大地上的事情 / from Life on Earth

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BY Wei An
TRANSLATED BY Thomas Moran
Chinese

六

　　　穿越田野的时候，我看到一只鹞子。它静静地盘旋，长久浮在空中。它好像看到了什么，径直俯冲下来，但还未触及地面又迅疾飞起。我想象它看到一只野兔，因人类的扩张在平原上已近绝迹的野兔，梭罗在《瓦尔登湖 》中预言过的野兔：“要是没有兔子和鹧鸪，一 个田野还成什么田野呢？它们是最简单的土生土长的动物，与大自然同色彩，同性质，和树叶，和土是最亲密的联盟。看到兔子和鹧鸪跑掉的时候，你不觉得它们是禽兽，它们是大自然的一部分，仿佛飒飒的木叶一样。不管发生怎么样的革命，兔子和鹧鸪一定可以永存，象土生土长的人一样。不能维持一只兔子的生活的田野， 一定是贫瘠无比的。”
　　　看到一只在田野上空徒劳盘旋的鹞子，我想起田野往昔的繁荣。

English Translation

6

I was crossing a field when I saw a Sparrow Hawk. It was circling quietly and it drifted there in the sky for a long time. Then it seemed to see something and dove straight down but quickly flew back up before it reached the ground. My guess is it must have seen a rabbit, which would be a rare thing because wild rabbits are disappearing from the countryside with the spread of cities and towns. In Walden, Thoreau writes, “What is a country without rabbits and partridges? They are among the most simple and indigenous animal products;…… of the very hue and substance of Nature, nearest allied to leaves and to the ground…… It is hardly as if you had seen a wild creature when a rabbit or a partridge bursts away, only a natural one, as much to be expected as rustling leaves. The partridge and the rabbit are still sure to thrive, like true natives of the soil, whatever revolutions occur……. That must be a poor country indeed that does not support a hare.”[1]

When I saw the Sparrow Hark hovering in fruitless labor over the field, it made me think about how rich with life our fields used to be.

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REFERENCES

  1. Thoreau, Henry D.Walden: A Fully Annotated Edition, edited by Jeffrey S. Cramer (New Haven: London University Press, 2004), pp. 271-2.
 

Biography

苇岸 (1960-1999)，优秀散文家，原名马建国，生于北京市昌平县北小营村。1988年开始写作《大地上的事情》(新生代散文代表作)。1998年，开始创作《一九九八二十四节气》。1999年5月19日因肝癌医治无效谢世，享年39岁。苇岸一生文字很少，不足二十万字。生前只出版一部《大地上的事情》。在病榻上所编的第二本书《太阳升起以后》， 于2000年由中国工人出版社出版。

WEI AN was the pen name of Ma Jianguo (1960-1999), who grew up on the outskirts of Beijing and studied philosophy at People’s University. While in college he was influenced by the Misty poets and their work. He befriended Gu Cheng, and published his first poem in 1982, taking his pen name from a poem of Bei Dao’s. In 1986, poet Haizi introduced him to Thoreau’s Walden (in Xu Chi’s translation). Inspired by this book, Wei An turned from poetry to prose nonfiction and in 1988 began to write “Things on Earth,” sections of which were first published in 1991.

Wei An wrote essays about birch trees, beekeepers, bird’s nests, wasps, his travels to Inner Mongolia and Xinjiang, people he knew, things he believed and writers he admired. In a short autobiographical essay, he listed the writers and poets he most respected: Thoreau, Tolstoy, Tagore, Whitman, Emerson, Kahlil Gibran, Hans Christian Andersen, Francis Jammes, Blake, Hesse, and Prishvin. He added apologetically that he was not familiar with the great corpus of traditional Chinese literature. Wei An never became well-known and his name is unfamiliar to most Chinese readers, but his life, work and beliefs are well remembered by poets, writers and critics. He was an idealist, a pacifist, a deep ecologist and a vegetarian at a time when these qualities made him unusual in China.

Wei An died of liver cancer at the age of thirty-nine. Many of his most well-known essays, including the original essay from which this translation was completed, are collected in his Zuihou de langman zhuyizhe (The Last Romantic), edited by Feng Qiuzi (Guangzhou: Flower City Publishing, 2009).

THOMAS MORAN teaches Chinese language, literature and film at Middlebury College. He is the editor of Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 328: Chinese Fiction Writers, 1900-1949 (Gale, 2007) and has co-edited a forthcoming second volume in this series on Chinese Fiction Writers, 1950-2000. Moran’s current research interest is the history of contemporary Chinese fiction and prose nonfiction about nature and the environment. He translated Wei An’s “Life on Earth” while in Beijing in spring 2012 on a Fulbright grant. He lives in Ripton, Vermont.

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