166 chapter four
pen would remain and not be swept away. But there is no way out of
the “here” and now of exile, as you ends up back on the page where you are
absent.
An alternative reading of the latter line is that the state of exile ret-
rospectively disables or even annuls the past, with displacement dis-
rupting a sense of continuity that might have been maintained had one
still been “there,” but is exposed as an illusion by the physical distance
from “there” to “here.” Thus, the past gains in importance at the same
time as becoming out of reach and indeed questionable, not to say
unreliable or deceptive. As a consequence, you grows old between the
lines, or, as a literal translation might read, in the characters and between the
lines, of a poetry that may travel the world but hides itself or is hidden,
presumably from readers of other languages than its own—or from all
readers. The ill-fated identification of you and writing, both in exile,
expands on the identification of exile and writing.^51 It is reinforced
by the fact that the modern Chinese word к ‘book,’ echoed inݭк
‘write’ in the penultimate line of the first stanza, means ‘to write’ in
classical Chinese. This would generate an alternative translation of the
poem’s title as «The Writing of Exile» or «Writing Exile», if only for
academic purposes.
In the meantime, it turns out that Yang Lian has written exile with
considerable success, as measured by his publication record. This leads
me to propose what may be an unexpected reading for the final para-
graph of «The Square» (ᑓഎ), dated December 1989. «The Square»
is a powerful prose poem, also included in the opening sections of The
Dead in Exile. As noted, it is one of the few texts that were excluded
from Yang’s later survey anthologies published in Shanghai. It starts
like this:^52
In this your statement, you leave the month of June behind, and you leave that
person behind.The word rendered as statement (Ѹҷᴤ᭭) literally means ‘[written]
material accounting for [one’s actions].’ Mabel Lee translates it as con-
fession. While it is definitely part of a semantic set including words like
Ẕ䅼 and 㞾៥ᡍ䆘 ‘self-criticism,’ and 㞾ⱑ(к) and ষկ ‘confes-
(^51) Cf Lin Xingqian 2001.
(^52) Yang Lian 1990: 58. Again, the date is provided with Lee’s translation (Yang
Lian 1990: 22-23).