Agarwood (excerpts)
1
Scent lingers. A single spark
intent on what can be turned to ash.
You have many things on your mind
but it is this spark that arranges them.
A ribbon of smoke departs from reality
as if something has been solved.
And far, far away, touched by these moments, trees
sway and rustle.
Women’s voices have been talking about this scent
for a long time. Now they’ve become wordless echoes,
breadth without feeling or name. Maybe when they are
figures on paper, when the echoes are heard, then you’ll understand
that ritual offerings, and the purity of art, both smell of troubled times.
You pace in the great hall. The spirit wall is spotted and blackened.
The quietest afternoons are hardest to endure:
the land like old silk, the gingko trees in the garden
like a pair of mad tigers.
2
‘... the wound consigns you to a life of offering your neck.’
On the plantation, someone is peeling back bark with a knife…
It’s always too late that you recognize
the knife-holder, and marvel
at how the resin forms, like the old, private ache of one’s country…
And the insects burrowing their way through the wood,
reminding you of ministers and servants at court,
deft survivors, always knowing
the safest path, aware that a useful gash
is not an emptiness, and may be more important than the tree.
And that pack of good-for-nothings, mindless
yet with vicious teeth, knowing only how to bite and eat —
fate will take good care of them, and their names will go down in history.
Fanaticism has always been a profession, a way of
training a blade to become a parasite. And the pain
you swallow sinks down inside you, forming
an indigestible depth —
a cave no one will enter.
‘Leave it, that thing that can drown a blade. All we need
is more cuts, until there is nothing you can say
on behalf of the past. The language is ours. Glory and slander
we have already arranged for you. In the end, the aroma
will quiet the dissenters…’
Yes. When you look back, the violence has left
like a tourist, and all the wounds
have been labelled souvenirs.
Translator’s note: The Chinese word for ‘agarwood’, chenxiang, literally means ‘deep-scent’. Chen, ‘deep’, or ‘to sink’, is a somber word associated with thought, reverie, heaviness. Xiang can mean any aroma; it is also the word for the sticks of incense burned in temples.
About the translators
Austin Woerner is a Creative Fellow in Chinese-English literary translation at the University of Leeds.
Jiang Jiaying is a student currently enrolled in the Conference Interpreting and Translation Studies MA course at University of Leeds.