Looking at the tumblr posts in which Xi Chuan has been mentioned, I noticed an often-repeated, and re-tweeted, quote:

The lofty bookshelves sag
Under thousands of sleeping souls
Silence, hopeful—
Every time I open a book, a soul is awakened.

(It even shows up in Spanish, as well as German, above). It’s beautiful, and takes on a special weight in age of e-books–perhaps, ironically, why it has been spread so readily on the internet–and yet, interestingly, I could not place the quote. I knew it was not my translation (despite the fact that Goodreads thinks that it comes from my Tinfish chapbook Yours Truly & Other Poems), which means that Xi Chuan and I had not selected it for inclusion in Notes on the Mosquito, and I couln’t find it in Michael Day’s translations on the DACHS archive… so where did it come from, and how was it phrased in Xi Chuan’s Chinese?

 A bit more googling turned up the quote again as an epigraph to a chapter in Inkspell, by German  children’s author Cornelia Funke, which attributed the quote to “New Generation“–more than a hint that it might be from the Wang Ping-edited anthology, New Generation: Poems from China Today (Hanging Loose Press, 1999). And indeed, on pp. 145 – 146, in the poem “Books” 书籍, I found the source, as translated by Wang with Murat Nemet-Nejat.

And yet the quote as it’s been disseminated is not completely accurate–between lines two and three of the section another couplet is missing, which to my mind separate two moments of high lyricism and rescue the poem from overstated melodrama. At any rate, here is the poem in full as it appears in New Generation (click here for the poem in Chinese):

Books

Books should be illuminated by torches,
just as the Incas illuminated their city.

Torches shone on its
woven fabric, pears, gold and silver utensils–

objects that time uses to express itself
from opposition to unity, revealing the secret of fate,

like Hercules and Plato
attracted by the same spring bee.

“All books are the same book,”
pale Mallarmé said with confidence.

All mistakes are the same mistake,
like Ptolemy’s research into earth and stars,

his precise calculations
that only led him to absurd conclusions.

Books create a space larger than books.
The life of fire ends in its own flame.

Emperor Qin Shi haunted the library hallway
and Aldous Huxley,

robbed of the past by a fire,
clarified the rest of his life in a single lecture.

I see a rose
covered with dust; what else can death do?

The lofty bookshelves sag
under thousands of sleeping souls.

We live together,
hiding beneath the spirit’s torch.

Silence, hopeful–
every time I open a book, a soul is awakened.

A strange woman walks
in a city I’ve never seen.

A funeral is taking place
in a dusk I’ve never entered.

Othello’s anger, Hamlet’s conscience,
Truth spoken at will, muffled bells.

I read a family prophecy.
The pains I’ve seen are no more than the pains themselves.

History records only a few people’s deeds:
The rest is silence.