
No teardrops falling
Only wet still objects
Are left for the sight
Vietnam is melancholic
II
Deep in the night
I watched a Tran Anh Hung’s film
And found
A melancholic Vietnam
Reminding me of those black & white movies
Deep in my memory
Drizzling on the screen
III
I once wrote in a long poem
"Isn’t a war really romantic
The way she holds a gun looks awesome
As if she is playing a harp"
I was writing about Road Back to Mother
About my downcast mind and heartache
For Vietnamese beauties
VI
Someone compares the Red River
To a wet vagina
The most splendid follows: America
Is a dick that thrusts everywhere
But in here it suffered a fracture
And ever since this pride-swollen man
Took on the sequelae of serious ED
Like Earnest Hemingway
VII
How can I look down on
The men in there
Their militia could fell many of my countrymen and women
As graves all over those mountain slopes
It was us who caused all this
I won't say "The oppressed is bound to win"
I'd say: melancholic men are
The bravest fighters
VIII
Vietnam is melancholic
Raindrops on banana leaves
No teardrops falling
Only wet still objects
Are left for the sight
Notes to the text:
Road Back to Mother (Đường về quê mẹ) is a northern Vietnam film produced in 1971 and dubbed immediately into Chinese as Road Back to Hometown. The film was one of the few and frequently screened Vietnam movies in China.
The original Chinese poem has eight sections, and I omit Section 4 & 5 because they are over-colloquial and the weakest. There is always something on the verge of bad taste in Yi Sha's poetry, which he might have meant to be a ridicule on the political correctness or "the sublime."
越南的忧郁
伊沙（1966-）
一
雨打芭蕉
不见有泪滴落
只留下这些
湿漉漉的静物
越南是忧郁的
二
我在深夜里
看陈英雄的电影
发现一个
忧郁的越南
想起我记忆深处的
那些黑白影片
银幕上下着雨
三
我曾在一首长诗中写道：
“战争是否真的浪漫
她握枪的姿势很好看
像在弹一把竖琴”
写的是《回故乡之路》
写的是令我黯然神伤的
越南美人
四
我想向我的一位
去过越南的朋友
求证越南的忧郁
想一想又做罢了
我的朋友
不是一个忧郁的人
关键是他不是一个
能够感知忧郁的人
五
说什么“云的南方”
越南是云的南方的南方
是云之国的边疆
云之下
一条大河奔流入海
六
有人将此比喻成
一条湿润的阴道
精彩的是：美国
这根到处乱戳的鸡巴
在此遭遇的那次骨折
从此那个自命不凡的男人
便有了严重的性功能障碍
一如欧内斯特?海明威
七
我岂敢小瞧
这里的男人
只派民兵就把我多少的同胞兄弟
打成了一山坡一山坡的墓地
那全是我们自找的呀
我不说“哀兵必胜”
我想说：忧郁的男人
是最勇敢的战士
八
越南是忧郁的
雨打芭蕉
不见有泪滴落
只留下这些
湿漉漉的静物
About the Author (copied from Amazon author product description for his book published in UK by Bloodaxe Books)
Yi Sha is the most controversial Chinese poet of the past 20 years, a member of the extreme avant-garde whose work has changed the face of Chinese poetry. His anti-lyrical poetry is minimal, unadorned, - dramatizing with facts, not painting emotional pictures - in plain, colloquial language. His poems present pared-down descriptions of seemingly banal incidents, or dramatic incidents described in an ironically banal manner. Born in the southern Chinese city of Chengdu in 1966 three days after the start of the Cultural Revolution, he grew up in the Maoist era. He came to prominence as a writer in the 1990s, publishing fiction and essays as well as poetry, all of which have been criticized, attacked, and reviled by detractors, including many fellow writers.
Yi Sha was born in 1966 in Chengdu, and moved with his family at the age of two to the central Chinese city of Xi'an in Shaanxi province. He published his first poems while still at school, studied Chinese at Beijing Normal University, and became a noted figure among China's university student poets. He has worked on literary magazines, as a TV presenter and independent publisher, and is now an assistant professor at the Xi'an International Studies University.In 1988 he published a mimeographed first collection, Lonely Street, but found an official publisher for his next collection, Starve the Poets! (1994). His other poetry and prose titles have included Vagabond Wharves (1996), This Devil Yi Sha (1998), The Bastard's Songs (1999), Blaspheming Idols (1999), Fashion Assassin (2000), Critique of 10 Poets (2001), My Hero (2003), Whoever Hurts, Nows (2005) and Shameless Are the Ignorant (2005). His poetry has been translated into several languages, but he has been refused permission to give readings outside China on a number of occasions. His Selected Short Poems was published in a bilingual Chinese-English edition in Hong Kong in 2003. Starve the Poets! (Bloodaxe Books, 2008) is his first English publication outside China.
