58 Steven L. Riep
Malmqvist 2001: 207). Bridging the historical significance of the first
stanza and the quotidian issues raised in the third, it problematizes the
nature of history. The line literally reads, “He has previously heard of
history and laughter,” with history and laughter being the object of
what the colonel has heard. We may be sorely tempted to misread the
stanza as “He has previously heard of history and, as a result,
laughed,” substituting the conjunction er/ for heâ(and), but the
original clearly places equal emphasis on both objects, not subordi-
nating one to the other as suggested by the misreading. Yet the elision
of history and laughter as common objects of the verb ting (to
listen) causes us to question the relation of the two objects and con-
sider the seriousness, the sacred quality, and the very reliability of
history. The first stanza forces the reader to listen, like the colonel, to
both history in terms of his wartime experience andlaughter as
defined in the ironic description of the historical event. The poem thus
desanctifies war and its history.
Ya emotionally distances the reader from the poetic subject again in
the third stanza, which begins with the question, “What is immortality?”
(Ya 1981b: 145/Yeh and Malmqvist 2001: 207). The poet invites the
reader to ponder a question that the poet has already answered himself.
His use of parataxis leads us to conclude that immortality resides in
“Cough syrup, razor blades, last month’s rent, and so on and so forth,”
or in other words, the quotidian detail of life (Ya 1981b: 146/Yeh and
Malmqvist 2001: 207). This answer also suggests that what immortal-
ity cannot be equated with is history and that history therefore is not
immortal. Like laughter, history is ephemeral, passing, and evanescent.
The colonel, the user of the cough syrup and razor blades, the one who
pays the rent, faces only one threat: the sun. The colonel’s enemy has
become time, the passage of which the sun marks in daily, weekly,
seasonal, and yearly cycles. Far from being an immortal hero, an indi-
vidual whose significance rests in his ties to great historical events, the
poetic subject is now most closely identified with the ephemeral, the
transitory, and the conditional that comes from the quotidian. The poet
has drained all heroism from war in his portrait of a disabled veteran
confronting time in a battle he will inevitably lose.
Like the use of beauty to describe the horrific discussed earlier,
trivialization becomes an unexpected and ironic substitute for physical
suffering in Ya Xian’s war poems. The repeated nature of death, Ya
suggests in “Wartime,” makes it all the more familiar and hence dis-
pensable. In the second stanza, the poet remarks in lines 7 and 8 that
his mother was “half-drowned in the many / Dove-gray deaths last
year” 71 xÄ /^_3灰色的T的間, an indication that so many