my life flew out of my 我í¥整整q
Ë 1965
homework 的I天 到 1966
的I天
she was a woman I was a boy 我óí}ÏÄ 的候
I wanted to say something like a man 她的脖¼Ë血!的天÷H垂来
didn’t know how I was still in ù成¥q根üý的þ
grade school
I tried for a whole year from
the summer
of 1965 to the summer of 1966
when I was finally ready to say it
her neck hung from the bloody sky
turned into a frozen scarf
(Yu 2004b; translation modified) (Yu 2003: 115)
Sun Wenbo: Remembrance and the Real
Where Yu Jian’s poems configure memory of the Cultural Revolution
by constructing a constellation of self-contained, internally complex,
and unresolved moments, the poems of memory that comprise Sun
Wenbo’s series “1960s Bicycle” place less stress on intratextual struc-
ture and more on real-world referents. Given the poetic function’s
emphasis on self-referentiality, such an orientation would seem con-
tradictory to something claiming to be poetry. Sun, however, attempts
to transcend this apparent violation of poetic principle by subsuming
his poems’ extratextual reference within a poetics of memory. What
results is a poetry deliberately concretized, vividly enumerated, and
constantly in oscillation between past and present. This poeticized
reference, patterned by the back-and-forth movement of memory,
defines and unifies the poems of “1960s Bicycle.”
Like Yu Jian, Sun establishes this vision of memory in the opening
poem of his series, “Overture” . With original footnotes it reads,
Early morning, indoors, naked, 晨, 着呆在 内, 薄
gauzy coolness 在Z。)q香,
clings lightly to my skin. I light 我坐来, 昨天ñ的t;
a cigarette, 爱 兰;镇Z, !特#$的% ;
sit, reopen a book left from q&q
, 父«v到()林,
yesterday; qY¡+)*的大,-恐,
an Irish village, that of Beckett’s /入的 12 , 成 3 q=(4扰的67。
childhood; 我的% : 文化大革a。9样:睹¥
- His father took him to < =>的?: 大街ZA啸的
Dublin, CZ挥EF的!G兵, 破IJ
where shocking bonfires of revoltK掉的皇NO 。PQRSS/入
Poems of Yu Jian and Sun Wenbo 177