Lost in Translation

偶然

我是天空里的一片云，
偶尔投影在你的波心——
　你不必惊异，
　更无须欢喜——
在转瞬间消灭了踪影。
　
你我相逢在黑夜的海上，
你有你的，我有我的，方向；
　你记得也好，
　最好你忘掉，
在这交会时互放的光亮。

-- 徐志摩 


I found this poem lying on my desk one morning . While I was in high school, my father still clung on to the hope of imparting me with a stronger interest in and better, if not full, knowledge of Chinese. At this moment in time, let's just say it remains half-baked. Hopefully not for long though!


Regardless, this poem has stuck to me. Maybe because it's so different from the Tang dynasty poems  I was forced to memorize and mumble aloud as a little kid. Or maybe it's because Xu Zhimo was a Chinese kid like me who received a Western education (Warning!: over-simplification to the max. That thought is just what goes on in my silly head. I readily confess our backgrounds are nothing alike. But I can't help the way my simple brain likes me to relate to other people.) He apparently fell in love with Keats and Shelley while he was at Cambridge then returned to China where he led the modern poetry movement. Who knows, maybe I don't even like the poem that much but am just delighted that I can translate it and am frustrated that I haven't seen another translation that is close enough to my own understanding of it. Here goes:

sand, and berried

Parachutes, My Love, Could Carry Us Higher
By: Barbara Guest


I just said I didn’t know
And now you are holding me
In your arms,
How kind.
Parachutes, my love, could carry us higher.
Yet around the net I am floating
Pink and pale blue fish are caught in it,
They are beautiful,
But they are not good for eating.
Parachuted, my love, could carry us higher
Than this mid-air in which we tremble,
Having exercised our arms in swimming,
Now the suspension, you say,
Is exquisite. I do not know.
There is coral below the surface,
There is sand, and berried
Like pomegranates grow.
This wide net, I am treading water
Near it, bubbles are rising and salt
Drying on my lashes, yet I am no nearer
Air than water. I am closer to you
Than land and I am in a stranger ocean
Than I wished. 


But... but parachutes can't and don't take us higher. They only lessen the impact of our plummeting fall through space. I'm guessing she knows  "my love could carry us higher," her love being the only thing that could actually lift them up from this suspended state. Yet she stubbornly inserts that second comma and assumes this reassuring and slightly patronizing tone by addressing her lover, allowing her to sublimate that knowledge and depend on this object which is external to her to save them from the fall. But what is "the fall"?