Homages to Seamus Heaney have been pouring out from his friends and admirers across the world, including, it turns out, China. On August 30 and soon after, my poet friends here in Beijing and around the PRC posted expressions of their sadness, often along with a Chinese translation of one of Heaney’s poems. “Digging” is a particular favorite here, as elsewhere. The piece below is my translation of the distinguished Chinese poet Zang Di’s (臧棣) own private eulogy to Heaney, printed here with his permission. This moving tribute from a distant literary culture is a testament the universal nature of Heaney’s poetry, and to the basic humanity that underpinned his work.
---EG (顾爱玲)
After the New Society for Wisdom
--in memory of Seamus Heaney 1939-2013
By Zang Di
The love of Ireland. Far enough
but not unfamiliar. With every dig,
Ireland’s orchids follow
that new wisdom, and find in the language of loneliness
a supreme support. The deep green tips of leaves sway
the careful heart. How will the pistils trembling
in those worded intentions regard
this side of human life, now poetry’s prisoners.
As for the hole left by the digging, only sweat
can fill it. Only this kind of hole
leads to a deeper trust in this wearisome world.
Call the after-images—
they’ve already persisted this long
in a landscape set in the landscape. Love is ice.
If you don’t believe it, you can go see for yourself.
The last day of August came like an elephant.
Don’t look at me that way—for now, I’m blind.
Blind men for dark times.
As Delmore Schwartz, Humboldt’s model
in Humboldt’s Gift, painfully said—
“For like a gun is touch.” All grim,
but still you open the blacksmith’s oily shop curtain,
to teach me to be like a hammer, to trust in every touch.
9.1.2013
--trans. Eleanor Goodman
随着那新鲜的深度协会
——纪念谢默斯·希尼( Seamus Heaney 1939- 2013)
爱尔兰的爱。足够遥远
但绝不陌生。每一次挖掘，
爱尔兰的兰，都会随着
那新鲜的深度，在孤独的语言中
找到美妙的支撑。深绿的叶尖摇动
一个细心。动摇的花蕊
在这样的口风中，会如何看待
人生的片面，已成为诗的俘虏呢。
至于挖掘留下的坑，只有汗水
才能填满。也只有这样的坑，
才能在时世的艰难中加深一次信任。
给倒影打一个电话吧——
既然它们已在风景中的风景里
坚持了这么久。爱是冰。
不信的话，你可以自己动手试一试。
八月的最后一天，像一头大象。
别这么看着我。我现在是个盲人。
这样的底线，就该有这样的盲人。
德尔默·施瓦茨，即“洪堡的礼物”中
洪堡的原型，他悲伤地说过——
“接触是一杆枪”。情况的确很严峻，
但是你，坚持掀开油腻的铁匠铺门帘，
教会我像铁锤一样，去信任每一次触摸。
2013年9月1日
Eleanor Goodman is a writer and a translator from Chinese. Her work appears in journals such as PN Review, Chutzpah 天南, Pleiades, Cha, and The Best American Poetry website. She is a Research Associate at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University, and this year she will be at Beijing University on a Fulbright Fellowship. She has held writing residencies at the Vermont Studio Center and the American Academy in Rome. Her book of translations, The Selected Poems of Wang Xiaoni, is forthcoming from Zephyr Press.
