Capturing War in the Poetry of Ya Xian 53suddenly lose their country’s proper dignity” ef們¿ 的父a...
(Á然失ÄÅÆ們ÇÈÉ有的Ê() from their dalliances with local
women (Ya 1981b: 127). The image of the pear tree sending forth
shoots becomes an allegory for the children, as the identity of the
planter of the tree, like that of the fathers of the children, is unknown.
The children themselves can be read as the “flowers of bitterness” or
“flowers of suffering,” the innocent by-product of war seen in the
inclusion of the reference to Mary, the “Blessed Virgin,” as a symbol
of compassion.
When Ya Xian does show combatants, they appear as victims of
war and injury. Completed on August 26, 1960, “The Colonel” ~校
belongs to a series of short poetic portraits of people from different
walks of life grouped under the title “Profiles.” Like “Naples,” “The
Colonel” was included in Ya’s own small anthology of English poems
compiled while studying at the University of Iowa. Ten brief lines in
length, it captures the trauma of war and suffering from the point of
view of a retired military officer. Rather than recounting heroic battle
scenes, Ya focuses instead on how the poetic subject lost his leg in one
of the greatest battles in 1943 during the War of Resistance. The
solemnity of this summary of the colonel’s personal battle history,
during what was for him the greatest battle of the war, is undercut by
the focus on the disabling injury and the mock-comic tone of the poet
when he notes that the leg “bid farewell” or “said goodbye” Ì別to
him. While “The Colonel” ostensibly profiles an individual, it makes
reference in the first stanza to a wider body of people who allow one
retired and disabled officer to stand metonymically for an army of his
fellow combatants and perhaps the entire Nationalist military. In
line 3 we read that “In the buckwheat field theyÆ們encountered
their greatest battle”—clear reference to a wider group than just one
soldier as “they” do the fighting. Ya Xian’s reading of history, couched
in terms of a single individual, actually represents a commentary of a
much broader nature than we might originally have expected.
The poet makes concrete the magnitude of war and the suffering it
causes in arresting scenes that ironically mingle the beautiful with the
horrific. In “The Colonel,” he opens with an image of beauty, a rose
formed or “born” of flames, that the reader quickly discovers signifies
the explosion in which the poetic subject loses his leg. The poet
substitutes beauty for pain and suffering, thus leaving the reader to
imagine the trauma and unspoken horror the colonel experienced
when his leg was blown off. “Wartime” (戰時, 1962), subtitled
“Luoyang 1942” ÎÏÐÑÒ , opens by describing the very
personal impact that war has had on the poetic subject, who reveals in