Ji Xian (Chi Hsien) is the pen name of Lu Yu, who was born in Hebei Province but spent his childhood in Yangzhou, which he regards as his home. He graduated from Soochow Art Academy in 1933. In 1936 he went to Japan to study painting, returning to China the following year. During the Sino-Japanese War (1937–45), Ji Xian lived under harsh circumstances in various places, including Wuhan, Hong Kong (where he worked as an editor for the Citizen’s Daily), and Shanghai. In 1948 he moved to Taiwan with his family; he taught for twenty-six years at Chenggong High School in Taipei. He retired in 1974 and immigrated to the United States in 1976. He lives with his wife and continues to write poetry in Milbrae, California.
Ji Xian started writing at the age of sixteen. Under the pen name Louis, he befriended such poets as Dai Wangshu, Shi Zhecun, Xu Chi, and Du Heng in the 1930s, contributed to Les Contemporains, and founded various poetry journals. In Taiwan he created the Modern Poetry Quarterly in 1953, which served as a fertile breeding ground for a new generation of poets. In 1956 he founded the Modernist School and announced “Six Tenets,” the second of which states that modern Chinese poetry is the product of “horizontal transplantation” rather than “vertical inheritance.” In other words, foreign—especially Anglo-European—poetry rather than the Chinese literary tradition was the dominant influence on modern Chinese poetry. Throughout the 1950s and ’60s Ji Xian was a controversial figure, engaged in many debates on or beyond the poetry scene. There is no doubt, however, that he was instrumental in promoting modern poetry in postwar Taiwan. Through his charisma and polemical ideas, he influenced generations of poets and left an indelible imprint on literary history.
Looking through windows of your soul,
Into its darkest recesses,
I see a city in flames, no one coming to the rescue
Only a tide of naked madmen.
I hear a sound pierce through that boundless maelstrom
Of my name, name of the lover, name of the enemy,
Names of the dead and living unnumbered.
When I answer in hushed voice
“Yes, I am here,”
I too become a fearsome city in flames.
(1936)
(translated by Denis Mair)
Expanding and still expanding,
On top of that exploding and exploding,
An inconceivable spiral!
A spiral beyond conceiving!
On the strength of your intuition,
Your innate ability,
Maybe Man,
You pull it out of the air.
And please give me answers;
Have them be correct ones.
In the jottings of your notebook,
Write down:
The X to the Nth power of life and other inscrutable symbols.
Then we say good-bye.
Do not cry and do not linger.
When there is no more magic
And there is no God,
When all heavenly bodies have been flattened,
And icthyological specimens begin to swim,
Then, my Maybe Man,
We will have a happy reunion,
On the most dangerous edge of a planet that looks like a clock.
By that time, oh my Maybe Man,
Will you still remember how to play the mandolin?
I don’t know;
Perhaps my throat has gone mute already,
No longer able to sing a waltz.
Yet we are joined into one body,
And with the speed of horses, we run,
Flailing eight pairs of futurist legs,
Casting shadows on a hard, cold ice cap that has no bounds.
(1936)
(translated by Denis Mair)
Lie down,
Let the cavalcade of time
Go galloping
Across the plain
Of my frail chest.
I keep silent,
And hand over
All my infant dreams
For them to carry away,
Because this calvalcade
Having neither enemy forces
Nor friendly forces,
Is an inconceivable calvalcade.
(1936)
(translated by Denis Mair)
I must use all the atoms I am made of,
My miniscule life,
And my giant heart,
To complete my pagoda-shaped plan;
Then I will stand at the apex of a cone,
Smoking strong plug tobacco and thinking,
What is more, with a genuine voice, a serene voice,
A dreamy voice,
I will declare to all contemporaries and future generations,
To all green lovers and cats,
To all mysterious telescopes,
My pagoda-shaped plan.
(1938)
(translated by Denis Mair)
The star-plucking youth
Takes a fall.
The deep blue sky laughs at him.
The great earth laughs at him.
Newspaper reporters
Bring out unbearable adjectives
And crown his name with them,
In ridicule.
A millennium later,
In a newly built museum,
A statue is displayed
Of the star-plucking youth.
His left hand is holding up the Dog Star.
His right hand is holding up Vega.
Around his waist he wears
The belt studded with three stars
Of Sagittarius, who shot him with an arrow.
(1942)
(translated by Denis Mair)
A train rolls by and out of sight, carrying a dog that howls at the moon.
The tracks heave a sigh of relief.
Songs with personality arise from all sides from naked girls astride giant cacti,
A chorus with no consistent meaning,
Discordant sounds on all sides.
Dark shadows of cacti recline on the flatland.
The flatland is a suspended disc.
The fallen train does not crawl back from the curved horizon,
But forlorn howls have struck the moon’s gong and now bounce back
To swallow the voices of girls singing.
(1942)
(translated by Denis Mair)
Holding a cane 7
Clamping teeth on a pipe 6
The number 7 has the form of a cane.
The number 6 has the form of a pipe.
So here I am.
Cane 7 + pipe 6 = myself who am 13
A poet. A genius.
A genius among geniuses.
The most unfortunate number there could be!
Ah yes, a tragedy.
Tragedy, tragedy I have come.
And so you clap your hands, you shout hooray.
(1943)
(translated by Denis Mair)
A fashion show of girls in the clouds goes floating by my window on a screen of azure sky:
Those are orange-colored girls kissed by the sun;
Those are peach-colored young girls;
Those girls are mascara-colored, crimson-colored, violet-colored;
And embedded in the picture frame of the window’s perfect rectangle:
Buildings in gray, white, black, and brown colors, with roofs showing red,
And the posture of pipe-smoking factory chimneys, the posture of a water tower and budding trees and electric poles.
Musical notes of sparrows leap onto a staff of electric wires.
(1944)
(translated by Denis Mair)
I must send forth my voice, unceasingly, within my shell-covered cosmos. The shell is tough yet transparent, like plexiglass. My cosmos is absolute.
I send forth my voice, because only my voice can prove my existence. All things are unreliable. All things are not to be trusted. All things have danger: those meanings of all tempting forms and magic spells that surround me. I must close my eyes to the beauty or ugliness of those forms. I must remain ignorant of the depth or shallowness of those meanings. Otherwise, the one who gets canceled out will surely be me—a whirlwind from any direction can snuff me out, as readily as blowing out a match.
My voice is multifarious, like the seven colors of the sun. There are pure colors, composite colors, appearing in endless variety. I paint my voice with colors: indigo, orange, lemon yellow, violet, green, turquoise, gray, and blackest black; at times I paint it with powerful crimson and red. But my crimson is not the crimson of the Comintern flag. My red is not the red of their Red Square. It is the burning essence of my life—a combustion that is irrepressible, inextinguishable, and fatal, yes fatal.
Simple yet complex, tranquil yet turbulent, my voice. Nearby yet distant, fleeting yet eternal, my voice. My voice proves my existence. Therefore I unceasingly send forth my voice, within my shell-covered absolute cosmos.
(1945)
(translated by Denis Mair)
I have a studio that is closed and cut off from everyone. Inside of it I can face the mirror and paint my naked body on canvas. My naked body is skinny, pale, and riddled with wounds: blue, purple, old and new, never fully healing, just like my hatred, never fading away.
As to who struck me with a whip, I do not know; who hacked at me with an axe, I do not know; who tightened a rope around me, I do not know; who branded me with hot iron, I do not know; who splashed acid on me, I do not know.
I only know the wish for vengeance burns fiercely in my heart.
But my only means of vengeance, which I have already adopted, is to draw my wounds over and over, to paint them over and over, in perfect likeness, then take them somewhere, to show at an exhibition, to let everyone look at them, let them also shudder in disgust, let them also know pain, and most of all fill them also with undying hatred like my own. And that is all, that is all.
(1946)
(translated by Denis Mair)
Within a castle wall devised of jugs,
I sit silently,
Royal in bearing.
Well before the end of everyone’s office hours,
I gaily arrive, the only one:
The three o’clock drinker.
I call the barkeep for the best wine,
Pour into my own cup, at perfect ease,
Ruling my complete and pure domain.
My departure and the collapse of my kingdom
Are due to the entrance of a second customer,
An invasion upon my grand solitude.
(1947)
(translated by Denis Mair)
PSYCHOANALYSIS OF PIPE SMOKING
The wreathing tendril that rises from my pipe
Is a mushroom cloud,
A snake,
A life preserver,
And the naked body of a woman.
She dances and she sings.
She sings of a dried-out river that overflows its banks,
And the extinction of a squadron of dreams.
(1953)
(translated by Denis Mair)
You are an unfinished masterpiece;
By the time you take on picturelike qualities
And give me a Mona Lisa feeling,
I have officially laid down my brush.
Because your tender right forearm
Has been stricken with terrible leprosy;
And your “Giaconda smile” has been slashed
By the knife of a madman.
(1953)
(translated by Denis Mair)
Take the Greek goddess Aphrodite, stuff her into a slaughterhouse machine
cut her up
into chunks
Extract the elements
Of her “beauty”
Prepare them as specimens; and then
in one little bottle
after another
Display them in categories at an exhibition of relics, let the public enjoy them,
And get some education on top of it.
This is indeed the twentieth century: our very own.
(1957)
(translated by Denis Mair)
Bath finished on a summer afternoon
Stretched out for a moment’s rest
Suddenly my long lean body strikes me
With its resemblance to a Christ figure.
It too could be betrayed
Could be pierced with nails
And my type-B blood
Would also be pure and holy
It must not flow in vain
How can I let it flow in vain?
So let it flow!
(1961)
(translated by Denis Mair)
BEFORE COMPLETION.* ONE
They like high speeds those greens
Being flammable, they are melancholy
As for the likes of decayed leaves deficient in octane
Melancholy they are not at all
Thus I often perform a clambering act
While whistling most unmusically, in sailor fashion
Inside a whole note marked with a special pause
Climbing up rigging so as to transcend
All greens and decayed leaves
All things flammable and deficient in octane
Whether melancholy or not melancholy, fond or not fond of high speeds
All in all I have begun again (Ah! Members of the audience
Hiss or leave early if you please
Shout loudly, keep statistically silent, or loudly applaud—
There is no public order to observe here)
Yet a cylindrical shape taken to a geometrical exponent is how
I climb up and plunge down; yet the geometrical exponent of a cylindrical shape is how I plunge down
And climb up …
(1959)
(translated by Denis Mair)
No sooner do I assume
A posture of flight, than the world
Goes into an uproar.
No end of hunters
No end of shotguns
Aiming
Opening fire.
Every bullet hole they make in the firmament
Lets through the light of a star.
(1983)
(translated by Denis Mair)
*“Before Completion” is the name of the last hexagram in the Yijing (I Ching or Book of Changes).