from adult revolutionary participation in lines 2–5, to the play of
young children in lines 6–7, and finally to the sexual activity of
teenagers in lines 12–15. In lines 2–5 and 6–7, syntactic parallelism
implies a mirroring of adults and children: while the former are
trucked off toward an ideological oblivion to carry out the deadly
serious, sometimes fatal play of political activism, the latter “roll”
toward hometown while engaged in sadistic play with a “screaming
sparrow.” The parallelism of action between these two age groups
might suggest the influence of state political discourse on both old and
young: directly through political command for the adults, and indi-
rectly through imitation of adults for the children. Keeping strictly to
the level of structural effect, however, this instance of parallelism con-
figures a sense of simultaneity, and with it an emphasis on synchronic
time whose imagination of temporality begins to define the era as a
static, but internally complex, historical moment.
Before looking at the third group—the teenagers—one notes
that repetition of grammatical form, now at the level of verb aspect,
further enhances the poem’s temporal configuration by suggesting an
atmosphere of stopped time. In lines 2–7, for instance, depictions of
adult and childhood activity are both constructed grammatically
through use of the durative aspect marker -zhe着, here affixed to the
verbs “load” &'着, “burn” )*着, and “pinch” ?着. Because it
indicates a condition of continuing, uncompleted action, -zhe adds to
a sense of temporal suspension by suggesting a state of being rather
than a state of progression. The effect is compounded a few lines below,
where -zhe indexes a sense of stillness by its reappearance in the
phrases “theaters closed” 电O院关着Rand “loudspeakers hanging
over basketball courts” W球YZ挂着]喇_. Through repetition of
grammatical form, then, the poem creates an associative link between
humans and everyday space, suggesting the immersion of both in the
same regime of immobile time.
The third group of actors in the poem, the teenagers, is clearly
aligned as a third semantic category alongside adults and children and
as such demands comparison with its counterparts according to the
syntactic and grammatical patterning already established. Making
such a comparison, however, reveals how the dynamics of parallelism
generate a significant variation, one that places adolescents in a sepa-
rate, in-between space as well as in a distinct temporal regime. Most
apparent in this regard are the straightforward subject-verb-object
syntactic patterns of lines 12–15. Although retaining the effect of
syntagmatic discontinuity effected by intralinear spacing, these
concluding lines contrast with the sense of durative, static tableau
Poems of Yu Jian and Sun Wenbo 173