Week 8: WANDER / ROAM

Huang Kung Wang, Dwelling in the Fu-Ch'un Mountains, handscroll detail

The new word: WANDER / ROAM

The poems--as an inspiration, or sometimes simply as an opening to what poets do--which may translate into what you do... There's a always a play between the what and the how. The materials being words, rather than charcoal or color.

Po Chü-i (from T'ang Dynasty China) wrote this more than a thousand years ago. He inspired generations of writers (and painters) who followed... The translator is David Hinton.

The story here cuts close--but the hope (even veiled) remains very great...

Setting a Migrant Goose Free
Po Chü-i

Snows heavy in Hsun-yang this tenth-year winter,
riverwater spawns ice, tree branches break and fall,

and hungry birds flock east and west by the hundred,
a migrant goose crying starvation loudest among them.

Pecking through snow for grass, sleeping nights on ice,
its cold wings lumber slower and slower up into flight,

and soon it’s tangled in a river-boy’s net, carried away
snug in his arms, and put for sale alive in the market.

Once a man of the north, I’m accused and exiled here.
Man and bird: though different, we’re both visitors,

and it hurts a visiting man to see a visiting bird’s pain,
so I pay the ransom and set you free. Goose, o soaring

goose rising into the clouds – where will you fly now?
Don’t fly northwest: that’s the last place you should go.

There in Huai-hsi, rebels still loose, there’s no peace,
just a million armoured soldiers long massed for battle:

imperial and rebel armies grown old facing each other.
Starved and exhausted – they’d love to get hold of you,

those tough soldiers. They’d shoot you and have a feast,
then pluck your wings clean to feather their arrows.

_____

(Po Chü-i,  translated by David Hinton)