Hardcover(Bilingual edition)
-
PICK UP IN STORECheck Availability at Nearby Stores
Available within 2 business hours
Related collections and offers
Overview
Liu Xiaobo has become the foremost symbol of the struggle for human rights in China. He was a leading activist during the Tiananmen Square protests of June 4, 1989, and a prime supporter of Charter 08, the manifesto of fundamental human rights published in 2008. In 2009, Liu was imprisoned for "inciting subversion of state power," and he is currently serving an eleven-year sentence. He was awarded the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize for "his prolonged non-violent struggle for fundamental human rights in China." Liu dedicated his Peace Prize to "the lost souls from the Fourth of June."
June Fourth Elegies presents Liu's poems written across twenty years in memory of fellow protestors at Tiananmen Square, as well as poems addressed to his wife, Liu Xia. In this bilingual volume, Liu's poetry is for the first time published freely in both English translation and in the Chinese original.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781555976101 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Graywolf Press |
| Publication date: | 04/10/2012 |
| Edition description: | Bilingual edition |
| Pages: | 208 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.32(w) x 9.06(h) x 0.90(d) |
| Language: | Chinese |
About the Author
Jeffrey Yang is the author of two poetry collections and an editor at New Directions Publishing.
Read an Excerpt
June Fourth Elegies
By Liu Xiaobo
Graywolf Press
Copyright © 2012 Liu XiaoboAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-55597-610-1
Chapter One
1Monument waves of weeping
marble grain fused with blood-stained veins
Belief and youth beaten beneath
a tank's rust-chained treads
Ancient story of the East
leaks out new hope unexpectedly
The glorious crowds have little by little disappeared
like a river that slowly, steadily dries away
landscape on both shores transformed to stone
Every throat has been strangled by fear, every
trembling has traced the dissipated niter smoke
Only the executioner's steel
helmet glints, luminous glints
2
I cannot recognize the flag anymore
The flag like an unknowing child
who's flung upon Mother's corpse
returns home weeping
I cannot tell day from night anymore
Time has been petrified by gunshots
like a paralytic without memory
Gun's muzzle presses into my back
I've lost my passport and identity card
In the bayonet-inflamed dawn
that once familiar world
cannot find a handful of dirt
to bury itself in
Naked red heart
collides with iron and steel
Earth without water without greenness
ravaged by sunlight
3
They wait and wait
wait for time to invent an exquisite lie
wait for the transformation of the bestial hour
Indeed, wait until
fingers transform to sharpened claws
eyes transform to a gun's mouth
feet transform to chained treads
air transforms to a command
It arrives
at last it arrives
the five-thousand-year awaited command
Open fire—kill people
kill people—open fire
Peaceful petition, hands unarmed
an old man's cane, a child's torn jacket
The executioner will never be swayed
Eyes burnt to red
Gun-barrels shot to red
Hands dyed red
A bullet
A mud-thick secret spills out
A crime
A kind of heroic feat
How relaxing
death's arrival
How easy
bestial desires are satisfied
Young soldiers
recently clothed in uniform
still haven't felt
the intoxication of a girl's kiss
but now in an instant
experience the bloodthirsty pleasure
of murder, their youth's beginnings
They who
cannot see the blood-soaked dress
cannot hear the struggle's scream
through steel helmets cannot perceive life's fragility
They aren't aware
of the fatuous old man
transforming the ancient capital
into another zone of Auschwitz
Brutality, iniquity rise up from the earth
like the splendor of a pyramid
while life crumbles into the abyss
where even the faintest echo cannot be heard
The massacre has engraved a nation's tradition
years, months as remote as an abandoned language
that enacts a final farewell
4
I had imagined being there beneath sunlight
with the procession of martyrs
using just the one thin bone
to uphold a true conviction
And yet, the heavenly void
will not plate the sacrificed in gold
A pack of wolves well-fed full of corpses
celebrate in the warm noon air
aflood with joy
Faraway place
I've exiled my life to
this place without sun
to flee the era of Christ's birth
I cannot face the blinding vision on the cross
From a wisp of smoke to a little heap of ash
I've drained the drink of the martyrs, sense spring's
about to break into the brocade-brilliance of myriad flowers
Deep in the night, empty road
I'm biking home
I stop at a cigarette stand
A car follows me, crashes over my bicycle
some enormous brutes seize me
I'm handcuffed eyes covered mouth gagged
thrown into a prison van heading nowhere
A blink, a trembling instant passes
to a flash of awareness: I'm still alive
On Central Television News
my name's changed to "arrested black-hand"
though those nameless white bones of the dead
still stand in the forgetting
I'm lifted up high by the self-invented lie
tell everyone how I've experienced death
so that "black-hand" becomes a hero's medal of honor
Even if I know
death's a mysterious unknown
being alive, there's no way to experience death
and once dead
cannot experience death again
yet I'm still
hovering within death
a hovering in drowning
Countless nights behind iron-barred windows
and the graves beneath starlight
have exposed my nightmares
Besides a lie
I own nothing
Dedication: At home, you didn't listen to the protests of mother or father and escaped through the small bathroom window; then the flag you raised collapsed, age 17. I'm still alive, already 36. Now, facing your departed spirit, being alive is a crime, writing you a poem a further disgrace. The living should really shut their mouths and listen to the graves speak. Writing you a poem I'm not worthy of. Your 17th year transcends all speech and man-made structures.
I'm still alive
with a name of some disrepute
I possess neither courage nor qualifications
holding a bouquet of flowers or a poem
walking toward the smile of 17
I know
17 bears no bitterness
17 tells me
life's simple without extravagance
as if gazing across a boundless desert
no need for trees no need for water
no need for the adornments of flowers
simply endure the tyranny of the sun
17 collapses on the path
the path disappears
17's long sleep underground
is as serene as a book
17 comes into the world
and is attached to nothing
save the pure white innocence of the age
(Continues...)
Excerpted from June Fourth Elegies by Liu Xiaobo Copyright © 2012 by Liu Xiaobo . Excerpted by permission of Graywolf Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Foreword by His Holiness the Dalai Lama ix
Author's Introduction: From the Tremors of a Tomb xi
June Fourth Elegies
Experiencing Death 3
For 17 17
Suffocating City Square 23
A Lone Cigarette Burns 29
From the Shattered Pieces of a Stone It Begins 35
Memory 41
I Will Give My Soul Free Rein 57
That Day 73
Closing in and Breaking Through 83
Standing in the Curse of Time 89
For Su Bingxian 101
Memories of a Wooden Plank 111
June Fourth, a Tomb 119
Beneath the Gaze of the Departed Souls 129
Fifteen Years of Darkness 137
Remember the Departed Souls 145
The White Lilies in the Dark Night of June Fourth 155
The Dead Souls of Spring 161
Child-Mother-Spring 169
June Fourth in My Body 181
Five Poems for Liu Xia
Daybreak 191
A Small Rat in Prison 193
Greed's Prisoner 195
Longing to Escape 199
One Letter Is Enough 201
Notes 203
Translator's Afterword 211