288 chapter eight
2. «The Program»: Content and Plot
An aside on terminology is in order here with regard to four related
words used in this chapter: content, plot, sense and meaning. Content is,
according to Jaap Oversteegen, the subject matter present in a given
form, or the poem’s more or less paraphraseable aspects, with the con-
stellation of its constituents intact, in the linear order of reading.^11 The
poem’s plot is the same thing after it has been paraphrased, rearranged
in the analysis and so on, and with less attention to its amplification
by formal aspects. Sense is one half of the duad sound and sense, an
elegant characterization of what the complex thing that is poetry has
to offer, and a subset of form and content, for there is more to form
than sound. In this chapter, especially in the latter half of section 3,
the large and potentially vague notion of meaning functions specifi-
cally as part of Aviram’s contrast of meaning and sound, cited above,
and largely overlaps with content. More broadly, meaning denotes
content after interpretation—and at that stage, it has also taken form
into account.
Like many of Sun Wenbo’s poems, «The Program» is a sizable text:
72 lines, neatly divided into nine numbered stanzas-cum-episodes. The
translation below is more rigidly “faithful” to the original than its liter-
ary rendition, published elsewhere.^12 My concern has been to ensure
that each line contains the same word groups as its Chinese source,
if possible in the same order, to let the text unfold to its Anglophone
reader in similar fashion to the original. This is to do with the para-
mount importance of the line as an organizational unit in Sun Wen-
bo’s work, on which I will elaborate later.
«The Program»
1
Leafing through the beautifully printed program, you see
a fiction of night: with a moon like a face ravaged by cholera.
He sits on a stone bench in the garden. Grief over the loss of his father
stirs his soul as would cheap liquor. You see
his depressed stare at the withered chrysanthemum.
When the orchestra strikes up, he starts, on the stage,(^11) Oversteegen 1983: 29-31.
(^12) HEAT 1997-5: 144-149, The Drunken Boat 6-I/II (2006, online).