Proof of Love (thoughts on Othello)

But, Othello, speak.
Did you by indirect and forcèd courses
Subdue and poison this young maid’s affections?
Or came it by request, and such fair question
As soul to soul affordeth?
(1.3.110–114)

How do you prove love? The question is put to Othello in the first act by Venetian nobles and the solution is not so simple. Unlike the nobility of Othello, which is provable by his acts and services,[1] the fact of the matter of love isn’t knowable through ocular evidence. So Othello has to appeal to testimony: he asks that they send for Desdemona and let her speak (and presumably trust that she speaks the truth—and therefore isn’t under magical deception). And while they wait for her, he relays his own story of their courtship, to which the duke replies approvingly, imagining that his own daughter would have likewise been wooed by Othello’s tale of odyssey. So is love proven? It’s hard to say. The duke’s reply is ambivalent in precisely this way: a sensible listener can’t know that she does love him, only that a woman would. The slide into generality affirms the plausibility of love, not its presence. Moreover, Othello is let off the hook, not because Desdemona manages to persuade. She isn’t believed by Brabantio, but understood as having made a terrible choice. So is love proven? Perhaps not then. And the question continues to haunt the play, in a transformed, more pernicious way. Instead of demanding love be proven to the polity, now it must be proven to the lover. And what is striking is this: it is not just as hard—as impossible—it is fatal.

I suppose I am driving at this: love can’t be proven.

In seminar, it was suggested that Desdemona shouldn’t have lied about losing the handkerchief. Imagine if she had just told Othello! Would that have changed the course of events? We want our lover to be honest. And we live with the fact that we can’t ever know for sure. We all know someone—or at least have seen the type cast on screen—who needs to know with certainty, and that need often starts to resemble the desire to catch the other in a lie. In Othello, that is exactly what unfolds. Desdemona doesn’t confess to losing the handkerchief, but it hardly matters. Othello isn’t waiting for the truth; he’s already replaced it with a suspicion that no confession can dislodge. His demand is not for understanding but for confirmation. He wants to eliminate ambiguity, to render love visible, proven, guaranteed. And it is that desire—not the concealments themselves—that makes the tragedy inevitable. To paraphrase my exasperation: the tragedy does not lie in the characters’ efforts to conceal; it lies in the effort to overcome concealment, to make love transparent, to drive out the opacity that marks the reality of love.[2]

I say that opacity marks the reality of love, but of course it is a severed reality. So perhaps it is not so crazy that Othello wants to overcome it and return to the status integritatis, when man and woman are united “in one flesh“; that is to say, bare, without the mediation of corporeal signs, truly as one soul to another soul. But it is not clear that one can go back. At least, it is not clear that one can go back by forcing the distance away and make the lover knowable. Perhaps we discover in this play that the desire to know has a tendency to deteriorate and transgress. In forcing the other to open it misrepresents and destroys the other. So really it is the progenitor of lies[3] and death—all in parody of Genesis 3, I suppose.

If I have more energy I’d now turn to examine Odyssey, which has a different grammar of love than Genesis, and which Othello also gestures towards (by casting Desdemona loosely in the role of Nausicaa). Odysseus and Penelope face a similar problem: how do you recognize each other? And the stakes are so high; it is a matter of life and death—and love. They manage to do it, and remarkably not through honesty but trickery and playful lies, staged encounters, and cloaked presence. And the final recognition keeps getting delayed. It’s really very beautiful stuff. But I can’t say much about it now, except that concealment here is a sort of poiesis integral to love and knowledge: Let us be lovers as storytellers, or something like that.

[1] Even the demonstration of nobility is fraught—racialized. But that’s a separate train of thought.

[2] And do we need to know Desdemona’s innocence? Would it have been less of a tragedy if she cheats? What a weird place to be in the audience—to be in the “know”. Are we really? In the “know” of what?

[3] Not absolutely. I mean, IAGO.

——————————————

I resolved last Monday to write daily—then weekly. And then neither happened. A moment of reckoning. It’s true that I never found writing effortless; it had always been a process of painful tinkering, circling important things and not getting there, trying out formulations until the pressure of deadline forces out something tolerable. But I am so out of practice now—since becoming a tutor—that even the art of bad tinsmithing feels unfamiliar. Is it too late for new year resolutions? I have never done it before. And Nowruz was not long ago. So maybe not. Spring is here—time for something small to take root. I will keep writing every week, something short and incomplete, but honest and timely, capturing thoughts on program texts when they are still fresh.

The Lock, by Li Xiao-Yang

之前翻译李老师的五首诗在Columbia Journal上登出了，其中《锁》这一首，我在翻译时想了很久。The idea of The Lock is quite simple. But I love its dialectic compactness. The last stanza goes:

通常，锁活在自己的空芯里
以刑具的对称性来启闭他物。
而蛀空的部分，需要更精确的力
来完成启示。

启示 is an interesting idea. It can carry the meaning “to open” in an ordinary way. But more often, it refers to a significant kind of opening that we’d understand as “disclosure” or “revelation”. In this regard, 启示 is quite different from merely 启闭. The latter, ordinarily a synonym, does not have that additional significance.

This contrast leads the ending in an unexpected direction. Sure, it makes sense on a literal level: the key wouldn’t correspond (对称) to a compromised (蛀空) lock, so to open it requires additional effort (更精确). But, as a metaphor, it suggests that revelation only occurs outside the context of correspondence. Take that a step further, The Lock appears to recommend a theory of truth as disclosure against theories of truth as correspondence.

Is this Heidegger? Certainly looks like it. So I was very tempted by “aletheia” before deciding—with regrets—that “disclosure” is in fact the better translation. “aletheia” would have been perfect if it were part of colloquial speech.

Father’s Palace (Excerpt)

Gods return on New Year’s Eve. Snow falls on earth, casting a silver dream over mountains. Chimneys receive snowflakes and their delivery of the auspicious moment. These blessings from the heavens glaze the rooftops of the poor and destitute with a dazzling white.

Wind gusts into cave houses, howling like a wild wolf, circling the haystacks atop the poor’s wall in hunger. Freezing, the villagers of Huoshao Bay return home and arrange themselves around tiny, pea-sized kerosine lamps. Men shell beans and women cook, settling into a homely comfort. Around them, paper windows are gilded by the caramel of candlelight and overlaid with paper cuttings in celebration of the New Year.

The clock’s ticking cuts through the sweet, pervading scent of potatoes on the stovetop, wiped down to a spotless shine. On top of the stove also sits a tea kettle, now whistling and beginning to boil. Behind the main room hangs a decorative New Year’s picture, promising abundance in all the years to come. There is a fat carp on the print, looking ready to swim off any second.

Night has fallen. Caifeng brings out a basin and begins wiping the household statue of Buddha with clean water. His altar is scarcely dotted with two potatoes and a few pieces of fruit candy in paper wrapping, but the Buddha is accustomed to the poor’s plain offerings. He sits quietly in the corner of the cave, eyes gleaming with kindness and tranquility. A potful of bean stew is bubbling away, stirring the children awake with its fragrance. Caifeng watches the flurries of white outside. She remarks, quietly:

“It’s snowing.”

Snow covers everything, imbuing all that is on earth with an airiness. It disguises roads, boundaries, and alleviates the hardships in the poor’s lives.

As Caifeng prepares for the big dinner, her husband Liu Shijiu traverses the dark night. The wind is biting, cold as a coffin. He lights a match. Sparks fly off and land on a clump of horseweed, setting off blazing flames which rise into the shape of a fox, draped all over in eyes. In drunkenness, Liu Shijiu catches a glimpse of something round and fuzzy rapidly approaching the sole of his shoe.

It startles him. “A wandering spirit of the night!” He thinks to himself, suddenly reminded of what his grandfather used to say, that certain spirits lurk in the darkness to sniff at travelers, and that death shall come swiftly to whomever they catch a whiff of.

Every farmer has a scent given by his guardian beast or bird. He can use mugwort, pachouli, and sow thistles to mask it and hide his tracks from spirits with the good nose. Some farmers give off the musk of wild goats. The green scent of mugwort can offset it. Others are under the protection of the god of cows and smell bitter. For them, the Cang-zhu herb is useless. Hemp leaves conceal the stench of damp feet. They come in handy for those with shoes stinking of quails’ sweat. Farmers returning home after a day’s weeding are protected by owls. They use rehmannia root to cover the muck on their shirts. Rose can hide the thievery of ratty farmers stealing corn from their neighbors. Bugloss erases the trace of stags who come out to court at night. The smell of dog dissipates under the spice of carrot seeds. Ironsmiths carry the musk of tigers, so they ought to wear sow thistles for disguise. Farmers whose sweat drips of swallow should make use of reed and Chinese plantain. Fenugreek is excellent for anyone who smells of hare. Finally, those protected by crows should apply Chinese violet.

“Wandering spirits of the night—” Liu Shijiu stirs awake and finds himself in the graveyard, surrounded by a dense mass of thorny bushes. Snow is coming down harder. Feathery flakes hurry onto his nape, sending chills down his spine. Something dark drifts towards him. By now Liu Shijiu has mostly sobered up. He makes out the shape of an owl, snickering as it lands on a dirt cliff. Liu Shijiu can no longer recall Grandfather’s tales. As he stands up from the graveyard and turns around, he knocks into a tombstone. It just happens to be the one carrying his ancestors’ names.

He hears a few crackling noises from afar. Using them as a guide, Liu Shijiu gropes his way out. He doesn’t make very far before a shadow sneers and jolts him into a halt. It’s Leng Xixi, rummaging through the graveyard for food. Sleeves and front stained with grease, he has pocketed all the sacrificial offerings and fruits laid upon the headstones. Leng Xixi pulls out a single, rumpled cigarette and offers it to Liu Shijiu, who scoffs and walks away.

Head pressed down by wind, Liu Shijiu makes it to an open field and finally catches sight of a few odd gleams from Huoshao Bay. Following the light, he makes it back to the village. Smoke is rising from the roofs. Once he sees the chimneys, he feels a lot better.

At home, Liu Shijiu unloads his pelts and picks up a bundle of firewood from the back. The living room is freezing, but it stays warm in the bedroom. On the windowsill sits a pot of geranium in full bloom, its emerald-green leaves extending calmly. His children have fallen asleep on the bed-stove. They’ve stretched their feet to the edge, exposing the puckering seams on the soles of their shoes. Fire burns bright in the hearth. Next to it, the dog is dozing off. Liu Shijiu strips off his worn coat and puts on cotton-padded pants that Caifeng has freshly sewn for him. They are very warm.

At last, with his new clothes on, Liu Shijiu is restored.

(Father’s Palace by Li Xiaoyang, an excerpt in translation)

原文是李啸洋老师《父亲的宫殿/Father’s Palace》，这里选译了第一节。同时期译的五首诗最近要登上Columbia Journal了，就想到这篇，索性把第一趴发上。

Father’s Palace的情节非常简单: Farmer and hunter Liu Shijiu wants to build a better, brick-and-mortar home for his family to replace the cave house he grew up in, so he sets out to accomplish that. Something wonderful and strange happens along the way: he dreams of ancestors from the shadow realm and encounters animal spirits. But most of what happens is very mundane: he sells pelts, goes to the market, fixes water leakage, has sex, casts seeds and harvests, and lays down the foundation to his house. What makes the story special is this: it is a rare, earnest effort at creating a spiritual home for the Chinese people without—this is crucial—taking recourse to nationalist sensibilities or ethnocentric dialectics that plague the Chinese consciousness today. Liu Shijiu has a strong relationship with his land, labor, family, and ancestry, but it is not construed in terms of conquering nature, claiming ownership of the land, or idealizing the dead. Liu’s relationship with his surroundings is a healthy, tender celebration of family and vitality. His desire to improve his surroundings does not come at the cost of nature, it is not expressed as “taming the wild”. As origin myths go, that’s just kind of rare.

收割者，吉恩·图默

收割者
吉恩·图默

黑肤的收割者磨镰刀
铁在石头上发出霍霍声响。我见他们将磨刀石
放回后裤袋，一事已了，
才开始他们沉默的挥舞，一个接一个。
黑色的马驾割草机驶过草丛，
那儿，一只野地里的耗子，受了惊，凄楚哀嚎流着血。
他的肚腹贴地。我见那利刃，
沾了血，继续剖开杂草和阴影。

Reapers
Jean Toomer

Black reapers with the sound of steel on stones
Are sharpening scythes. I see them place the hones   
In their hip-pockets as a thing that’s done,   
And start their silent swinging, one by one.   
Black horses drive a mower through the weeds,   
And there, a field rat, startled, squealing bleeds.   
His belly close to ground. I see the blade,   
Blood-stained, continue cutting weeds and shade.

Can Xue, Kafka, and Anti-realism

I reviewed Can Xue’s I Live in the Slums (2020) recently but not everything that struck me about the book made it into the review. Here is one of those loose thoughts: Can Xue’s use of the limited point of view.

I Live in the Slums is a collection of short stories. More than a third are told by first person narrators (“Story of the Slums”, “Our Human Neighbors”, “the Other side of the Partition”, “Shadow People”, “Crow Mountain”, “I am a Willow Tree”). The rest use the third (limited third, not omniscient).

In any first-person story, the narrative filters through the I as narrator. That’s a formal feature of the POV. But Can Xue’s “I”s are one of a kind. They are this strange combination of disrupted minds and intense hunger (sometimes actually for food, which is the case in “Shadow People”, other times not so literal). Because of their disrupted minds, they tend not to have explicit, articulate concepts or self-concepts. Adding to it, their desires are so consuming, their perceptions of the exterior world become completely bent to cater these inexplicable yearnings: to stay, to escape, to be satiated, to hunt or wound, to be safe. So, if we have an anxious protagonist, everyone around him or her would be equally anxious. If he or she is afraid, then every conversation he or she has is a cryptic message promising more trauma. And if he or she is dire to get out (of whatever situation they are in), a bunch of utterly bizarre obstacles would suddenly pop up in his world. It all reminds me a bit of Kafka’s a Little Fable:

the whole world is growing smaller every day. At the beginning it was so big that I was afraid, I kept running and running, and I was glad when I saw walls far away to the right and left, but these long walls have narrowed so quickly that I am in the last chamber already, and there in the corner stands the trap that I am running into.

I don’t recall a single story where characters other than the protagonist have personal histories. If at any point the protagonist wonders where other people come from, that curiosity quickly dissipates with a “it/he/she had always been there/this way” (30, 32, 40, 76, 165, 183, 196). (It’s mind-blowing how often variations of this phrase pop up.) It is as if they do not exist outside of their interactions with I. And they might as well not exist—because why would that matter to I!

What we have here is not, I think, a case of unreliable narrator, because to have an unreliable anything we must first assume the existence of an objective (read: constitutively-mind-independent) reality to serve as the benchmark. Can Xue does not make such an assumption.

What she goes for is a bit more exciting and ambitious: it is the denial that anything to the effect of a benchmark exists or can be known. It’s a philosophical statement, actually, to the effect of antirealism, expressed through watertight first-person POV delivered as matters of fact. The external world and the other people exist quite explicitly as the mind construes it and projects them, yet there is no getting behind the construal and projection. It’s quite a feat.

I wouldn’t lie and say reading Can Xue had been a blast: she is difficult and exhausting. I wouldn’t even hesitate to call her tyrannical. But, just like hitting a sweet spot in a demanding workout, moments like this make the experience worthwhile.

Poppies in October, Sylvia Plath

十月的罂粟花

作者：西尔维娅·普拉斯
翻译：Stella

即便是今晨的太阳云也裁不出这样的裙裳。
救护车里的女人也不行
她红色的心脏绽放着穿透
大衣，如此惊世骇俗——

一件礼物，爱的礼物
不请自来
无论天空

苍白而炙热地
点燃它的一氧化碳，还是双眼
在常礼帽下暗淡凝滞，都未曾予以邀约。

噢上帝，我为何物
竟让这些迟到的嘴儿张开呼喊
于霜冻的森林，矢车菊的黎明间。

Poppies In October

by Sylvia Plath

Even the sun-clouds this morning cannot manage such skirts.
Nor the woman in the ambulance
Whose red heart blooms through her coat so astoundingly —　

A gift, a love gift
Utterly unasked for
By a sky　

Palely and flamily
Igniting its carbon monoxides, by eyes
Dulled to a halt under bowlers.

O my God, what am I
That these late mouths should cry open
In a forest of frost, in a dawn of cornflowers.

H.D.’s Epitaph

A poem first published in her volume Red Roses for Bronze (1931), Epitaph was later engraved on H.D.’s headstone on her grave in Pennsylvania.

So I may say,
“I died of living,
having lived one hour”;

So they may say,
“she died soliciting
illicit fervour,”

So you may say,
“Greek flower; Greek ecstasy
reclaims for ever

one who died
following
intricate song’s lost measure.”

于是我可以说：
“我，在活过一个钟头后，
因生而死”；

于是他们可以说：
“她因煽动不正当的
热情而死”，

于是你可以说：
“希腊的花；希腊的狂喜
永远带回了”

那一个亡者，她因
追随隐秘之歌的
失落的旋律而死。”

There is another poem by H.D. titled Pear Tree (1919) that I like very much.

Pear Tree

Silver dust
lifted from the earth,
higher than my arms reach,
you have mounted.
O silver,
higher than my arms reach
you front us with great mass;

no flower ever opened
so staunch a white leaf,
no flower ever parted silver
from such rare silver;

O white pear,
your flower-tufts,
thick on the branch,
bring summer and ripe fruits
in their purple hearts.

梨树

银色的尘
从泥土中被举起，
比我手臂所及更高处，
是你攀上的地方。
噢——银子，
比我手臂所及更高处，
你不可胜数；

从没有花盛放过
这样坚贞的白色花瓣，
从没有花从这样珍罕的银中
洒下纯银；

噢——白色的梨，
你的花簇，
密布枝干，
将夏天和熟透的果实带进
他们紫色的心里。

我想最后一句应当是指，梨花白花中紫色的花蕊。不知道great mass是不是兼有宗教意象。

The things is, the kinds of pear trees that tend to flower in the stunning way H.D. describes here are usually ornamental varieties, and don’t produce a lot of fruits (or tasty ones for that matter). I have often wondered whether that fact takes away from the idea in the last stanza. No conclusion yet.

What’s more, ornamental pear trees come in a few varieties. The most common one, which happens to be the tallest, would be the Callery pear, native to China (我们这儿叫豆梨) and capable of growing up to 40 feet. Could the Callery pear be what H.D. was writing about? —Apparently they are quite a olfactory hazard and smell like rotten fish.

《女性男人》乔安娜·拉斯

（随处可见的）幸福大奖赛

第一个女人：我不能更幸福了。我爱我的丈夫，我们有两个可爱的孩子。理所当然，我不希望我的命运发生什么改变。

第二个女人：我却比你还要幸福。我的丈夫每周三洗碗。我们有三个可爱的孩子，一个胜过一个乖巧。我实在是无比幸福。

第三个女人：你们俩都不如我幸福。我的幸福，无与伦比。我与丈夫婚后至今十五年，他从未看过别的女人一眼。但凡我使唤他，他便会帮忙做家务。而且，假使我想出去找一份工作，他是绝不会介意的。但对我而言，最幸福的事莫过于履行作为妻子和母亲的职责。我们有四个孩子。

第四个女人：我们有六个孩子。（六个实在太多了，众人鸦雀无声。）我在布鲁明戴尔百货公司兼职做柜员，以负担孩子们的滑雪课。但对我来说，制作蛋奶冻，蛋白酥，还有装点地下室才是忠于内心的自我表达。

我：你们这些可怜的蠢蛋。我有一座诺贝尔和平奖，十四本发表的小说，六个情人，一幢联排别墅。我在大都会歌剧院有一个包厢。我飞飞机，会自己修车。我可以做引体向上，直到力竭一共十八个——如果你想知道数字的话。

所有女人：杀，杀，杀，杀。

或者

他：我可忍不了愚笨，粗俗，只会看爱情漫画，没有知性爱好的女人。

我：噢天呐，我也不能。

他：我极为欣赏精致，有修养和魅力的职业女性。

我：噢天呐，我也是。

他：你觉得那些讨厌，愚笨，且粗俗的普通女人究竟为何出落得如此讨人厌？

我：好吧——大概——我不是想要冒犯你，但在我审慎思考过后，作为非常初步的结论——希望你不要对我动怒：我认为，至少有一部分原因是你的错。

（鸦雀无声）

他：你知道吗，回头想来你这样恶毒，丑陋，神经质，还扰乱纲常的女人更可怕。何况，你看着可不年轻了，身材也在走样。

抑或

他：亲爱的，你为什么非得兼职卖地毯呢？

她：因为我希望能通过亲身投入市场来证明，即使身为女性，我亦能对我们集体的命运做出有意义的贡献，并挣得在我们文化中被视为独立成年人象征的标志——金钱。

他：但是亲爱的，等我们从你的工资里扣去请保姆和上托儿所的开销，更高的税率，和你的盒装午餐，你的工作对我们而言其实是经济负担。所以你看，你并没有挣到钱。你不可能挣到钱。只有我能。停止工作罢。

她：我不会停。我恨你。

他：但是亲爱的，你为什么这么不理智？你挣不挣钱并不重要，因为我能挣钱。等我挣了钱，我会给你，因为我爱你。所以你并不非得要挣钱。你不感到快乐吗？

她：不。为什么不能是你呆在家中照顾婴儿？为什么我们不能从你的收入中扣除那些开销？为什么我要为我不能谋生而感到快乐？为什么——

他（庄重地）：这场辩论愈发低劣荒唐。我会让你一个人呆着，直到你因为孤独，因为倚赖于我，因为察觉我心有不快，而重新变回嫁给我时的那个甜美女孩。同女人争执毫无意义。

最后，抑或

他：你的狗在喝冷水？

她：大概吧。

他：这小伙子喝了冷水会得肠绞痛的。

她：她是条母狗。而且我不担心肠绞痛。你知道吗，我担心的是发情期带她来公共场所。我不怕她得肠绞痛，我怕她会怀孕。

他：那可不都是一回事，哈、哈、哈。

她：对你的母亲来说，也许罢。

（此刻伟大的乔安娜从蝙蝠翅膀上猛扑而下，一记威严的拍击把他打落，并将她和狗升上胜利女神星座。她们将在那儿熠熠生辉亘古不变。）

我知道，在某处——就为了证明我是错的——生活着一位美丽（美丽自然是必须），知性，亲切，有修养和魅力的女子。她有八个孩子，自己烤面包、蛋糕、和派。一个人完成家务，做餐饭，养大孩子，在传统男性行业工作，朝九晚五，履行苛刻的顶级决策层职务。她那同样成功的丈夫爱慕她，因为就算她是位勤勉工作、雄心勃勃的经理人，就算她拥有鹰的眼睛、狮子的心、蝰蛇的灵舌、和大猩猩的肌肉，长得同好莱坞巨星柯克·道格拉斯一模一样，当她夜里回到家，换上轻薄的睡衣裙和假发，便能立刻蜕变为脑袋空空的《花花公子》女郎。谣言称，你不能同时成为八个人并拥有两套截然不同的价值观。而她的存在正是对这谣言的讥诮与驳斥：她仍能拥有女性气质。

——

The above is a section from Part V in Joanna Russ’s The Female Man (1975), a feminist science fiction classic and tour de force. Russ’s other non-fiction classic, How To Suppress Women’s Writing (1983) has been published in Chinese in late 2020. As far as I know, it is also the only piece of writing from Russ that exists in Chinese today, which is quite sad because Russ is an excellent storyteller. She is so good, so powerful, and so angry in such a way that is incredibly relevant to a new generation of frustrated young women in China, who are also very, very angry. They, nay, we have very progressive views on marriage, pregnancy, and childbirth, but have to navigate a disappointingly stagnant social reality and a political environment growing ever more dystopic by the day.

I came by Russ when serving as a teaching assistant for Mike Rea, some two or three years ago, and The Female Man was on the reading list. I owe Mike, forever, for the introduction because the book overtook me. For a couple weeks I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I have said above that Russ is angry. That’s really an understatement. She is bitter and biting, and wields words like daggers. During her career, she was attacked and ridiculed nonstop for it. If we live in a world that operates according to poetic justice or, even, a world with better literary tastes, there should be a twist of fate now and more people would be reading Russ. But we don’t. People still waste their precious time reading and talking about Heinlein. Some other racists and sexists may deserve a place among our science fiction or literary pantheon. H.P. Lovecraft has my vote. Definitely not Heinlein though.

Some last words on the title, 《女性男人》. On the Chinese internet, The Female Man has been variously referred to as 《雌性男人》and 《女身男人》. The latter might work, except not all female protagonists in the story are actually female-bodied. Regarding the former, 雌性 would be a literal translation of ‘female’ as denoting the biological sex. But I am not so sure that Russ actually uses ‘female’ in this way. I won’t go into the details here. 女性 just has a more neutral tone to it, and I like that; in comparison,《雌性男人》is quite eye-catching…somehow oddly salacious, but maybe that is a drawback, not an advantage.

《翅果》李立扬

凌晨两点，我于雨中醒来，而别的旅人仍在昏暗的公寓中沉眠。

我的父亲造访了我的梦。他穿着下葬时的衣衫，手中拿着一罐血，西装口袋中列布着黑色的种子。

他身上灰色的羊毛西装并不显旧，磨得光亮的肩膀和臂肘除外。我想，那也许是在狭窄的棺木中磨损的结果。

然后我注意到他的鞋，已经彻底穿坏了：皮革开裂，张着口，起了褶，褶上又起褶。缝线散开的地方，褶皱的接缝处，露出他赤裸的双脚。

父亲的脚踝令人心惊。他未着袜，只有极薄的鞋底使他不至于在行走时光着脚。

他是徒步奔波而来的。意识到这一点，我不禁流下泪。我想象父亲从宾州墓地中独自向上攀爬了数百级一模一样的台阶，然后，遵循某种直觉，向西行至芝加哥，来见他的妻子，孩子，和孩子的孩子。我不知道他是何时起程。他在找寻我，我们，他的家人，而我们却对他的到来一无所知。梦中的我为之羞耻，不安。

我不知道，为完成这段旅程他用了多少年。没有人告诉他我们在哪儿。我想到多年来，他顺着汽车盲区中的公路路肩，穿过田野，循着河川，沿北美城市和乡村的人行道，不论白天黑夜，孤身一人，踽踽独行，只觉心中不忍。

一个与他在1964年带来这个国度的家人分别了的，已过世了的中国男人；活着时，对大多数人来说是个陌生人；一个亚洲人，来到与亚洲交战的国家；如今，是死亡中的陌生人。我不断看向他的鞋。

全家人都聚集起来，为纪念他的归来合影留念。在这纷乱中，他却似乎心不在焉——他有约要赴。当其他人为挤进取景框忙着在镜头前落座、起身、再落座时，我发现他却没有按往日的习惯坐在正中。相反，他在第一排的最边上，看起来不仅非常自在，更有些漠然。我心中想，希望他的鞋不要出现在照片中，因为那会让他感到耻辱，那么破的鞋，那赤裸的脚踝。接着，我笃信，他将要问我一个问题，而我不会知道问题的答案。

照片刚拍完，他就站起身向我走来。回头想，占据了逝者从前座位的人，正是我自己。他让我去道别。我们得走了。我得跟他一起走。他的话似当头一棒。我没有动。察觉到这一点，他问我，我究竟愿不愿意同他一道。我回答，当然。我撒了谎。

他说，太好了。我会在门锁处等你。然后他就出了门。

我环视着我的十三位家人，觉得陡然间我被孤立了。但随即我的心中升起一种感觉，如延绵潮水：我永远无法离开他们。

然而父亲的鞋。破得那么不成样，那么旧，坏得那么彻底。我大声说，他真可怜。他的鞋，我可怜的父亲，他的鞋。我想我应当同他走。于是我开始回想那许许多多我应当与之告别的人的名字和脸。我得出结论，同父亲一道是我必做的事。但是唐娜，当我向你走来，同你告别时，我无法触碰到你的脸。

如果碰触意味着离别，那我不愿碰触你。我开始颤抖；颤抖，我需要碰触你。但我无法做到，不管如何假设…然而那意味着…正是如此…

我的爱人，什么是夜？一个男人在夜里思考，是不是夜？果实在夜里成熟，是不是夜？

我想起从前在安佐尔，沙滩边的竹码头，我同我的姐姐一道，在纸灯笼的光下钓鱼。我们趴在码头边缘向海水中望去，泛起无数涟漪的水面下，成群结队的章鱼，灯泡般的脑袋发着离奇的光。

夜正是夜那样，没有双手。夜是夜，就算夜是一盆烈火。夜是夜，即使夜是触手和漩涡。夜，甚至是沾血的蛋奶冻，是躯体，是可爱的水槽，即使我的手是一张可能的脸…过去了的夜是群岛的颜色。啊，我该如何跨越被抛掷之物留下的裂隙前来触碰你？夜，有什么是它不能推翻的？风，有什么是它不能抹除的？童年将逝，我们还需聆听何种故事？未来方至，玫瑰霸占了我们的每一扇窗，夜是创伤和入途，夜是粉色的粗鲁的拇指，栓子和水池，芥菜和痛楚，我的棍棒和香甜的红薯，身着红色外衫与绿色绣花鞋的白萝卜之王向蜗牛女王致信：我欲念你咸味的足，容许我从你的触角饮一杯酒。夜，灵动，变化多端。即使夜是夜，就算它是高烧和茶匙，木马和火车轨道，车厢里，除却我们家和另一头的两名乘客，就只有一位穿风衣的年轻女子，和她臂弯中的婴儿，被裹在尿湿的施皮格尔服饰目录册页中。

—

I started reading Li-young Lee’s The Winged Seed: A Remembrance (1995) recently and am completely blown away. So I decided to translate a couple pages from the beginning. Doing so has the benefit of forcing me to make decisions about how I truly want to understand any particular passage, even if that decision is an emphatic ‘it is ambiguous’. Otherwise I just get complacent playing with options.

There is a Chinese translation of it, already, published by 江苏凤凰文艺出版社 in 2015, titled 《带翼的种子• 怀念》. I browsed the first couple pages, and found it wanting. There are some plain errors: e.g. Ancol, a place in Jakarta is falsely translated as 安可儿. It should be 安佐尔, or 安卒 for many sinophones outside the mainland. Tricky phrases like ‘night past the color of archipelago’ are hard to render anyways for there is much ambiguity in the word ‘past’. But translating it as 夜越过群岛的色彩 (which the 2015 version does), in my opinion, is just incorrect. I have opted for 过去了的夜(是)群岛的颜色, reading ‘past’ as a modifier for ‘night’, meaning ‘gone by’. Alternatively, it could also be 夜比群岛的颜色更甚, where ‘past’ is read as a preposition, meaning ‘exceeding or beyond’. But considering that Lee was born in Indonesia, the biggest archipelago in the world, this phrase probably means to conjure a sense of remembrance. So I went for the interpretation that highlights the temporal dimension.