Xi Murong (Hsi Muren) [b. China/Taiwan]
1943
Xi was educated at the Royal Academy for Science and the Arts in Brussels, and back in Taiwan began to teach painting.
Her first major poetry collection, Qi li xiang (Seven-li scent) in 1981, causing a sensation in the Taiwanese literary scene. Her second book, Wuyuan de qingchun (Blameless Youth), also a literary success, was published in 1983.
In 2001 the publisher Green Integer published a translation of her work, Across the Darkness of the River, translated from the Chinese by Chang Shu-Li, who described her love poems as containing “an ironic sense of the necessity as well as the impossibility of love. But her love poems are also extended meditation on the tyranny of time and death, on the many implications of having to confront and negotiate the inevitability of loss.”
In 2002, she published Mitu shice (A booklet of poems gone astray). She published further new work in 2009 and 2010.
Qi li xiang (1981); Wuyuan de qingchua (1983); Mitu shice (2002); Meng wen ke (Bejing: Zuo jia chu ban she, 2009); Bai e ji Beijing: Ren min wen xue chu ban she, 2010)
Across the Darkness of the River, trans. by Chang Shu-Li (Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2001)
Not a Parting
Not to meet is not necessarily a parting
Not to hear is notNecessarily to forget.
Simply because your sorrow has mingled with mine
As evenly as the way moonlight has blended into
the hills. And whenever
The night feels as cold as water, it touches my old
wound.
An Experiment
A tiny piece of alum
Can then drain out all
The dregs.
Then If
If into our heart is put
A poem
Can it also
Drain out all the yesterdays?
English language copyright ©2001 by Chang Shu-Li. Reprinted by permission of Green Integer.