(1910–2000)
Born in Jiangsu, Bian Zhilin bought a copy of Bing Xin’s A Maze of Stars when he was fourteen, a chance encounter that kindled his passion for new poetry. In 1929 he entered Peking University and studied under Xu Zhimo, who quickly recognized Bian’s poetic talent and helped him get published. Closely associated with the Crescent poets, who emphasized metrics and prosody, Bian was most productive in the 1930s, when he wrote some of his best poems, including “Fragment” and “Dream of the Old Town,” which combine techniques of Western modernism with the Chinese poetic tradition. In the tumultuous decades in Mao’s China, Bian worked quietly as a professor and translator of Shakespeare.
Evening sun leaning on West Hill,
temple wall just standing, about to fall;
facing each other, what do they want to say?
Why don’t they say it, eh?
Haggard donkey, old man on its back,
hurries home, clackety-clack,
hooves rapping on clay and stone—
a dry and ragged tune!
A croak in midair—
treetop, a crow there
soars up, but makes no sound,
then lights and settles down.
—1930
There are two kinds of sound in the small town,
equally desolate:
the fortune-teller’s gong by day,
the watchman’s clapper at night.
Unable to shatter dreams with his gong,
as if in a dream
the blind man walks the streets,
step by step.
He knows which slab of stone is low,
which slab of stone is high,
and the age of the daughter in each household.
His claps sending people deep into dreams,
as if in a dream
the watchman walks the streets,
step by step.
He knows which slab of stone is low,
which slab of stone is high,
and the door of which house is most tightly shut.
“Third watch already, listen,
Ah Mao’s dad.
The baby makes such a row we can’t sleep a wink,
always crying in his dreams.
Let’s have his fortune told tomorrow.”
It’s deep in the night;
it’s the quiet afternoon:
the watchman with his clapper crosses the bridge,
the fortune-teller with his gong crosses the bridge.
Ceaseless is the sound of water flowing under the bridge.
—August 11, 1933
You stand on the bridge looking at the view—
the viewer on the balcony is viewing you.
The moon adorns your window—
you adorn someone else’s dream.
—October 1935
Fearing loneliness the country boy
kept a cricket beside his pillow.
Toiling in the city after he grew up,
he bought a luminous watch.
As a child he used to envy the cricket
for having weeds on the tomb as its garden.
Now he has been dead for three hours,
yet the watch keeps on ticking.
—October 26, 1935
(Translated by Mary Fung and David Lunde)