Yu Guangzhong's "Single Bed" 余光中的『單人牀』

Yu Guangzhong writes not only about happy times. He also writes about the darker side of life. In one of his poems, he writes about solitude and loneliness. He sees the moon as the embodiment of an incomplete relationship, indicating its complement, the other eye in a most unusual image of one of the eyes of a blind man . The blind man may be China, divided into two. But the two share the same earth. Is he suggesting that the two Chinas are so different that they might just as well be inhabting two different "universes"? Even the atmosphere partakes of his dissatisfaction and his rage. He experienced the howling winds as the barkings of a dog. The sky was dark with more than despair and even his dreams could not transcend such darkness. Not only is the external world dark, it is freezingly cold as well. He thought China so remote, even further away from him than the sun. He felt cut off from his lover and his friends. He was lying on a lawn, his eyes directed skyward and when the wind blew, he felt it blew sadness, and what came out from his mouth were bad omens, concretized into the form of the surrealistic crows, each one uglier than the previous. It turned the agitation inside his stomache into ashes. Everything is dark and cold!

He was lying alone in his single bed! Is that a dream? Is that reality? The poem was written on March 31 1966 at a foreign city called 卡拉馬如 ( no idea where that is), further strengthening the sense of his alienation from China which he regards further away than the sun, when the relationship between Taiwan and China was at its lowest. So was this a veiled reference to the relationship of the two governments on two sides of the Taiwan Straits? So the singleness he refers to is not confined to the number of beds on which he sleeps. It qualifies even more the heart and mind of the one sleeping on it. He suffers from triple singleness or loneliness: from his love, his friends and his own mother land!

單人牀                                                         Single Bed

月是盲人的一隻眼睛                      The moon is an eye of a blind man

怒瞰著夜，透過蓬鬆的雲               Overlooking the night in rage, through ruffled clouds

狺狺的風追過去                               the howling winds in hot pursuit

這黑穹！比絕望更遠，比夢更高   This dark sky! Farther than despair, higher than dreams 

要凍成愛斯基摩的冰屋                    Frozen into an Eskimo's igloo

中國比太陽更陌生，更陌生，今夜    The China was even more distant than the sun, more distant, tonight

情人皆死，朋友皆絕交                     All lovers dead, all friends stopped talking 

沒有誰記得誰的地址                         None remembered the other's address

寂莫是一張單人牀                            Solitude was a single bed

向夜的四垠無限地延伸                    expanding limitlessly towards the four limits of the night

我睡在月之下，草之上，枕著空無，枕著 I slept under the moon, above some grass, resting on the void

一種渺渺茫茫的悲辛，而風             some nameless sorrow, and the wind         

依然在吹著，吹黑暗成冰                 was still blowing, blowing ice into the dark

吹胃中的激昂成灰燼，於是             blowing agitation in the stomache into ashes

有畸形的鴉，一隻醜於一隻             Misshapen crows, one uglier than another   

自我眼中，口中，幢幢然飛起     taking off one by one from my eyes, my mouth