by Shenzhan/申展

In the winter of 2021, I am looking for something to get lost into, desperately. This time I find myself rediscover the power of written languages through poetry.

And here are my selections and notes.

Two Poems for December

江 雪 River Snow

By 柳宗元 Liu Zongyuan （773 – 819）

千山鳥飛絕   A thousand mountains, no sign of birds in flight;

萬徑人蹤滅   Ten thousand paths, no trace of human tracks.

孤舟蓑笠翁   A lone boat, an old man in straw cape and hat,

獨釣寒江雪   Fishing snow, in the icy cold river alone.

(Translation adapted from William H. Nienhauser, Jr. etc.)

* * *

In the Bleak Midwinter                                                                                                             

By Christina Rossetti (1830 – 1894)

 

In the bleak midwinter, frosty wind made moan,

Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone;

Snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow,

In the bleak midwinter, long ago.

 

Our God, Heaven cannot hold Him, nor earth sustain;

Heaven and earth shall flee away when He comes to reign.

In the bleak midwinter a stable place sufficed

The Lord God Almighty, Jesus Christ.

 

Enough for Him, whom cherubim, worship night and day,

Breastful of milk, and a mangerful of hay;

Enough for Him, whom angels fall before,

The ox and ass and camel which adore.

 

Angels and archangels may have gathered there,

Cherubim and seraphim thronged the air;

But His mother only, in her maiden bliss,

Worshipped the beloved with a kiss.

 

What can I give Him, poor as I am?

If I were a shepherd, I would bring a lamb;

If I were a Wise Man, I would do my part;

Yet what I can I give Him: give my heart.

 * * *

A Personal Note for December

What’s on the fisherman’s mind when he is all out there in the cold and alone?

I cried a lot in the winter of 2021. It is the second winter since the beginning of the pandemic. A new covid variant put the world on edge again. Trees outside of my new studio in New York are shedding their beautiful red and golden leaves, once again turning lifeless. Mom passed away in July. The coldest days of the year are yet to come.

Sitting in front of my computer screen with “River Snow” on, all I can think of is the winter of 1996, when I went home from college in Beijing for the Chinese New Year. Right after I got home, Mom took me out for a walk and told me that Dad had passed away a couple of months ago due to heart attack. That year, instead of families and relatives gathering together like the past when Dad was around, it was just Mom and me. I was craving for spicy hotpot after being in Beijing for many months without authentic Sichuan food. Mom prepared hotpot for the two of us. In the small apartment where we lived as a family, she set up a small square table, where a boiling hotpot soup was sitting in the middle, surrounded by raw vegetables, meat, etc. She made the spiciest sauce I ever had! I don’t remember much of the meat and vegetables from that dinner, but it was very spicy. The two of us celebrated the Chinese New Year. The year after she would have met my stepfather and a few years later I would have left for the U.S. That winter, we had only each other in the entire world. But I didn’t feel I was short of anything.

I wonder, what I would be thinking of if I were out in the snow on a river. Perhaps the icy cold water will resonate my cry, like the silence in the studio. Perhaps the absolute quietness of the falling snow would calm the most aching heart. I could be there thinking of nothing, just in unity with the nature, emotionless and compassionate at the same time.

When I studied “River Snow” in elementary school in China, I was taught that this poem is famous because it captures the desolate scene and the loneliness, which to the heart of a teenager are all the unwanted and undesired. Thirty years have passed; it is an ideal world now.

As a comparison, “In the Bleak Midwinter” begins with such simplicity and beautiful rhyme that I feel a certain degree of similarity to “River Snow”. However, whereas Liu Zongyuan leaves the human quest largely unanswered after describing the river, the snow, the boat and the fisherman, Christina Rossetti, one of the greatest female poets in the English world in the 19th century, turns to the Lord in the bleak midwinter.

Astoria, New York

11/28/2021

Appendix: Original translation of “River Snow” by William H. Nienhauser, Jr.

A thousand mountains, no sign of birds in flight;
Ten thousand paths, no trace of human tracks.
In a lone boat, an old man in rain hat and straw raincoat,
Fishing alone, in the cold river snow.