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有一種愛叫山歌
馬克·特雷迪尼克
一
相傳在中國南方桂林城附近的喀斯特山區(qū)，生活過一位秀美的農(nóng)家姑娘。她動人的歌喉婉轉(zhuǎn)而又迷人，天地萬物無不為之贊嘆，山川、河流無不為之動容，令百鳥鳴囀黯然失色，精通音律者自嘆弗如。她的美貌更令當?shù)貜V有田產(chǎn)的土豪垂涎三尺，不惜高價雇用秀才在歌圩上與她一決高下。有人說，姑娘逃離了土豪的迫害，與戀人隱姓埋名，遁入了大山深處； 更有傳說，這對情人變成了兩只鳴禽，這是他們?yōu)楦柙佔杂珊蛺矍楦冻龅拇鷥r。
這位壯族“歌仙”人稱劉三姐，相傳生活于公元8世紀初的唐朝。她在魚峰山下唱過的歌謠和其他山歌都是即興創(chuàng)作的。三姐秀外慧中、才情斐然，被壯族人奉為仙女，此后1300多年間，她的歌謠經(jīng)口耳相傳，經(jīng)久不衰。她集山歌創(chuàng)作與演唱于一身，可謂前無古人，后無來者。
即便這樣的歌仙不曾真實存在，歷史也一定會創(chuàng)造一個劉三姐。事實證明的確如此。這個姑娘和她的歌謠、短暫而極富詩意與英雄氣概的一生，是所有時代都需要的養(yǎng)分，是人類精神賴以生存的神話。文學(xué)所為者何？不就是書寫謳歌這樣的平民英雄嗎？而劉三姐的故事和歌謠經(jīng)歷代搜集、整理、傳唱，終于匯集成了一種精致的民間歌謠文學(xué)。縱觀人類歷史，寄寓文學(xué)作品的“興、觀、群、怨”的種種主張和因此彰顯的真、善、美，都在她的歌謠中一一得到了實踐：她主持正義，譴責不公；在思想、精神和肉體層面她都拒絕屈服于任何權(quán)勢，也絕不讓我們屈服；她歌詠艱辛凡世中的點滴快樂，這種樂觀的生活態(tài)度，凝結(jié)在歌聲中化為永恒。她，一如所有高邁真誠的詩歌，是正義、美、愛與自由的化身。
劉三姐身處男權(quán)社會，又歸屬主流文化之外的邊疆民族。她出身貧寒，每一天醒來就要為謀生而勞作，族人還飽受欺凌壓迫?？伤焐幸桓焙蒙ぷ?，雖身處邊緣與委頓窮困，卻唱出了鄙視強勢話語的歌謠，對得之不義的財富嗤之以鼻，以一種罕見的決絕和自覺守護個體生命的自主和神圣，并向世界大聲宣稱：青春神圣，愛情神圣，年輕擁有隨心而非隨俗的權(quán)利。她歌頌了靈魂對世界的叛逆、自我對險境的反抗、底層對強權(quán)的斗爭。
正因如此，劉三姐才稱得上是獨立女性，她的歌謠才稱得上是文學(xué)，流芳千載，激勵世人。劉三姐的這些歌謠，看似是自中古以來流傳下來的民歌藍本，在黃少政筆下被譯為短小精練的現(xiàn)代英語文學(xué)作品后，更像是在我們這個時代創(chuàng)作出來的。劉三姐簡直像是為我們這個時代而生的。當下，東西方的藝術(shù)文化學(xué)者都將目光投向少數(shù)民族文化、女性藝術(shù)、沉默群體、邊緣群體和殖民地的詩歌，活在唐朝的劉三姐，這個南方大山里的壯族民謠歌者，也以女性之身，為我們的時代唱響贊歌。
時至今日，劉三姐仍是壯族人心中的神，是山野文化中正直、不羈與堅韌的象征。儒家學(xué)者將她塑造為一個音樂奇才，給她編配了一個出身上層的丈夫；年輕的新中國也打出她的旗幟，將她擁戴為人民英雄、反抗壓迫的斗士、敢于智斗嘲弄舊知識分子的歌者。在以她名字命名的彩色電影中，劉三姐被刻畫為人民的女兒、膽識過人的階級戰(zhàn)士。電影1961年上映時，在國內(nèi)外大獲成功，廣受贊譽。其后，她成了壯族的標志，為廣西的文化發(fā)展、民族融合做出了貢獻。而如今，劉三姐成了國內(nèi)外游客紛紛探訪桂林的緣由之一，是僅次于桂林喀斯特地貌的廣西第二大旅游熱點，幾個世紀以來，一直吸引著詩人、畫家與朝圣者慕名前來。
隱于山野，天真未鑿，年輕姑娘聲如天籟，歌聲不絕；山歌悠揚，即興而成，所歌者何，歌為心聲。
二
我有幸以詩人身份數(shù)次訪游中國，曾受邀去北京參與國際寫作計劃，在魯迅文學(xué)院待過一個月，也曾參加過在香港、杭州、西昌、汨羅和成都舉辦的詩歌節(jié)，算得上半個中國通，但不知何故，與劉三姐卻總無緣相會，直到黃少政教授將她的詩歌和故事帶到我眼前。對魚峰山和廣西漓江畔回蕩著劉三姐山歌的群山，我一直心懷憧憬，無奈劉三姐總是從我的世界路過。1961年的電影我沒看過，此前那部火遍中國大江南北、令毛主席也如癡如醉的音樂劇我也沒看過，就連從2004年起就蜚聲國際的絢麗多彩的戶外聲光秀《印象?劉三姐》，我都不知其名，對劉三姐這個壯族文化象征、桂林名片一無所知，我著實赧然。
在我未讀到少政的譯文，不曾結(jié)識劉三姐的時光里，她似乎已被賦予了千百次新生。她受山民景仰愛戴，被轉(zhuǎn)化為精神符號，經(jīng)過無數(shù)次解讀、詮釋、想象與塑造；她的故事也被接受、化用。而現(xiàn)在，我已讀過了關(guān)于劉三姐的研究，看過了電影，也演奏了她的歌謠，能在黃少政教授的翻譯中邂逅這位靈動善辯、膽識過人、天仙一般的壯族民謠歌者，我感到三生有幸。(我又多了一個理由讓自己前往桂林游覽，現(xiàn)在這本書就成了我的最佳導(dǎo)游。)
少政的譯文含蓄自然，毫無浮囂之氣，我在其中遇見了純真的劉三姐和她的歌謠。少政將劉三姐與人們以各種方式重構(gòu)的形象剝離開來，返本歸元，還原了她的本來面目，賦予她人性、女性特質(zhì)和民族特異性，還讀者一個赤子般的劉三姐。
我們在劉三姐歌謠中和一個不凡的靈魂不期而遇，她不附庸任何人，天生麗質(zhì)，這是大山的產(chǎn)物，野性、不羈、愛是她的最高信仰。因而在她的歌謠里，我們與自我不期而遇——一個尚未被覺察的更好的自我，若有她一半銳氣，本可以成為的那種自我。
其實我們每個人心底都有一個劉三姐，只不過我們需要聆聽劉三姐的歌謠，就像我們必須閱讀李白、密羅跋伊、狄金森、阿赫瑪托娃，他們會引領(lǐng)我們省察自己的人生，返璞歸真，更富于人性。別忘記，超越性別、階層、身份（被強加的、抗拒的、認定的），撥開上天的眷顧、虧待，比坎坷、苦難和宿命更深的靈魂深處，有一片群山，群山的歌謠真切悅耳，如鶯啼百囀；有一個自我，錚錚玉骨，唱著山中浩歌，遺世獨立，陶然自樂而心懷悲憫。
三
少政以全新的視角解讀了劉三姐，他不拘泥于此前人們建構(gòu)的劉三姐形象，邀請我們一道從全新的角度走近她。此前，劉三姐是才華橫溢、天真無邪的傳統(tǒng)儒家閨秀，也是階級革命的英雄，而少政獨辟蹊徑，將她與這些形象剝離。擺脫了先入之見，我們就能靜候佳音，在山歌中邂逅一位歌唱家和作家，壯族人民的女神，一個凡人，但確實天賦異稟， 一個有血有肉的人。
少政幫助我們欣賞到了純真的劉三姐山歌。劉三姐曾被挪用、改編以服務(wù)于各種目的：古代家長制對她形象的塑造、20世紀60年代社會現(xiàn)實主義對她的新解讀。少政別出心裁，他提出了兩種審視劉三姐山歌的路徑，并在翻譯中遵循了這兩種路徑。
首先，少政明智地建議我們把劉三姐山歌視作特定地理位置與當?shù)厥⑿械奈幕?guī)范的實體（這些文化規(guī)范在固守傳統(tǒng)的地方依然盛行）。在聆聽這些歌謠時，多多少少把它看作是一種特定時代民俗的結(jié)果。所有藝術(shù)作品中都包含情愛的因素，在我看來不無道理，因為藝術(shù)是參與創(chuàng)作的行為，一種愛的行為，一種渴望的抒發(fā)，一種對美的歡頌，一種狂喜瞬間的定格（亦可以是希冀與絕望）。然而許多文學(xué)理論研究，尤其是那些透過權(quán)力和經(jīng)濟的關(guān)系、階級、社會類別、既定道德以及各種規(guī)范性抽象視角的解讀，似乎并不能闡明詩與歌的靈感源泉。詩歌可以來源于憂痛、激憤、歡悅與怡樂；詩歌有所希冀乃至心灰意冷；寫詩是對生活不如意與世界不堪的補償，或?qū)ι旧淼母卸?，和生活本質(zhì)的凡俗庸常達成坦然的和解。
奧克塔維奧?帕斯寫道，“詩歌即是語言做愛”，這就比西方流行的許多文學(xué)論調(diào)更切題。正如我最近一篇文章里寫的：“無論愛為何物，詩即愛?！比绻x懂了劉三姐的歌謠，我們不妨說，確實有一種大愛，叫作山歌。劉三姐的詩歌是愛與欲，溫軟如玉的呢喃，有慈悲有希望，也有惶惑有尖刺，更有對所愛之人與世人所愛的渴求，也是對積存在世壯族山歌的升華。山歌本就是壯族歌圩的核心，傳唱山歌在于和心愛之人共情，而非一定要落實在婚姻之中，心心相印才是這一活動的必要條件。壯族文化歷來重視戀愛自由，當代讀者也會驚訝于他們的開明。
無論愛為何物，詩即愛：正統(tǒng)文學(xué)理論向來難以理解接受這一概念，可事實如此，以詩性的行為和壯族的歌圩文化來理解劉三姐山歌，聆聽歌中人性的淳樸，而非將其看作意識形態(tài)的實例或僅僅是體現(xiàn)政治和身份的形式，如此一來，恍然間，歌聲里的那些撥云撩雨、嬉笑廝磨、曖昧難明、感官愉悅與玩世不恭，霎時一一入耳，了然于心。
少政的另一大突破是將劉三姐的山歌解讀為群山的造化，提供了生態(tài)批評的解讀思路。所謂山歌，與野性、不羈、天真未鑿、未經(jīng)文明浸染同化同義。
這就是說，少政引導(dǎo)我們不要單純地將劉三姐的山歌上升為民族家國的呼聲，鉤沉階級斗爭乃至民族身份的因由，抑或只探究其文學(xué)作品的底色，這些山歌更像是描摹了中國南方的萬千氣象、巖溶起伏，是對湍流急雨和莽莽榛榛山地的鮮活注解。壯族文化，包括其中的情愛因素，都是由山地孕育而生的，所謂地理即宿命。在劉三姐的歌謠里，你能找到一個女性生存的土地與根基，驀然回首，憶起你亦寄身在這世上的某一處所，而在你的生命中、你的文字間、你的情感深處，分明也有大地的旋律涌動。也許這世上某個角落還記得你，于是你的筆觸、你的聲音、你的雙手和生命都在娓娓道來，訴說它的故事，它的今生和來世。
四
國家與事業(yè)、反叛與治國，理論家與衛(wèi)道士，世間形形色色的勢力無不試圖“征用”藝術(shù)。他們扶植藝術(shù)宣傳自己的主張，發(fā)掘既往的作品，彰顯同質(zhì)價值觀，或因其缺乏此類價值觀而痛陳其墮落退化。
然而，真正的藝術(shù)本質(zhì)上不會屈從、附庸任何權(quán)勢。大浪淘沙，披沙揀金，藝術(shù)永恒。世人攘攘，政治浮沉，藝術(shù)如青山依舊，幾度夕陽。極而言之，人類少不了藝術(shù)，人性健全有賴于藝術(shù)。作家、歌手、畫家正可以大顯身手。存在的喜悅和悲苦，日復(fù)一日世間的粗糲與敏感靈魂的二律背反，生活的美好與可怖，藝術(shù)就是見證。人生苦短，藝術(shù)必須為我們安身立命提供一個說法。悲苦不堪的世間，愛是如何可能？希望與妄想有何分際？我們需要藝術(shù)發(fā)聲，我們指望藝術(shù)作證。藝術(shù)源于人生，高于人生。人類多數(shù)的理論話語往往會忽略深植于人性的這種渴求，不單單忽略，更有甚者，貶低、污名化人性的需求，藝術(shù)的出場，為人性正名，為悲憫張目，并在我們的心靈惶惶然處發(fā)現(xiàn)了極美的趣致。
藝術(shù)的目的，正如我在中國西昌一篇演講中宣示的，就是自由，就是正義。藝術(shù)憑其新奇巧思和清正之氣，助我們跳出陳腐與偽善的樊籠，掙脫主流正統(tǒng)的桎梏，表達自由和富于個性的聲音，傳遞藝術(shù)家的生活體驗。幾許匠心，賦予了人生真實的觸感，譜寫了心靈專屬的樂律。
在少政的劉三姐歌謠新譯中，自由、喜悅、正義，聲聲入耳，我們與大地脈動同頻共振——世界以愛予我，我亦報之以情。劉三姐的歌是唱給群山的情歌，是對大千世界愛的傾訴。
上周日我聽一個學(xué)生說起，詩人就要腹有詩書，蘭心蕙質(zhì)。 她說起她的先生，一位詩人，相濡以沫經(jīng)年。她說起歷史上那些著名的大詩人。她說，詩人需要從生活和書本中汲取各種養(yǎng)分，包括思想、歷史、音樂、韻律、品格、人性，甚至熟稔植物與禽鳥的學(xué)名。果如此，他必須真正走出書齋，學(xué)貫百家，臻于會通，才能出口成章，作詩撰文。一個詩人的資質(zhì)尚且如此，一個譯者又要如何萬里行路，萬卷讀書呢？
翻譯的確需要一種虛懷若谷的大智慧、豁達沖淡的心境、揮毫落紙的勁頭，并守住一份情懷。用母語自然能夠暢言真實的所感所念，但若假自己之口，移譯他人言語又是另一碼事。蓋因每種語言自成一世界，譯者功夫再深都難以徹悟并在另一種語言中再造原作者的聲音、思想和筆調(diào)——任何譯作都是一部新作。即便譯文能傳神達意，在形式、情感、態(tài)度、音韻、文氣和寓意上固然都能忠實于原作，但譯作永遠不會取代原作。
質(zhì)量上乘的譯品，其意境與原作基本相當，能夠再現(xiàn)原作的精神，且在形式上盡可能地效仿原作。作為一種介質(zhì)、替代品和備選方案，它在功能上等同于原作。這樁活計誰人能夠勝任？好壞讀者自有公論——拙見非我的朋友少政莫屬。除了譯者本人，還會有誰能如此鐘情于原作，并絞盡腦汁將其原汁原味呈現(xiàn)給讀者呢？正是像少政這樣的翻譯家，他們大大地豐富了我們的世界。我把他們的工作，視為愛的奉獻。我無時無刻不對他們心懷感激。我之所以能同托爾斯泰，能同詩人魯米、阿赫瑪托娃、薩福、吉狄馬加、屈原、李清照、《圣經(jīng)?舊約?雅歌》莫逆于心，正是拜翻譯所賜。也正是李牧原最早的譯本、黃少政等對我的譯介，將我的作品帶到了中國，用漢語賦予了我的詩文第二次生命。
筆者不諳中文，無法在這里對譯文質(zhì)量做出專業(yè)判斷。但我知道少政是一位優(yōu)秀的譯者。例如，他將《新約》和紀伯倫的詩歌翻譯成中文，將吉狄馬加的詩歌和演講翻譯成英語。他被視為當下中國最杰出的雙語翻譯家之一。少政博學(xué)并極富靈性，酷愛世界文學(xué)。他如此醉心譯介劉三姐歌謠，部分原因是他定居廣西，而廣西正是劉三姐歌謠的故鄉(xiāng)。我還知道他比對研究了之前劉三姐歌謠的其他譯本，新的譯文大異于從前，他試圖在英語中捕捉到早期譯本中缺失的某些特殊品質(zhì)——質(zhì)樸、感性、戲謔和柔情，早期的譯文不可避免囿于彼時翻譯習慣和流行教條的影響。
少政還發(fā)愿要讓劉三姐在英語中唱響。要像在漢語中那樣唱得驚天地泣鬼神，絕非譯者的本意，但至少要讓英語讀者聽眾感受到劉三姐的歌謠有多么優(yōu)美動聽，這一點也不算奢求。
擺在你面前的這部劉三姐歌謠新譯，譯者試圖剝離不同時代的意識形態(tài)的“征用”與道德的“挪用”，還原劉三姐歌謠的產(chǎn)生背景和發(fā)生場域，重新審視劉三姐傳說故事的結(jié)構(gòu)性因素——源于壯族的歌圩文化，帶領(lǐng)我們穿越時空，親耳聆聽唱響在旖旎喀斯特山水間的天籟——劉三姐歌謠。透過黃少政的這部譯作，我們讀到了一個鮮活生動、漂亮機敏、大膽奔放、為民請命的鄉(xiāng)野女性，足堪我們追慕一種自由本真的性靈，師法一種樸素高貴的人生。
（焦琳 譯）
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Preface
How to Love Like a Mountain
Mark Tredinnick
1
It is said that in the karst mountains near the city of Guilin in China’s south, there once roamed a beautiful peasant girl, whose singing pleased the heavens and did justice to the beauty of the rivers and the fields and peaks and rivalled the birds and shamed the music scholars and seduced and outwitted an evil landlord. Some say she escaped the tyrant and lived out her days obscurely with her lover in the mountains. Other tellings turn them into two songbirds, the price they paid for their refusal to let the singing of her people be stilled.
She was Liu Sanjie (“Third Sister Liu”), or so she became called. She is said to have lived and sung, this angel of song, during the Tang dynasty, in the early years of the eighth century. Her people were the Zhuang, and her name has been held sacred and her songs have been sung among them these thirteen hundred years since, for she is said to have performed the ballads of Yufeng Mountain, and the other mountain songs of her people, and to have improvised in that idiom, with a divine kind of grace and wit and intelligence. Hers was a talent for composition and performance of the songs of the mountains, the love songs of the earth, never rivalled, before or after.
If such a young woman never existed, history would have to have invented her, and to a large extent it has. She and her music and her short, lyric, heroic life story are the kind of thing all ages need, the kind of myth the human spirit depends upon. Third Sister what literature is for. No matter who co-opts her life and story and songs——and many have——Liu Sanjie made a small literature of folk music that does what literature, through human history, has always done, and which we need it to keep on doing: she insists on justice; she decries inequity; she refuses to be cowed, or to let us be cowed, in mind, spirit, and body; she transfigures everyday experience into small eternities of song. She stands, in other words, as all poetry of integrity does, for justice and beauty and love and freedom.
Liu Sanjie was a woman in a man’s world. Hers was a minority culture. Her family was poor, and as a girl in a tenant-farming family, she had little to hope for from life; her mountain people were colonised and oppressed. She knew no privilege but the gift of her voice. She came from the edges; and from the edges and out of her poverty, she sang what all dominant discourses overlook or disparage: the autonomy and irreverent divinity of each human life, the right of each human heart to love what and whom and how it loves. Her songs sing the rebellion of the soul against the world, of the self against its unpropitious circumstances, of the marginalised against the powerful.
All that makes Liu Sanjie, the Third Sister Liu, a woman, and hers a literature, for all times and all people. But more than ever, her small literature, translated here into clear contemporary English, is a folk poetry for our times. And her life could almost have been coined for these days——as art and cultural scholarship in both the east and the west give attention to minority cultures, to women’s art, to silenced voices, to lives on the margins, to colonised lyrics. Liu Sanjie of the Tang Dynasty, Zhuang folk singer from the mountains of the south, stands as a woman, her songs as anthems, for our times.
For her people, Third Sister Liu was and remains a saint, a symbol of the integrity and sensuality and resilience of their mountain culture. Confucian scholars construed her as a prodigy and married her off to a noble. The young PRC recruited her as a heroine of the people, a champion of the oppressed, and used her as a stick to beat intellectuals with. It is as a darling of the masses, a spunky class warrior, that filmmakers depicted her the film that bears her name shot in technicolour and rolled out to a clamour of popular acclaim in 1961 in China and beyond. Later, she was rebranded as a Zhuang icon, to support a claim for Guangxi’s special administrative status. These days, people from across China and the world travel to Guilin because of her. Among the reasons tourists come to Guangxi, she ranks second only to the karst mountain peaks of Guilin, those darlings, for long centuries, of poets and painters and pilgrims.
Hidden inside these mountains, inside these many incarnations, was this young woman, blessed with an angel’s voice, singing all these years——inside her people’s mountain songs, inside coquettish improvisations——the music of all of our hearts.
2
It has been my good fortune to travel many times to China as a poet. I have spent a month in Beijing at the Lu Xun Academy, a guest of the international writers’ program; I have attended festivals in Hong Kong, Hangzhou, Xichang, Miluo, and Chengdu. I have read widely in Chinese poetry. But somehow, until Professor Huang Shaozheng introduced me to her songs and her life, Third Sister Liu had eluded me. I have longed to visit Yufeng and the mountains her songs ring with, along the Li River, in Guangxi, but Third Sister Liu, herself, had eluded me. I had not watched the 1961 film; I had not seen the musical that preceded it, which travelled China and stole the heart of Chairman Mao; I had not, to my shame, heard of the world-famous high-tech, light-and-sound outdoor spectacular running in Guilin since 2004, Impressions of Liu Sanjie, which celebrates her as an emblem of Zhuang culture, a synecdoche for Guilin.
Before I met her in my friend’s translations, Liu Sanjie had already lived, it seems, a thousand lives. She had been worshipped and celebrated among her people of the hills; she had been venerated and received and repurposed; she had been interpreted, reinterpreted, reimagined, and rebadged; she had been adopted and she had appropriated. Having now read the Liu Sanjie scholarship and seen the movie and played the songs, I am glad to meet her, myself, in Professor Huang Shaozheng’s translations——this feisty, plucky, angelic Zhuang folk singer. (And now I have a new reason to visit Guilin, and in this book I now have the perfect guide.)
It is herself and her songs, in themselves, I feel I meet in this unpretentious translation. For Shaozheng reclaims Third Sister Liu from every way she has been borrowed and restores her to herself; he gives her back to her humanity and femininity and the specificity of her country; and he gives her back to us.
In her songs one meets a human being who belonged to no one but herself, who belonged to no cause but the mountains’, and most of whose politics was love. In her songs, consequently, one meets oneself: one’s unfamiliar better self; the person we would be if we had half her courage.
For inside each of us lives someone like Liu Sanjie. But we need to read her songs, as we need to read the poems of Li Bai or Mirabai or Dickinson or Akhmatova, to remember how we really go, deep down there in our humanity——to be reminded that deeper than our gender, than our class, than our identity (conferred or denied or asserted); deeper than our privilege or our disadvantage, than our trauma or our trouble or our fortune, there are mountains and their songs, sweet and true as birdsong; there is a singing self, indomitable and joyous, beautiful and kind. One of the ways that goes is how Liu Sanjie’s songs go.
3
Huang Shaozheng reads Liu Sanjie freshly, and in his introduction, he invites us to read her freshly, too, unconstrained by how she’s been, to date, construed. He lets her stand clear of the types she’s been cast in: brilliant Confucian ingenue, and proto-revolutionary class heroine. If we can free ourselves of preconceptions, we will stand ready to meet the singer and a writer, the woman of her people, any one of us at all (though more gifted), this flesh-and-blood human, who turns up in these songs.
I’ve said Professor Shaozheng helps us see Liu Sanjie’s work in itself, that he stands her clear of how she has been stolen from herself by the uses to which she has been put——the paternalistic pre-modern construction, the social realist reinterpretation of the 1960s. But Huang Shaozheng reads her, too. He proposes two ways of seeing her in herself. And he translates her with those inflections in mind.
Very sensibly, for starters, Huang Shaozheng suggests that we consider Liu Sanjie’s oeuvre as a manifestation of its place and of the cultural norms that prevailed there (and prevail still where traditional practices thrive). I would have thought it made sense to consider the role of the erotic in all works of art——since art is a participation in creation, an act, generally, of love, an articulation of longing, a celebration of beauty, a moment of ecstasy (of hope or despair etc). But many theoretical readings of literature——in particular those that see through prisms of power and economic relations, of class, of social category, of settled moralities, of various normative abstractions——seem innocent of the wellsprings of poetry and song. One writes from grief and anger and joy and delight; one writes in hope or despair; one writes to run lyric repairs on one’s life and all lives; one writes out of gratitude for being alive among all that is beautiful and all that is not.
When Octavio Paz writes that “poetry is language making love,” he is more on the money than many theoretical readings that prevail in the west. As I say in a recent essay, “whatever love is, poetry does that.” If all literature might be better understood, then, as the practice of affection, seduction, tender recollection, compassion, hope, dismay, provocation, or yearning (for a human beloved or for the beloved in the world), this is even more manifestly the case for Liu Sanjie’s songs, which honoured and transfigured established Zhuang mountain songs, which were themselves a central part of the courting rituals of the Zhuang people, songs which were made and shared to help one make amatory progress——to score, not necessarily a husband or wife, but certainly a lover. For Zhuang culture has always valued freedom of love, in particular before marriage, in a way that contemporary readers might find surprisingly broad-minded.
Whatever love is, poetry does that: a concept theory has always struggled to understand or accept. But so it is, it seems, with Liu Sanjie’s songs, and invited to hear her words in their humanity, as practices of poetry, of Zhuang courting rites, not as instances of ideology or merely as enactments of politics and identity, one suddenly hears the flirtation, feels the playfulness, discerns the innuendo, enjoys the sensuality, understands more fully the irreverence, in these songs.
A second and equally sensible innovation in Huang Shaozheng’s reading of Liu Sanjie is his invitation to see them as manifestations of the mountains in which they came into being. He offers an ecocritical reading. These are mountain songs, and if one feels allowed, on can hear the mountains in them.
Shaozheng invites us, then, to consider in the songs and life of Liu Sanjie as expressions not just national aspiration, nor of class struggle, nor even merely of ethnic identity, nor yet merely as literary artefacts, but as expressions of the weather in China’s south, of the steepness of the karst slopes, and the swiftness of the rivers and the hardness of the rain and the difficulty of the soil. Zhuang culture, including its erotic charge, is what it is because of where it evolved. Geography is destiny, as it has been said. In these songs, then, find the ground of one woman’s being, and recall that you, too, are home somewhere on this earth, and in your life and in your word and in how you love, geography sings; there is perhaps a place that remembers you, and in the work or your voice or hands or life, you manifest something of what that place knows and how it goes.
4
States and causes, rebels and rulers, theorists and defenders of prevailing intellectual norms——all these forces, everywhere on earth, want to recruit art. They sponsor new work that practises ideals they value; and they find in old work manifestations of those same values, or evidence of degeneracy in the absence of those values.
But real art is not for bending; it endures and survives. Beyond the shifting causes and beliefs and theories that seek to recruit art, art is needed. Humanity needs it. And writers and singers and painters will always supply that need. Which is to bear witness to the pain and delight, the infernal contradiction, the beauty and the terror entailed in Being: What it feels like to live a short while on an astonishing and sometimes appalling Earth, how one goes about fashioning meaning from the chaos of things, how one hopes and loves, notwithstanding the evidence to hand. This is why we need art, and it is what art has always tried (even without knowing it) to articulate. And we need art to keep doing that because it alone does justice to the felt-sense of being alive. Whereas most other discourses overlook our humanity, diminish it or disdain it, art (songs such as these) sees us. Art allows us and redeems us in our ordinary humanity. Art alone forgives us for being human. It makes beauty of our confusion.
Art, then, as I found myself saying in a paper I gave once in Xichang, is for freedom and it is for justice. In its freshness and originality and integrity, it frees us from cliché and cant; in its freedom from orthodoxy, in its individuality of voice, it does justice to an artist’s lived experience, and it justifies, in its own sui-generis achievement, the authenticity of each human life; it justifies and allows the particular music of each human heart.
One hears all this——the freedom, the joy, the justice——in Huang Shaozheng’s new translations of the songs of Liu Sanjie. One hears the heartbeat of the Earth——how the Earth loves us and how it would be loved in return. These folk songs are a kind of love song to the mountains, and beyond them all the Earth.
Poets have to know so much, I heard a student say last Sunday. She had in mind a poet whom she’d been married to for many years; she had in mind the many she had read. And she meant how much the poet has to study in life and in books about ideas and history and speech music and metrics and characters and about human nature and the names of trees and birds. It’s true you have to get out a bit and go to many different kinds of school and get across disparate bodies of knowledge to make poetry and other forms of literature. But how much more then must the translator know.
Truly, translation is a practice of deep humility and great wisdom, of generosity and courage and faith. It is one thing to sit in one’s own language and say what one perceives to be real and to matter; it is another to take the authentic utterance of another and to seek to do justice to it in one’s own voice in a tongue the first speaker could not speak. Because each language is another universe, and because the translator, no matter how hard she tries, will not divine and recast in a new tongue the voice and mind and manner of the author of the original work, in her mother tongue——each translation is new work. If it is honourably performed and well-achieved, it will, of course, be faithful in form and mood and attitude and voice and sense and implication to the original. But it can never be that original work.
A good translation gives a close impression. It adequates the original; it approximates it. It stands in for it, a proxy, a substitute, an alternate. And who would perform this work, which inevitably invites comparison and critique, but someone passionately dedicated to the work they translate? Who but a dedicatee, a lover of the original work would labour to bring to a new readership a faithful likeness? The world is immeasurably richer because of the work of translators, and I think of their work, including that of my friend Huang, as the work of love. I express my gratitude to them every day. I would have no Tolstoy, no Rumi, no Akhmatova, no Sappho, no Jidi Majia, no Qu Yuan, no Li Qingzhao, no Song of Songs, without translators. And my work would not have come to China without Isabelle Li, who translated it first, or without Huang and others, who have given my poems and essays a second life in Chinese.
I don’t know Chinese well enough to make that judgment here. But I know that Professor Shaozheng is a fine translator. He has translated, for instance, the New Testament and the poetry of Kahil Gibran into Chinese, and the poetry and speeches of Jidi Majia into English. I know he is respected as one of China’s most accomplished translators, and I know him to be a man of spirituality and a profound love for world literature. I know that he loves the songs he is translating, in part because he is a native of Guangxi, the region of China sung by Liu Sanjie. And I know that he has studied other translations of Liu and followed them here and departed from them there, in order to catch in English the particular qualities——the earthiness, the sensuality, the play, and the tenderness——missing in earlier translations, inflected as they were by older and more formal mores and dogmas.
The hope of the translator is that their translation seem a good song in the host language. Not as good as the original was in its mother tongue——that would be a fool’s ambition. But a good enough song, striking and original in the same sort of way that the original was.
Here, then, is Liu Sanjie, freed from others’ orthodoxies, walking in the integrity of her own ideas, in the music of her own heart, in the weather of her own culture, in the idiom of her own mountain realm. Liberated by this humane rendering of her profoundly human life and works, in which each of us can find a self it’s still not too late yet to be, a life it’s not too late to live.
