134 chapter three
and with the additional caption “in dedication to the daughter of the
dark night”:^63
The dark night rises from the earth 咥ҢഄϞछ䍋
blocks out the brightest sky 䙂ԣњܝᯢⱘぎ
on the bleak earth after harvest Єᬊৢ㤦ޝⱘഄ
the dark night rises from inside you 咥ҢԴݙ䚼Ϟछ
You come from afar, I must go afar
the long road comes through here
there’s nothing at all in the sky
why does that comfort me...
Flocks of birds like dark raindrops
fly from dusk into the dark night
there’s nothing at all in the dark night
why does that comfort me
Walk down the road 䍄䏃Ϟ
and sing out loud ᬒໄ℠ଅ
wind across the mountains
above it all the endless sky
咥, literally ‘black night’ or ‘dark night,’ is conventional poetic us-
age, usually best translated as night. I have added the adjective—and
made the English heavier, perhaps clumsier, than the Chinese—in or-
der to retain the contrast of darkness and brightness in the first stanza,
the resonance of dark night in dark raindrops (咥䲼Ⓢ) and so on.
The first stanza is another example of the effective formal organi-
zation that is visible in a small number of Haizi’s poems. Just like in
«Clasps a White Tiger», all four lines in the original are eight charac-
ters long and unpunctuated. There is end rhyme in lines 1 and 3, and
lines 2 and 4. These qualities enhance the effect of typical Haizi im-
agery—night, earth, sky, harvest—in that they make it cohere. Night
falls, or rather, it rises, when the daughter of the dark night in the
poem’s motto arrives and the speaker leaves on a journey afar. What
follows in the third and fourth stanzas, left untranslated here, is rural
scenes in which the harvest is equated with bleakness, logically yet
(^63) Haizi 1997: 319, 359, 472-478. For the «Poem[s] in Dedication», see 474 and
476; for «In Dedication to the Dark Night», see 477-478.