Xu Zhimo's Ding Dong-Fresh 除志摩的『丁當--清新』

I like Xu's poems. I like the way he writes as he talks. In the following poem, he talks about a broken relationship. He does so through an unusual method. He distances the pain and objectifies it to a certain extent by imagining that he was having a talk with the autumn rains and skilfully embodies the broken relationship by adopting and adapting two traditional Chinese poetic images: the autumn rains and a broken mirror to suggest the broken relationship and the accompanying pains. Here it is together with my translation.

  丁當--清新                                                  Ding Dong--Fresh

 

簷前的秋雨在說什麽？  What's the autumn rain saying beneath the eaves?         

  它說摔了她，憂鬱什麽？         It says that she's jilted, why sad?                  

我手拏起案上的鏡框，           I pick up the mirror frame,

  在地平上摔了一個丁當。       and throw it over the horizon in a ding dong.

 

簷前的秋雨在說什麽               What's the autumn rain saying beneath the eaves?

   「還有你心裏那個留著做什麽？」"What's that you're still keeping in your heart for?"

驀地裏又聽見一聲清新--         All of a sudden, a sound is heard, clean and fresh--

    這回摔破的是我自己的心！  It's my heart which got broken this time!

 

He effects a sudden reversal in the last two lines. The autumn rains ask him why he is still keeping the image of his lover in his heart. The moment he hears it, he seems to hear the sound of another broken heart, that of his own! Whilst in the first stanza, he seems to be in control: he proudly announces he's jilted her. But he was not happy. He was angry. He vented his unhappiness through the aggressive act of throwing the framed mirror to the floor. Probably he didn't like what he saw! He blamed the mirror for showing him an unsavoury image of himself. In the second stanza, he found that what he broke was not just his mirror but his own heart!