(1921–)
Born in He’nan Province, Zhou Mengdie (Chou Meng-tieh) graduated from the middle school and worked briefly as a schoolteacher and a librarian. He served in the military for seven years, and when he had to follow the Nationalist government to Taiwan in 1949, he left behind his wife and children. For the next twenty-one years, he ran a sidewalk bookstand in front of a Taipei café, selling newspapers, magazines, and poetry books (which he often gave away for free to students). He retired for health reasons in 1981 and now lives in a Taipei suburb.
A pen name, “Zhou Mengdie” alludes to the Taoist philosopher Zhuangzi (Chuang Tzu, 369?–286? B.C.), whose family name is Zhou, and his classic tale of “the butterfly dream”—“mengdie”:
Once Zhuang Zhou dreamt he was a butterfly, a butterfly flitting and fluttering around, happy with himself and doing as he pleased. He didn’t know he was Zhuang Zhou. Suddenly he woke up and there he was, solid and unmistakable Zhuang Zhou. But he didn’t know if he was Zhuang Zhou who had dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he was Zhuang Zhou. Between Zhuang Zhou and a butterfly there must be some distinction! This is called the Transformation of Things.
(based on Burton Watson’s translation in The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu [New York: Columbia University Press, 1968], 49)
Zhou is a long-time member of the Blue Star Poetry Society. His life and two books of poetry, published in 1959 and 1965, have made him a living legend on the poetry scene in Taiwan. In 1997, he became the recipient of the inaugural National Culture and Arts Foundation Award.
Hugging the bitter cold
and cruel heat of the Twelfth Month,
you sleep so soundly, so sweetly,
you, flock of daydreamers,
you, with smiles hanging forever
from your wingtips.
How much innocence
will be grabbed by the greed
of hand after hand?
Where a hot mist gently encircles, here
people are, cooking and selling
the corpses of bats!
Jacket after purple iron jacket
cut down; pair after pair of black
angels’ wings cut down;
daydreams petal by petal,
smiles crescent by crescent….
God, did you endow Darwin with tears?
(published 1959)
(translated by Lloyd Haft)
Yesterdays—
yesterdays soaked through,
drenched in the shades
of Hamlet and Rudin!
Begone, begone!
My parting gift to you’s a begging bowl
of nice cold compassion.
I’m the metamorphosis
of camel and sand.
Naked I lie on the back of loneliness,
letting myself be carried
on that endless distance, measureless height,
letting the sound of my footfalls
silently open in black blossoms
blooming on my chest.
Black blossoms stalking me
in smiling gloom,
the future luring me
with a blank sheet of mystery;
the blank sheet is endless,
my gloom is endless too….
It’s dark! Death pours me a glass
of grape wine. In the crazy, wide-awake eyes
of Omar Khayyam, I see the Eternal reflected,
and hidden behind the Eternal
my name.
(published 1959)
(translated by Lloyd Haft)
A trickle of Cloud Elixir
in your begging bowl. Tracks of your feet
that rooted nowhere! The cross blossoms
on the road you speed along.
Beyond tomorrow and yesterday and today
you’re burying sorrow.
Purple lilac, purple clover everywhere
like prayer beads, surrounding you with care.
Sun and moon: paired lamps
to light your soles, shoulders, back;
the robelike face of night.
The Fourteenth Month. Snowflakes fly.
The unnavigable waves of ancient legend
slumber. Ask upstream and over,
downstream and under
to show you the way.
Ask how long there’s been a way.
When will the way and the sky go together?
Ask when the Udumbara’s* going to bloom.
Can you glimpse, across the ties, the binds,
the drifting rings, which bubble of froth
is your name?
Ever tossing and turning on the Ganges.
Every patch of rain along the Ganges,
every drop from gulls, egrets,
shows care for you.
There’ll be no going back now.
Resting your head on a snow-white wave
you say: “I’ve come too far!”
All the crossings
are closed, bemisted in the Fourteenth Month.
Beyond the girls, the peaches, the farewells,
you fondle an empty begging bowl.
You wonder if tonight
a falling star will drop for you
in silence, like a tear from heaven.
Like a rain of blossoms,
like the finger of a Holy One
reaching from the Other Shore …
(published 1961)
(translated by Lloyd Haft)
There’ll be a patch of azaleas
blazing up from your eyes:
the fiftieth time the perennial grasses
make the change they can’t help making:
green to brown and back to green again.
And I’ll come looking for you
—as a broken-winged and timid butterfly—
and through a scent of tears, now red now white,
with a touch so familiar
I’ll speak to you of a former incarnation….
If only I could be transformed
into that underground darkness
you’re resting on! While thunder roars,
lightning tears, night cold daunts …
even at this distance, no heaven left to cry to,
my thought still turns on you,
solitary shadow, soul alone.
For whom can the bosom open?
Who, except the autumn weeds, knows
how heavy the blood in your heart,
how ready to be shed?
If I had known that parting
is the other side of meeting—
while the moon was haloed and before the wind
arose, I could have commanded the Long River
to go back, to the west, the source;
or given my infatuations,
spit out on a bloody handkerchief,
to the fire to burn. And stepped out of the ashes
and seen, beyond the body and within,
smoke flying, smoke vanishing.
The poisoned arrow of my plaint
has left the bowstring, shot and gone,
never to be shot back.
When will I ever roam at ease
like the biggest swans in the highest heaven?
In dreams I always see heaven falling,
see a thousand fingers, a thousand eyes,
dropping like a net
while I—mud to the left, rocks to the right—
walk straight at the screaming mouth
of a black pit….
Of all impasses the most impassable!
Like a ray of cold radiance
yearning to escape from the sobbing scabbard
left behind when the sword broke.
When I roused myself and soared, riding the roc,
and died—south of the South Pole, pleasure and pain,
those kaleidoscopic cat’s eyes,
opened a window for me.
A face, bleached
in the numberless night skies of the years—
my face. Blue tears gradually light up.
On the sea of your memory
the wind whirls, raising up answers.
The snow and the plum blossoms
have all gone back to winter.
Beyond the thousand mountains
a setting moon shines in solitude.
Who is it—coming again,
the familiar one, the one yet unborn?
(published 1964)
(translated by Lloyd Haft)
Your shadow is a bow.
And with yourself you draw yourself
full: so full it hums.
Every day, out of the east, a sun’s shaken down:
ball after ball of copper-red autumn, completed
in your wind-dried hands.
Why don’t you grow a thousand hands, a thousand eyes?
—you have so many autumns:
so many selves, waiting to be shaken down.
(published 1965)
(translated by Lloyd Haft)
Boat—carrying the many, many shoes,
carrying the many, many
three-cornered dreams
facing each other and facing away.
Rolling, rolling—in the deeps,
flowing, flowing—in the unseen:
man on the boat, boat on the water,
water on Endlessness,
Endlessness is, Endlessness is upon
my pleasures and pains,
born in a moment
and gone in a moment.
Is it the water that’s going,
carrying the boat and me? Or am I going,
carrying boat and water?
Dusk fascinates.
Einstein’s smile is a mystery, comfortless.
(published 1965)
(translated by Lloyd Haft)
My ear membranes are rusty—soon they’ll be cocoons!
Between dreams and isolation
I’m a snake! coiled in fantasies of waking up to spring.
Who knows how much time my sleep has flattened?
The night’s as long as sorrow;
Cold’s shell cracking inch by inch.
Where did the mail boat run aground
that set out from Subzero
carrying the Twelfth Month in bloom?
In dreams I always see snowslides,
creepers swinging from steep cliffs,
touch-me-nots no more to be restrained,
eyes closed, ruminating wind and sun …
while a stone lion, its face
gloomier than Le Penseur’s,
stands up, hops up eastward,
and roars till the dawn awakens
that makes Chaos laugh forth its tears….
(published 1965)
(translated by Lloyd Haft)
Suddenly I wake up
to the sound of a rain of blossoms in profusion,
pounding till my shadow’s soaked!
Is it a dream? Real?
Facing tonight: an upside-down
boat under a coral reef.
How much endurance will turn my bones
to an indestructible Relic? Buddha,
your heart is radiant, but the Sixth Month’s heart is warm—
how many Sixth Months will I have?
Where can I park my perseverance?
Between you and the Sixth Month.
They say snakes’ veins are ageless!
Even if you worked the metal of eternal night
into autumn, into winter;
even if darkness gouged out its own eyes …
the snake would know: from under the water
he could still cry tidings of fire.
Death whirled, dancing on my palm
till she fell, dropped like a meteor.
I want to turn around, pick her up, and put her back
but—rainbow broken, red clouds flown—
she’s already become
a profusion of butterflies.
(published 1965)
(translated by Lloyd Haft)
“If you call the mountain and the mountain does not come, then you must go to it.”—the Qur’an
Up from the unresolved you fly,
so high, so alone,
wanting to stick your head out past the heavens,
see how your shadow
is calmer than all your thinking,
gaunter than your philosophy,
more obstinate and old.
The sorrow of Sisyphus lights up
in a symphony of thunder
and you weep like fate,
weep this day, whose day is this
and night, whose night is this?
Vague in the heights, an echo is calling you;
beyond the bitter smile of the honeysuckle
you’re trembling. “If you have no crutch, then
throw away your crutch”—that’s the sort
of madman you are.
Gales moan at your hairtips.
The cold face of time grows darker,
says there are other heavens beyond the heavens,
other clouds beyond the clouds.
Says an inch of green foxtail
is tall as the radiant points of a lion’s mane.
Every rock’s a fabulous mountain.
Let Caesar go back to Caesar,
God to God, you to you—
till the Eternal unfolds its full scroll of darkness
to cover the you and the Moses on your forehead.
(published 1965)
(translated by Lloyd Haft)
Is it a pair of antlers
that a gazelle left hanging here?
Or is it a vacant stare, left behind
at Waiting Rock?*
Who is to say after the Five Seasons
there is no Sixth?
High in the cliffs, I faintly hear
spring on its tightrope, shivering
and again shivering.
Yesterday you were a snowdrift,
today you are spring grass
beneath the snowdrift,
hazy with awakening.
Whose is the luck-bringing magpie,
carrying in its mouth
a skyful of red clouds
on plum twigs of the Fifth Month?
From beyond the rainbow, birds
come flying;
from beyond the birds, a rainbow
comes gushing—
your hidden thoughts are a herd of sheep
that walked out over the mountainside
and know no way back home,
seeing only peak on peak
of shades of autumn.
The wind that came from cactus country
goes back into cactus
with a clang, and Contemplation’s on.
From now on, after the Five Seasons
there’ll be no more Sixth
till Contemplation wakens from the wind,
till nimbly as a butterfly
you waken from the wind.
(published 1965)
(translated by Lloyd Haft)
*Udumbara refers to a flower that blooms every three millennia, which coincides with the birthday of a buddha.
*Waiting Rock refers to a rock on North Mountain in Wuchang. According to the legend, a soldier’s wife stood there every day, waiting for her husband to return. She died and turned into a rock in the shape of a standing woman.