[創作] Grandfather's Landscape

[kamadevas (蔗尾蜂房)]

Before you became a landscape painter
You were an architect
Maybe you were not so great
People would say you were at best an amateur
And you were not an architect at all
You were only a foreman
More precisely an overactive petty proprietor
Trying to build a mini condominium on a tiny patch of land
Coordinating all the masons, tilers, plumbers, carpenters
To carry out your ambition to design a dream edifice
Even though in reality it was just a mediocre building
And you never told me how you bowed hundreds of times
In front of the bankers to ask for a loan
And bribed the municipal officials to get the certificate
In your landscape, huge boulders and sheer crags in distance
Overlapped each other like a skyscraper
But the shanty at the foot of the mountain
Was exactly like the first house you bought
Where your son was born

Before you became an architect
You were an entrepreneur
No. You had never been so successful
You were just a small businessman
You were a shoemaker, clockmaker, clothe manufacturer,
Orchid cultivator, goldfish breeder, green finch raiser…
You tried all kinds of speculations
As long as there was some money in your pocket
You wanted to make an investment
Yet you failed again and again, draining your savings
In your landscape, the flying birds, the swimming fishes
The blossoming flowers seemed to tell
The funny stories of your industrial adventures
Fortunately, you bet your biggest investment on your son
It was not about any stake but love

Before you became an entrepreneur
You were a shipowner
Of course you were not a shipping tycoon
You were just a clerk in a shipping company
And later had some shares of an old pilot boat
No, you dared not get involved with smuggling
Its penalty was capital punishment
And you never defered any payment or workers' wages in arrear
Maybe that's why you couldn't accumulate capital
Maybe that's why you painted in such detail
The wooden ferry, the bamboo pier
And the fisherman who put no bait or hook on his rod
Maybe that was just the way you did your business

Back to reality, before you became a frugal clerk
You had lived too long already, yes, lived too long
To see the great China you fought for, after passing through
All the ordeals, unified once yet falling apart again
Yes, you should have died and been promoted to captain posthumously
Before you celebrated the victory over Japan in Shanghai
Wearing a white suit and a Panama hat
Going to all the expensive cabarets and theatres with your wife
And your newborn son wrapped in swaddle
You telegraphed multi-million devaluated money to your widowed mother
And a message saying, "I visited the U.S. battleship in Shanghai today
I will come home as soon as the communist revolt is suppressed"

Yes, you should have been shot by the caliber of a Zero fighter
When you took shield behind a mossy tombstone
Trying desperately to tune your shabby walky-talky
And yelling for the anti-aircraft gun unit
Before you abandoned your mother in the remote hometown
And fled to Taiwan with Chiang Kai-shek's nationalist troops-
Yes, the landscape scroll is too long for you
Too much blank is waiting for, not your pigment
But your explanation. Like the white corner with a black smear
Among the emerald hills, is it the brink of a lake
With a glimpse of a fighter plane's shadow
Or a cloud with a strand of cremation smoke?

Too many fellow soldiers had died yet you survived
Because you were a technician, a signal lieutenant
And most of the time you hid in the bunker of the headquarters
Because when you set telephone poles along the country road
The illiterate battalion commander would question
Why you let another side of the road empty without poles
Why you didn't set two lines for his troops
And he didn't accept any other explanations until
You answered the other side was for the wireless only

In your landscape, there is no electric pole
No radio mast, no dam, no oil pipe, no power plant
No tractor, no truck, no metal grain bin, no asphalt road
In your imagined blueprint for your country
You had drawn them a hundred thousands times
But now, you were a retiree learning traditional landscape
From your son, a professional painter
You only wanted to draw your pre-modern hometown

It was the time before you became a soldier
When you were only a simple country boy, probably a swineherd
You used to mention your hometown producing the best pork
Those pigs live in the elevated, thatched cage above the fishing pond
The pond keeps them cool and clean and receives their excrement
As feed for fishes, and no you don't eat those fishes
They become the fertilizer for the paddy fields
Growing more crops to raise more pigs

No, you were probably not so simple,
You were from a petty landlord family
Your father used to be a public functionary
No matter how hard it was, your widowed mother
Supported you to finish middle school
You were probably one of the radical students
Because Chairman Mao is also from your hometown
No, your mother and brother died during the Cultural Revolution
No, when you came back half a century after you left
You couldn't find the exact place of your mother's tomb
No, in your landscape, everything is fine, no trouble
The white corner with a black smear
Is just the moment when a kingfisher skims over
The curve of the Yangtzu River


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推 yuuyh:(很讚!)
推 hahastarr:love it!!!
推 korn31910:Just wonderful!