Born in Zhongshan, Guangdong Province, Ye Weilian (Yeh Wei-lien), also known as Wai-lim Yip, moved to Hong Kong at the age of twelve. He received a B.A. from National Taiwan University, an M.F.A. from University of Iowa, and a Ph.D. in comparative literature from Princeton University. For many years he has been professor in the Department of Literature, University of California, San Diego.
Ye started writing poetry and was active on the Hong Kong poetry scene in the 1950s. While a college student in Taiwan, he was closely associated with the Epoch Poetry Society. He developed his poetic theory, which relates modernist poetry to Taoist aesthetics, in the 1960s and ’70s; it was highly influential in Taiwan. Ye is also a prolific literary scholar and translator of classical and modern Chinese poetry.
I
North wind, am I to bear this one more year?
Streets shiver along the walls
Romances, cold sorrows, from the frontiers
Disclose to me these:
Patience of mountains Erratic breath of outlands
Chronic neighing of Tartar horses
Bonfires in war and farming in spring
Plants that transcend all knowledge
Immaculate snowfalls Grand cathedrals and palaces
All plunge into the scandals of gods
In our youthful days
The song goes:
The moon will rise
The sun will sink
Quick, quick, do not get lost in the sun
Have you forgotten the oracle of the dragon?
It may slip again from the jade balcony
Into this single sycamore among
Compacted houses Yesterday
Or is it today?
Beside the river, the deep-flowing river
and dark-shimmering rushes
I see a cloud of crows gather around a drifting of lives
But where to?
The winds bring the barking of dogs into winding back alleys
The poets are dead The Vixen reappears
Is the one-eyed seer still living?
The north winds roar In the cold street in the flying dust
I vaguely recognize this is the bus to my native land
Tables, mats, and wines proudly invite me
To look at the stars—fugitive ideas on flowers
And intentions in myths
We go sightseeing
II
My feet and my hands collide together In the rushing coach
Stumps uphold the body of winter
In the rush, the fire burns the translucent days of the past
In the rush, the tree-lined boulevard tempers the translucent days of the past
A line of thatched huts and flying birds embrace
My skyward solitude I go in search of
Vespers and festivals within a tent a beach
A kitten rains in apricot days and smoke from wild ferns
In the first frost shortly after my vigorous hands
Caressed a holy face
Standing up, he
Imitating the ancient prophet:
By the Twelve Branches
It comes true
It comes true
I wait for you to bring you to the golden dynasties of Tang,
Yu, Xia, Shang, Zhou
The earth holds a full load of floating-sinking memories
We were the great book read into the world
We were the children on the vastest plains
We were the giant of sky-reaching ranges
The earth holds a full load of floating-sinking memories
Glimmering Mars appears and strolls over our gardens
A man with disheveled hair sings
I want to see the land of Lu*
Mount Tortoise hides it
And I have no axe or hatchet
To Mount Tortoise, what can I do?
Warm southerly winds
Woes-soothing southerly winds
Grains-increasing southerly winds
In early winter
In whispers
In sickbed
The fire burns the translucent days of the past
The boulevard tempers the translucent days of the past
We drink to the flowering chrysanthemum make a flute from reeds
And play a stanza from the fugitive song
III
Do you not see people seeking for their children
the embryo of man?
Do you not see people seeking from abrupt waterfalls
an ode of stone?
Do you not see people seeking in the jingling of spears
communion with the heavens?
Against the maple, the willow, the wind, and the wine of the poet
There is the speech of cliffs the hurrah of the sea
The soundless pit of the sky as we remember
A source turns into a pond
or gets into plants
or gets into human bodies
real or unreal
abstruse or void
We simply walk down the steps No monsoon
Nor ill-omened events coming on
Let us brood over a tale: A peach or a desire
Which spoils the moral of the celestial court? O how boring
Let me tell you the legendary charm of a white mouse …
But on craggy precipices
Or on rocky ruins of a long wall
What can we make of the world?
We have admired
Millions of flowers, trees, and bays of water, far and near
What can we make of the world?
We have made and remade
Rhymes, rhythms, meter, tones, ballads, etc.,
What can we make of the world?
Board a congested bus stop at the crossroads
Look here and there wait for a butterfly
Wait for a supreme seer wait for a knight on horseback
Pass by
How many faces
How many names
Flouted by trees and buildings
My good friends? They are far away
I stop and scratch my head
Night brings down a galaxy of chilling rains
(1960)
(translated by Wai-lim Yip)
PASTICHES FROM TAIWAN COUNTRYSIDE
4. Sunset and white egrets
Ruler-straight horizon
Divides the scenery
The lower panel is broad ink strokes of mistiness
The upper panel is endless dreamy drunken red
Dots and dots of flying flashes
Now rising now falling like musical notes
Are silently playing
The sunset
Welcome back!
Egrets, white, wing to wing
wing upon wing
6. Deep night visitor
Night sinks deeper
Following the fragrance of the cassia
I walk the entire narrow lane
And arrive at the Temple of the Tutelary God
Beside a big banyan tree
When laughter of girls washing by the well
Has subsided
I tiptoe
To the side of the well
And, in a fast move,
Pull up from the well
A bucket of glittering stars
8. Glazed sun
Caught in the mud ditch
The sun
In one stroke
Glazes the thick murkiness
Into a stretch of
Ceramic brightness
9. To stay the sunset
In order to stay the sunset
Children bathing in the stream
Cup their hands and bail water
Toward the sky
Golden ears of grain
As in fairy tales
Transparent birds
Flap their wings in mid-air
(1981)
(translated by Wai-lim Yip)
Perhaps we have waited too long.
All journeys are a circle
(You said you knew)
Return to a pure beginning.
In spring: forest trees show their first green.
Some fierce animals appear.
In deep nights: dark water gurgles.
Some specks of ghostly fire drift around.
You departed from the east to the west, losing your way….
Anticipation is
A line in the distance
So thin, so small, so fine
Between seen and unseen.
Notes of flutes stretch on and on
Toward that distant beginning
Long forgotten
Chaining you.
Every time you said: We have waited too long,
You opened your heart’s window.
The air all at once was filled with the tenderness of earth,
As if that happy moment had already arrived.
Birds, like bouquets and bouquets of light,
Exploded out from the tree like a fountain.
You ran to embrace it
And suddenly stopped short.
Are you all ready?
After the fusion of this moment
And then
And then, separation and death.
You responded philosophically:
Eternal happiness is—
Eternal quest, following the wings of
Pain….
In the surging springtime,
In the clear river water,
Between the shadows of two banks of peach blossoms,
There is some prowling, there is some calling.
Invading the spring coldness is
Your familiar fragrance,
Such a soft and small line of fragrance
Chaining you.
Thus, you open your heart’s window again….
(1981)
(translated by Wai-lim Yip)
The souls of azalea flowers
Are trapped
Below the dark canal under the tar thoroughfare
The windblown ways of willows
Swing in the
Memories of a distant past
We travel together
On the dust-raising New Birth Road South
In search of
Dreaming about
Those familiar petals-red and leaves-green in the vague air
The old bell of National Taiwan University
As if to echo the turning wheels of bicycles
Rings, rippling waves
Reach us in the present
In a journey, anxious and pressing.
Distance
Like one’s age—in the mist
Is a network of lines that defy undoing
A mere dot of light
Occasionally
Brightens from the lukewarm past
Wisteria, a stretch of flowers
Flash by the car window
We travel together
Inside the restless humming of engines
Talking about a kind of cold
Talking about a kind of heat
And how they break out from rigid frames
To stimulate a kind of frisking
A kind of total unfurling
From the fountain of surging feelings
Between monotonous gray shadows
Under the chase of speed
And how to find out from it
Those words, engaging, disengaging, between getting and losing
In the cold
To let them slowly warm up
To let them slowly take on color….
The quiet cries of azaleas
Fade in the dust of cars
The fine combing of windblown willows
Becomes invisible in the dense opaque sunlight
We travel together
Toward the past
Toward the future
That runaway road
Now bright, now dark
(1985)
(translated by Wai-lim Yip)
*Lu is the birthplace of Confucius and a symbol of Chinese culture.