Also known as Dominic Cheung, Zhang Cuo (Chang Ts’o), pen name of Zhang Zhen’ao, was born in Macao, although his ancestral home is Huizhou, Guangdong Province. After graduating from a Jesuit middle school in Hong Kong, he earned a B.A. in Western languages and literatures from National Zhengzhi University, Taiwan; an M.A. in English from Brigham Young University; and a Ph.D. in comparative literature from University of Washington, Seattle. Since 1974 Zhang has taught in the Departments of Comparative Literature and East Asian Languages and Literatures at University of Southern California, Los Angeles.
Zhang began writing poetry in the 1960s and to date has published eleven collections. He started out as a modernist, but in the 1970s he renounced modernism and turned to realism, addressing social issues in a simpler language. His mature style, which blends the lyrical with the narrative, has won him several prizes in Taiwan. The theme of his recent poetry is a persistent quest for homeland, identified as Taiwan, which nevertheless leads to restless wandering.
Raise your head out of meditation, the trance starts with the scent of hair roots
following the breath of a breeze
you appear in the light of autumn—
gorgeous, and bright
some say you are wasting away
it is an announcement of autumn’s relaxed descent
A mood of falling leaves
in the hues of a scarlet season
remembering Mu Dan, and his lines:
“Your eyes see the conflagration,
you cannot see me, though I light for you;
Ah, what burns is only a ripe age,
yours, mine. We, parted as if by a range of mountains.”
A noon like a gray pigeon in the courtyard of an old temple
an ugly relief of an oldster’s head holds
a lamp that will never be lit!
A little solemn and sacred, like a witness
all previous pain and sorrow
could vanish in a traded glance
or mutual concern, even love
Thereupon in all seasons
stubbornly, we persist in a rose garden
and silently embrace in a world beyond the reach of words containing all gingko trees, cotton roses, and birds of paradise
(another type of bright genealogy of light)
This merciful, cruel autumn!
brings tears and joy, alarms and excitement
a tiny bit of greedy expectation too
from the start quietly all along
the persistence of suggestion.
(1992)
(translated by Michael Day)
When the ground beneath a gingko is gold,
I know cold-faced autumn absolutely cannot be held.
The words of wind brush by, an exchange of heat and cold,
Leaving behind a translucent space.
I begin to know—
Already it is the distance of winter.
There is a fog rising from the haze behind my eyes
In the distant gloom, so near
And coldly pretty,
Despair big with contradiction and expectation
Lingering in the desolation of autumn and the provocation of spring;
There’s a dampness, not last night’s feeling of spring,
But the great gray sea of winter.
That is a billowing poignant refusal,
Just as if amid the endless years
Trying to stop the unstoppable
Seasons that breezily arrive then drift away.
You ask me how to let winter keep its pure identity,
I reply, with a pale face, a twinkling frost on my temples,
And a leopard of Hemingway
At Kilimanjaro, pure white ice and snow!
That is another kind of persistence and transparency,
Another type of winter distance,
Silent, and far beyond reach.
(1992)
(translated by Michael Day)
With a hopeless love we turn into a flame that lights our path
sealed into an earthen jar, by night we wade
into a lake where a flock of wild geese rests, intentionally announcing our presence
a mystery of nature, goose slaves compete to cry in alarm
raise a tumult on a thousand sandbars
later they settle down—
nothing but a fight of light between moon and stars.
Finally we reach the edge of the formation of geese
entrapping them in an inescapable dragnet
until one large goose wails, breaks through the net
then, we keenly sense the wretched sorrow of
the instinct to escape, the dutiful looking back
no look is so despairingly met
so absolute, yet futile
awakening a thousand years of poetic promises to never part
even the unthinking chivalry of a double death!
With the fall of the Jin,** the Mongols continue south
fools and idiots rendezvous and tryst
the powerful and the rich pay a million for a nice pot, a hundred pieces of gold for a courtesan
husbands and wives of similar ilk separately fly away
to the South of vast waters, soft sand, and tall grass
one body sinks, trussed
how can the other fly into a thousand mountains and snow at dusk?
In the night, we seem to hear a song
an intermittent query—
I ask the world … love is …
(published 1993)
(translated by Michael Day)
“Moving, moving, always moving on”*
The hardest thing to while away is repose
Torrents of rain in the plum-blossom season
Still dodge behind innumerable sultry afternoons
Lush silvergrass grows in the courtyard
In a provocative pose, as to the river, grass in the wake of a prairie fire
Long ago after waiting or expectation is turned to ash
A promise that can’t be kept is a lie
Leaving never to return is to be parted by death
What really cuts us off is not a path
But two hearts incapable of trust!
That evening as I rushed for the night train
I thought of a song about
An illusory butterfly, night rain
Tapping on a window
Yet love is my permanent faith
Though the road is long and hard, and meetings unknown
My night will forever be your day.
(published 1994)
(translated by Michael Day)
“We are a pair of scissors
who come together to cut.”
—Anne Sexton
Hand in hand in tacit agreement
we walk into a secret garden of negation
the subject of blooming is exceptionally clear
but the ending of wilting is vague
Like a song with teardrops—
“A life of decline, a withering rose
a lifetime of beauty all for this love.”
But you must know,
getting together is easy staying hard
staying together is hard
abiding even harder.
We seek to capture scattered shadows and light
holding the pure purple blossoming of summer in reserve
we resist the hungry gloom of autumn
another kind of drizzly afternoon
grasping your hand
impossible to age with you
“This kind of emotion is unnameable
I strip off my mask of many years, follow you in crime
to again know this world.”
But after recognition what is there?
And what after staying together?
many of life’s idiocies lie in wait
all to prove a language of constancy!
You should know—
“Though in the public eye the mountains and rivers remain unchanged
there can be no return to the same tableau.”
A face of wind frost
the withered look of a tree
everything seems to be in the secret garden, you and me,
and all the reckless accomplishments of the flowers.
(published 1994)
(translated by Michael Day)
* “Words of a Goose Catcher” is based on the tenth-century Taiping Compendium, which thus notes the life of wild geese and the technique of goose catching: “Wild geese spend the night on the banks of rivers and lakes, on sand beaches and shoals, moving in hundreds and thousands. One mighty one resides in their midst and has slave geese surround him and police the area. Southerners have a method of catching them: when the sky is dark, or when there is no moon, they conceal candles in earthen jars and several people carrying clubs steal forward with bated breath. When they are almost upon the geese, they lift the candles a little way out of the jars, then hide them again. The slave geese raise the alarm, frightening the big one too. In a short while calm is restored and then men move forward again, again raising the candles. The slave geese are frightened again. The whole process is repeated four times, by which time the big one is angrily pecking the slave geese. The candle carriers slowly close in and raise the candles again, but now the slave geese are afraid of being pecked and do not respond. Then, lifting their candles high, the men with clubs enter the flock, striking out around them, harvesting a great many geese.”
** The Jin Dynasty was destroyed by the Mongols in 1234. The poet Yuan Haowen (1190–1257) wrote the famous song lyric that begins with the line: “Ask the world what love is.” It was based on a real-life incident: on the way home from a state examination, Yuan met a goose hunter and learned that during the course of the hunt a goose had escaped but its partner had been caught in the net and died; the escaped goose wailed mournfully and would not leave, and finally, it threw itself at the earth and died. Touched by its faithfulness, the poet bought both geese and buried them in Goose Mound.
* From the first of the “Nineteen Ancient Poems,” a collection of poems by unknown authors from the turbulent time of dynastic transition in the second–third centuries A.D. The cited poem expresses the sorrow of a conscript’s wife.