Xi Murong's "Listener" (席慕蓉的《旁聽生》)

Attended a very touching talk in one of the lecture halls of the Convention Centre last Sunday. In fact, more than one by one of my favourite poetesses, Xi Murong. First, there was a public recitation of three of her poems. That was followed by a talk on what made her write what she did. Although she was not supposed to be doing a recitation at the second talk, she couldn't help herself: towards the close of her talks, she recited again two of the three which she did at the earlier session.

Although I saw a picture of Xi Murong once on the internet. It was a completely different experience to see her in person. One sees her as she narrows her eyes, as she adjusts her hair, as she gestures with her fat fingers, as she unconsciously touches her scarf, as she laughs or smiles her embarrassment when she recounts how she was taunted by his brother and husband about her complete ignorance of the principles of physics, as she lifts her head in reverie of the pastures, the hills, the rivers, the grassland, the trees, the skies of Mongolia, as she recalls her stares of utter amazement at the inscription on the back of what she originally thought was a 9th century Han stele in Mongolia, carved in her native language, when she saw it for the first time. As she recites the last few lines of the poem I recently translated "The Border Farewell Song", one could hear the trembling in her voice,  choked with irrepressible emotions. At that moment, I could no longer withhold my own tears. It was so moving. What drew those reluctant tears from my tear glands, which seemed suddenly to have taken on a life of their own, completely evading my control, was her honest unabashed and undisguised love of her motherland, which before her first visit, remained, as she said, only her father's "homeland". In one of her earlier poems, the "listener" or "auditor", she recounted how she felt about her native country.

She told us how she was born in Sichuan and how her father as a Kumintang official moved to Taiwan when she was a child where she learned about her native country, Mongolia only second hand, through geography books and the mouths of her father and yet somehow, whenever she saw any photograph or heard about it, a certain feeling would well up inside her and how she instantly felt she was "connected" to the grassland, the hills, the lakes, the horses, the cattle, the sheep of Mongolia the very first moment she set foot upon it. She has since become a passionate defender of the preservation of "open" not fenced up, grassland of Mongolia. The "listener" is one of the three poems she recited. In this poem, she recounts her feelings of alienation  as a "listener" sitting in on talks about her native country.

旁聽生 您是怎麼說的呢  沒有山河的記憶等於沒有記憶 沒有記憶的山河等於沒有山河 還是說 山河間的記憶才是記憶 記憶裡的山河才是山河                那我可真是兩者皆無了 是的    　父親 在「故鄉」這座課堂裡 我沒有學籍也沒有課本 只能是個遲來的旁聽生                 只能在最邊遠的位置上靜靜張望  觀看一叢飛燕草如何茁生於曠野  一群奔馳而過的野馬  如何 在我突然湧出熱淚裡 影影綽綽地融入夕暮間的霞光 席慕蓉

Listener How would you say it                                                          A memory without a country is not a memory                     A country without a memory is not a country Or should one say                                                          Only a memory within a country is a memory                    Only a country inside a memory is a country If so, I really have neither                                             Yes    Father                                                                    In the classroom of “native country”                                 I have neither student status nor textbooks                       I could only be a late listener I could only look around in silence from the farthest seat And watch how a clump of swallow grass grow in the fields How the images of a passing pack of galloping mustangs     Merge effortlessly into the shadowy red aura of dusk        In  those hot tears welling up suddenly within me Xi Murong    tr. El Zorro