54 Steven L. Riep
line 5 that his mother was killed in battle. We do not see the mother or
her corpse, but instead see a chair burnt by an incendiary bomb, a
chair in which she may have frequently sat, on which the poetic sub-
ject sees her “set smile” Ó的ÔÕ, a reference to her death, until it
passes into his memory. Here the poet uses the unexpected image of a
fan, which normally connotes refinement, delicacy, and beauty, to
describe the violent explosion that rips up the street and kills the
mother. The irony of the fan image, like the rose in “The Colonel,”
heightens the horror of the explosion.^3 That a chair, a piece of furni-
ture, comes to represent the mother indicates the depersonalizing and
dehumanizing effects wrought by war and its carnage. In “Naples,”
Ya Xian describes an incendiary bomb using nature imagery as a “tree
of flame” ®焰(Ya 1981b: 126 and 351–352). In each case, the
irony of the beautiful standing for the horrific creates memorable
images that the reader will not soon forget.
Ya Xian’s war poems make little or no reference to enemy combat-
ants. We do not know who caused the suffering experienced by the
women and children in “God of War” and “Naples,” nor does Ya
inform us who blew off the colonel’s leg. Ultimately this does not matter,
for neither individuals nor even countries are culpable. Instead the
institution of battle, represented by the heartless God of War, who calmly
and coldly wipes the blood of his victims from his boots, is to blame.
The absence of combatants also suggests Ya’s desire to universalize
the impact of war, rather than reading it as a specific conflict between
a few nations. His frequent use of both Asian and Western imagery
amplifies this. “God of War” opens as follows:
In the evening 在×Ø
an evening of many black crosses ^_U十ÙÚ的×Ø
in the sick clock tower, two sisters die: Û鐘Ý, TÅ的兩ßà:
the minute hand and hour hand 時áâ分á
their frozen arms paint a final V äå的æ膀, è着最{的V
(Ya 1981b: 48)
The crosses that appear in line 2, and the clock tower, with its promi-
nent hour and minute hands both bespeak Western rather than
Chinese or other Asian traditions, as do the wineskins and perhaps
even the God of War himself that appear later. That the poet describes
the crosses as black, a color with reference to death in Western culture,
reinforces the connection. Ya indicates the scale of death by referring
in line 2 to “an evening of many crosses,” a suggestion of the great
magnitude of war (48). The absence of names on the crosses indicates