Kjell Espmark, The Imperial Army in Xi’an Translated by Göran Malmqvist

What is the devouring light

we are staggering towards? Unarmed.

The sword is but a void in my grip.

The wooden hilt has mouldered away

and the bronze blade has fallen to the ground, green

and brittle like eggshell, I feel

the terrified faces of others within my own.

My twitching muscles search in theirs

but fail to find our rapture:

the stiff cries above our lips,

the delirium that made us implacable.

Here in the vanguard not one coat of mail ─

in our encounter with the future

intoxication was to be our armour.

We wait for it, shaking, a horde of

fragments leaning into each other, shamefully

seeking the support of others. I understand nothing:

surely our army was invincible?

Close beside me

I sense the flank of a horse:

only a stiffened neighing from the ground.

I’m still half asleep.

Only an instant ago

I possessed senses. And was sought by one

who was as close as my own skin, kneeling,

a tress of hair, held taught by the comb

that falls to the ground

as the lips seek my throbbing groin,

and who still defends her honour

throughout the centuries I have been gone:

a face more and more dissolved,

a voice more and more tenuous,

the only one who knew my loneliness.

Now there is nothing but this light.

Nothing else ever happened.

An archer close by, kneeling,

his crossbow drawn against the throbbing light,

without stock, without string, the patinated

arrow-head fallen to the ground.

He must have had a name. Or

was there not even a name to forget?

Yet the situation tells me

that he is our best archer:

his mouldered arrow never fails to hit the target.

But what is his target?

He has only terror where his sight should be.

His lips tighten from what he sees.

Straining black lips of burnt clay.

On his back a strip of skin, broad as a hand, is

utterly unprotected, bubbling, blackening,

a peeling text, for no one to read.

This is a final loneliness.

A loneliness in 38 formations.

I rush forward, my hat

is a bird that rises from my head.

In collapsing order we stumble

into the growing light.

With an aching shard of tile serving me for eye

I see that the gleam is full of shapes,

flaming white.

They move against us with drunken faces:

merciless. I recognize them!

I recognize my own features,

I have but one thought left,

more like a wriggling void behind my forehead

and hard to retain a grip on.

But I sense that you who trust in us

needed to feel our helplessness.

The bird risen from my head,

from these scattering shards,

brings you tidings of our helplessness.

My views on the Confucius Institutes Reply to a question from a Chinese journalist

According to information of December of last year, 475 Confucius Institutes and 851 Confucius Classrooms for pupils in secondary schools have been established in 126 countries in the last ten years. These Confucius Institutes are meant to play a major role as a Soft Power promoting efforts to ease the way for the globalization of Chinese culture. Unlike the independent Goethe Institutes and the Alliance française, the Confucius Institutes are associated with already existing universities and high-schools in the host countries. As I see it, this is where the problem rests. I personally feel that the association of the Confucius Institutes with host universities threatens to nullify their own aims. The conflicts that have arisen between Confucius Institutes and their host universities mostly seem to originate in diverging views on what topics can and what cannot be part of the curricula. If the Confucius Institutes were wholly independent, they would of course be free to exclude such topics from their curricula as may not be freely discussed in China. 

In the last two years the American Association of University Professors and the Canadian Association of University Teachers have recommended that their associated universities cancel or refuse to renew contracts with Confucius Institutes for the sake of safeguarding the academic freedom of the universities. Negative views on these institutes are also spreading in Europe. My own Alma Mater, Stockholm University, decided on December 20 of last year not to renew its contract with the Confucius Institute established there in 2005, as the first Confucius Institute in Europe. 

My own attitude toward the Confucius Institutes is based partly on the fact that a number of university departments of Chinese in the Western world, after having established contact with a Confucius Institute, have turned into centers for the teaching of elementary Chinese, to the detriment of serious research. My attitude is also based on my belief that the HANBAN Headquarters of the Confucius Institutes are less well informed about the cultural essentials of China. Some years ago, the HANBAN decided to initiate a re-translation into English of The Five Confucian Classics (易，书，诗，礼，春秋), to serve as textbooks for the indoctrination of Western readers.

易 is an ancient handbook of divination, written in a deliberately obscure language lacking literary quality and exceedingly hard to penetrate even for scholars who have made a special study of the text. Poor translations of the work have served and still serve as a New Age Bible for generations of hippies.

书 is a collection of archaic documents, mostly fictitious speeches, by prominent members of the archaic society of China, which very few Chinese can read with full understanding;

诗 is an anthology of poetry, containing 305 poems from the first half of the first millenium before our era. Except the folk poems in the section 國風,“Guofeng”, large portions of the text could not be appreciated without lengthy learned commentaries. Bernhard Karlgren has presented a scholarly translation of the whole text, and Arthur Waley a literary translation of the text.

礼 consists of collections of dry as dust notes on rites and rituals of feudal China, mostly of little or no literary value;

春秋 is an annalistic chronical of one of the feudal states (Lu) in the period 722-481 B.C., totally void of literary quality.

This initiative in my opinion reveals a lack of knowledge not only of Western Sinology, but also of the researches by generations of eminent Chinese scholars in the fields of philology and textual criticism from the 漢 Han dynasty to the present day. It also reveals a total lack of appreciation of the appropriateness of these texts as an introduction to Chinese culture.

Suggested content of a HANBAN handbook:

Selections from the 國風 “Guofeng” section of the 詩經 Shijing, containing folk songs;

Selections from 孟子Meng Zi, 論語Lunyu, 荀子Xun Zi, 列子 Lie Zi, 莊子Zhuang Zi and 墨子Mo Zi;

Selections from the 左傳Zuozhuan;

Selections from 楚辭，九歌Chuci, Jiuge:

Selections from 司馬遷Sima Qian, 史記 Shiji;

Selections of 漢Han poetry;

Selections of南北朝 Nanbeichao (420-581) poetry;

Selections of 唐Tang poetry and 宋Song lyrics;

Selections of Buddhist sermons from the Tang and Song periods，such as 慧能，六祖壇經 ;

One Yuan drama;

Selections from 明Ming and 清Qing novels.

It seems to me that such a handbook would be far more useful than a re-translation of the 五經。

I would not be fair to myself, nor to the HANBAN for that matter, if I refrained from referring to an incident that took place on the eve of the opening of the European Association for Chinese Studies Conference in Portugal in July of last year, when Mrs 許琳Xu Lin, the Executive Director of the HANBAN, ordered four pages to be torn off from the Conference program which referred to a gift of books from the Central Library in Taiwan and to the support given to the European Association for Chinese Studies by the 蔣經國基金會Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation. Her high-handed action, which was deeply regretted and condemned by sinologists all over the world, has no doubt greatly influenced Western sinologists’ negative attitude toward the Confucian Institutes.

I much regret that many Chinese authorities choose to consider any views that deviate from their own as inimical, aiming at harming China and offending the Chinese people. This has caused many of my colleagues, less outspoken than myself, to prefer to keep silent instead of entering into serious discussions that could have led to positive results.

I wish to assure you that I have the highest regard for the manifestations of Chinese culture, ancient and modern, with which I have come into close contact. I am also grateful that, as a translator, I have been given the opportunity to share with my compatriots some fifty volumes of Chinese literature, ancient, medieval, modern and contemporary, which I myself have found especially rewarding.

Göran Malmqvist

January 12, 2015

Tomas Tranströmer, Poems from the Wild Square Translated by Göran Malmqvist

SHORT INTERVAL IN THE ORGAN RECITAL

The organ ceases to play and the church is dead silent but only for

a few seconds.

Then the faint humming noise penetrates from the traffic outside,

a greater organ.

Yes we are surrounded by the muttering of the traffic that moves

along the walls of the cathedral.

There the external world glides by like a transparent film with

struggling shadows in pianissimo.

I hear one of my pulses beat in the silence as if it mingled with the

noise from the street,

I hear my blood pulsate, the cascade that hides within me, and that

I carry along,

And as close as my blood and as far away as a memory from the

age of four

I hear the heavy lorry that passes by, causing the six-hundred-year

old walls to tremble.

Nothing could be more different from a mother’s embrace than this,

yet right now I’m a child

who hears the grown-ups talk far away, the voices of winners and

losers blend.

A sparse congregation sit on the blue benches. And the pillars rise like

strange trees:

no roots (only the shared floor) and no tree tops (only the shared

vault).

I re-live a dream: I stand in a church-yard alone. Everywhere the light of

heather

as far as the eye reaches. Whom do I wait for? A friend. Why doesn’t he

come? He is already here.

Slowly death screws up the light from underneath, from the ground.

The shimmer of the heather grows more intensely lilac─

no a colour that no one has seen….until the pale light of morning

seeps in through the eyelids

and I wake up to that staunch PERHAPS that carries me through the

tilting world.

And every abstract image of the world is as impossible as the

blueprints of a storm.

At home the all-knowing Encyclopaedia occupied three feet in the

bookshelf, I taught myself to read from it.

But for every person an encyclopaedia is being written, it grows in

every soul,

it is being written from birth, and onwards, hundreds of thousands of

pages are pressed tight

and yet there is air in between! Like trembling leaves in a forest. A book

of contradictions.

What is written there changes with every moment, the pictures retouch

themselves, the words flicker.

A swell rolls through the entire text, followed by another swell, and

another…

CODEX

Men of the footnotes, not of the headlines. I find myself in the deep

corridor

that would be dark

if my right hand didn’t shine like a torch.

The light falls on something written on the wall

and I see it

as the diver sees the name of a sunken ship flicker before him in the

flowing depth:

ADAM ILEBORGH 1448, Who?

He who made the organ spread its clumsy wings and rise─

It kept aloft for almost a minute.

What a successful experiment!

The writing on the wall: MAYONE, DAUTHENDEY, KAMINSKI…

the light falls on name after name.

The walls are filled

with the names of almost obliterated artists,

men of the footnotes, the unplayed, the half-forgotten, the immortal

unknown.

One moment it feels as if they all whispered their names in unison─

whisper added to whisper, swelling into a surf that gushes through

the corridor

without knocking anyone over.

It’s no longer a corridor, for that matter.

Neither burial ground nor market place, but something of both.

It’s also a green-house.

Here is plenty of oxygen.

The dead of the footnotes can breathe deeply, they enter into ecology,

as before.

But there is much they escape from.

They escape from swallowing the morals of power,

They escape from the game checkered in black and white where the

stench of death is the only thing that never dies.

They are rehabilitated.

And they who can no longer receive

haven’t ceased to give.

They unfolded a length of shimmering and gloomy tapestry

and then let go their grip.

Some are anonymous, they are my friends

but I don’t know them, they resemble those figures of stone

carved on gravestones in ancient churches.

Mild or stern reliefs on walls that we touch lightly, figures and names

sunk into the stone floors, on their way to obliteration,

But those who really want to be struck off the list…

They don’t loiter in the region of the footnotes,

they enter the descending career that ends in oblivion and peace.

Total oblivion. It’s a kind of exam

that is taken on the quiet: to cross the border with no one noticing…

FIRE SCRIBBLING

During the gloomy months my life glimmered only when I made love

to you.

Like the flickering of the fire-fly─you can follow its flight, glimpse

by glimpse

among the olive trees, in the dark of the night.

During the gloomy months the soul sat shrunken and lifeless

but the body went straight to you.

The night sky mooed.

We stealthily milked Cosmos and survived.

FROM MARCH 1979

Tired of all who bring words, words but no language

I went to the snow-capped island.

The wilderness has no words.

Unwritten pages spread in all directions!

I come across prints of the cloven hoofs of deer in the snow.

Language but no words.

POSTLUDIUM

I drag like a grapnel across the bottom of the world.

Catching all that I don’t need.

Tired indignation, glowing resignation.

The excutioners fetch stones. God writes in the sand.

Quiet rooms.

The furniture is ready to take wing in the moonlight.

Slowly I walk into myself

through a forest of empty coats of mail.

photo:Wenfen