A Brief Discussion on the Development Clues of Ancient Chinese Flower-and-Bird Painting and Natural History Painting; Selected Translations of Poems: Li Liyang, Celan's Melody, Dickinson

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It can be said that a person's life is a kind of luck if it belongs to a relatively limited life and limited individuals. But there are those few who are too intense and sincere to belong only to a community of people beyond history. Think about Qu Yuan, Holderlin, Celan, Dickinson, how can you turn your back on them and avoid them? We are also lucky if we face them directly, have more constant confidence in the world, and have more empathetic rationality. 【April 20, 2013】

Writing begins as an object of the gaze, then as a creative activity, and finally as a murder, after which the metamorphosis is absence. (Zhou Yan pretends to be Roland Barthes) [April 19, 2013]

Song Fachang (Muxi) sketch scroll is used in today's illustration. During the past two years of writing Plant Hunter, I have gradually clarified the clues to the development of ancient Chinese flower-and-bird paintings and natural history paintings. Before the middle Tang Dynasty, most of the depictions of flowers, birds, fish and insects were used as components of murals and decorative paintings (sculptures). During the Anshi Rebellion, the Tang court took refuge in Sichuan, which actually brought the northern culture accumulated around Chang'an to Sichuan, which was inspired by the local life and natural environment, and produced new paintings and poems (Take Du Fu as an example, there are some poems in Sichuan during his stay in Sichuan. A large number of poems describing local nature, customs, flora and fauna). Flower and bird painting came into being in Sichuan in the middle and late Tang Dynasty, and entered the Song Dynasty through the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms, especially the Southern Tang Dynasty. It became a style of painting under the painting academy system. In fact, since the Song Dynasty, there have been three branches of paintings depicting the nature of flowers, birds, fish and insects. One is courtyard-style paintings of flowers, birds, fish and insects, which focus on depicting the shape and mood of things, while the overall tendency is to be painterly and decorative; 1. Nature sketching painting, which mainly focuses on observing and recording nature, is equivalent to natural sketching and freehand sketching; the other is a component part of nature, landscape or life emotion painting. These three paintings representing flowers, birds, fish and insects changed constantly from the Northern Song Dynasty to the mid-Qing Dynasty, but there was no substantial change. The biggest and fundamental difference between ancient Chinese natural history paintings and Western, Indian and Arabic natural history paintings is that there is no subject or object. Natural objects are not objects of objective expression, but things in themselves that are life and existence; therefore The nature depicted is always in its own life and death, reflecting the painter's emotions. Western nature is an object, a dead object, and an idea in paintings, rather than natural life itself. Once a style or genre is established, art is dead, so painters are always giving new forms and life to painting in the challenge of living from death. Among the natural history paintings, Zhu Da's sketching surpasses all others. The modality and individuality of things and the eclecticness of the pictures are unmatched in ancient and modern China and abroad. The real transformation (or decline) of ancient Chinese natural history painting occurred during the Qianlong period, with the introduction of Western painting by court Jesuit painters, the introduction of exotic ornamental and edible plants by court Jesuit missionaries, the spread of plants in trade exchanges, and the introduction of export paintings. Due to the joint fermentation of demand, court painters and export painters began to draw a large number of natural history atlases, and the content, painting form, audience and aesthetics gradually changed.

this hour and the dead

Li Liyang

Tonight my brother, in his heavy boots, is walking

The empty rooms above my head,

Open and close door after door.

What is he looking for in an empty house?

What would he need in heaven?

Does he remember his earth, his birthplace where he was torched?

His love for me feels like splashed water

Flow back into its container.

At this hour the dead have no peace

And the living burn.

Someone told him it was time for him to sleep.

My father keeps a light on by our bed

And get ready for our journey.

he sewed on his knee

Ten holes in five pairs of boy's pants.

His love for me is like his sewing:

Colors and too many threads,

Stitches are uneven. But the needle follows his hand

Every movement clearly cuts through.

At this hour, the dead with sorrow

And the living are escaping.

Someone told him it was time for him to sleep.

God, that ancient furnace, never stops

With his mouth of teeth said,

stained beard at the feast, and his kerosene-smelling

Breath, airplanes, ashes of people.

His love for me feels like fire,

Feel like a flock of pigeons, feel like water in a river.

In this moment, dead alone and helpless, kind

And helpless. And the Lord lives.

Someone told the Lord to leave me alone.

i've had enough of his love

It feels like burning, flying and fleeing.

a table in the wild

Li Liyang

i drew a window

and a man sitting in the window.

I drew a bird flying over the lintel.

That is my painting thinking.

if i draw a woman there

Instead of a man, it is a painting of speech.

if i draw the second bird

On a woman's lap, that's the guard

The third flew at her feet

Now it's singing.

or erase the bird

Let the ivy branch

Wrap around the woman's ankles, climb up

her lap, it became a memory.

you need to find your own

Drawing, whoever you are,

what do you need.

for me waterfall

Many little hands splashed

means silence

Nurturing me.

Time hangs like fruit on the tree of night

means when i close my eyes

look into myself,

a thousand opened eyes

The test has seen my waking hours.

At the same time, the clock

drop by drop

not much,

minus a day from a day

never have less, means honey

inside the hive

awake all night

Guess who its parents are.

Even my death is not my death

unless it's a nameless face

Unpredictable expression.

even my name isn't my name

unless the bees flock

a table for a stranger

light and moment, in the wilderness

to whom? Where?

virtues of a boring husband

Li Liyang

Whenever I talk, my wife falls asleep.

So, now, when she can't sleep, I talk.

It's like magic.

Let's say she hasn't had a good night's sleep in a week

feeling exhausted, evening

go to bed early,

But it started turning around.

I lay down beside her,

He raised his head with one hand and said,

"You know, I've been thinking about it."

Immediately she calmed down,

Find a fetal position,

And tucked his head under my arm.

I know her body lies, being caressed carelessly

To be the master also needs to sleep, but the mind wanders in all directions.

"Will you stay?" she asked.

"I'm right here," I replied.

"Well, what were you talking about?" she wondered,

So I said.

"It's not that lovers always meet in the garden,"

her eyes

Already looking hazy, as if unable to concentrate.

"Go ahead," I said to her, "close your eyes."

"Okay," she said, "you can go on." So I went on.

"It's not that lovers are always

A house by the sea, or the shadow of a branch

Whirling in a room with walls and ceilings

talk together.

but these spaces

born of their relative speech

emerges from listening.

I mean, maybe..."

And she sighs. Her breathing eased.

And I remember hearing it somewhere:

Every living being breathes and sighs.

Everyone in the living beings sighs and falls asleep.

Or is that: every living being sighs, dies?

I went on, stroking her head now,

Push back the hair on the front of the forehead,

Showing her vivid brows,

And waited to hear her next sigh.

Maybe real lovers face what the picture shows

shows a universe

The previous union, or body and soul,

Equivalent counterparts in eternal transformation

Swap combines the respective properties:

Shore and non-shore, sea and sky,

A room and a world, the gazer and the gazed. "

A slight tremor ran through her body,

From the arms, to the legs, and then the feet, as if

Tension shot out of her.

She mumbled the beginning of a word.

I continued.

"Perhaps the union of lovers

Is the moment of first meeting, beyond time,

From which emerge various times and processes:

arrive, leave, wait, return,

Fountains, terraces, paths, and eaves.

maybe any world

all god and soul

product of contact,

Fountain of mind and soul. "

I counted her second sigh, the deeper and longer it was.

"Perhaps God said I love you! And the whole

The universe, including consciousness, is what it claims

a form.

Maybe without you,

Only I love it! ringing,

Generate everything in the space, every quadrant

They are all expressions of God's first nature: I love!

maybe a you

Rising from this echo,

Resurgence of my love for this master!

And we are you, against the source of me,

The second man, as opposed to God's first man.

So let's put a whole lot of me down

To truly feel yourself. a you

Before God, be seen.

To be seen: the divine experience

One of your mysteries.

Perhaps, often, we

Anti-customer-oriented,

Confuse that me with that you. but still, maybe

More time emerged from that confusion. "

By this time, she had pretty much stopped listening.

Oh lower your voice and continue to whisper,

If I stop too soon she will wake up.

"Perhaps for God

Love is the loved one giving the loved one

Give back the gaze.

From that look and look back,

We are about space, home, distance

start, end, repeat,

dead, owed, fruitful, numerical, weighty

all ideas

emerge; everything is

the lover and the lover

The result of meeting, our souls

Empathize with what it loves.

Now she's slack, her fingers

Released from its grip on the edge of the sheet,

And I'm almost whispering.

"Perhaps what the wise man says is true,

I don't know if I remember correctly.

About the sublimation of love.

maybe we learn

To love someone, so to speak, begins as an object,

Then a presence, then an indispensability,

Finally as a divine manifestation,

Maybe all of this at the same time,

It may be gradually discovered

Every deeper level is real.

maybe we see it in each other

Validating that face in ourselves.

Oh, I don't know. Now you are asleep. "

So I stopped talking and kissed her forehead,

waited for a moment

left the bed

Close the door behind me.

Geoffrey Hill: Two Songs for Celan

Two Choral Overtures: Celan's Melody

1

Hail Mary

this is a land of despair

there is a land called lost

Peaceful in our heads.

The moon, full on frost,

Bring these stone heads to life.

The emotion of the verb "to stare at"

split personality, from the air

Sections of conjugated ice,

The glossy glaze shines brightly.

Look at us, Our Lady.

our loneliness has drifted

your loneliness, seven

The Death Star is in your sky.

2

carol at the end of vespers

We'll go home and spin...

Cornflowers and your steadfast bloom

where you alder beech you fern,

Midsummer draws near to my distant home,

A fresh trace of a lost origin.

Blackberry hanging like silver frost,

plum tree seeps through every crack

The horsefly sucks the green droppings,

The sweetness of grafts clinging to them:

Immortal ephemerality, a

'The charity of otherness', self-understanding,

Faithfulness grows in the heart

like moss on trees.

Dickinson: Have a happy heart — first —

Let the heart be happy — first —

Then — to be free from pain —

Then — those little painless tablets

That dull pain —

Then — go to sleep —

Then — if the

the wishes of its approvers

the privilege of dying

Wendler uses this poem to analyze the peculiarities of Dickinson's chromatic scale-like writing and the use of nouns and verbs. She also talked about Zeno's concept of time - time can be divided infinitely. Although Dickinson is extending and advancing the psychological process step by step, the infinity of fate time is still hidden in the overall process of her gradually shrinking back and handing over to fate.

Dickinson: He touched me lightly, so I lived to understand

He touches me so I live to understand

Such a day, so allowed,

i groped on his chest

to me it's boundless

And still, like a raging sea

Let all the streams rest.

And now, I'm a different person from before,

As if I breathed the ultimate air—

Or brushed off a royal gown—

My feet too, they used to wander around—

My gypsy face—disguised now—

Became a softer name—

into this port, if I could,

Rebecca, come to Jerusalem,

Will not turn around with such joy—

nor in Persia, before her shrine

for her regal sun

Hold up such a sign of crucifixion.