Saying Good-bye to Cambridge Again

I learnt about the writer of this poem, the early 20^th Century poet Xu Zhimo, from listening to the radio programme, ‘The Chinese Grand Tour’ on Radio 4 last Sunday.  This programme – still available for a few days! – was about the groups of Chinese tourists who come to the Britain to follow a very specific itinerary. From London, where they don’t seem to linger long, they head up the East coast stopping in Cambridge, York and Edinburgh, before heading down via Old Trafford and the Chinatown in Manchester and the brand-discount shopping centre in Bicester.

As a Northumbrian, I wondered whether they would stop here for anything. The presenter had explained their route related to cultural links to China, so it was conceivable that they might be interested in a wall, like their own, built to define an empire and keep out hostile tribes. But – even though the remnants of Hadrian’s Wall are right there between York and Edinburgh – they didn’t. More perplexed than me would be the proud Oxford alumni listening; if the group were interested in great learning institutions, then why not stop at Oxford as well as Cambridge? Oxford is just down the road from their last stop, Bicester, after all.

But Xu Zhimo didn’t go to Oxford, he went to Cambridge. Not only that, his most famous poem, a poem Chinese school children know by heart, is called ‘Leaving Cambridge Again’ or ‘Saying Goodbye to Cambridge Again’. The presenter explained the poem’s importance to modern Chinese poetry by saying it was like the Chinese equivalent to Wordsworth’s ‘Daffodils’ in English. There is a spot on the river Cam, near where Xu Zhimo used to sit where a plaque commemorates him, and it is pointed out to the groups of Chinese tourists who float by on specially enlarged rented punts. Listening to all this, I began to feel like I should know a bit more about the poet, especially since the couple of stanzas read on air were quite pretty, and – as it does – Google obliged me with a bit of information about Xu Zhimo and an anonymous translation of his poem, printed in full below.

 

Saying Goodbye to Cambridge Again

 

Very quietly I take my leave,

As quietly as I came here;

Quietly I wave good-bye,

To the rosy clouds in the western sky.

 

The golden willows by the riverside,

Are young brides in the setting sun;

Their reflections on the shimmering waves,

Always linger in the depth of my heart.

 

The floating heart growing in the sludge,

Sways leisurely under the water;

In the gentle waves of Cambridge,

I would be a water plant!

 

That pool under the shade of elm trees,

Holds not water but the rainbow from the sky;

Shattered to pieces among the duckweeds,

Is the sediment of a rainbow-like dream.

 

To seek a dream? Just to pole a boat upstream,

To where the green grass is more verdant;

Or to have the boat fully loaded with starlight,

And sing aloud in the splendor of starlight.

 

But I cannot sing aloud,

Quietness is my farewell music;

Even summer insects keep silence for me,

Silent is Cambridge tonight!

 

Very quietly I take my leave,

As quietly as I came here;

Gently I flick my sleeves,

Not even a wisp of cloud will I bring away.

 

(See Original Chinese here)

 

There’s something about eastern England, with its marshes and slow rivers, its clement weather and its flat expansive landscape, that seems to fit so well with the flavour of Far Eastern poetry. The willow dipping in the lazy river and the pink-tinged clouds would not be out of place in poetry from China’s golden age. Perhaps the environs of Oxford, Durham or Saint Andrew’s would not have been so symapathetic to Xu’s poetic sensibility!

 For me, the poem captures very that sense of leaving a place to somewhere completely different when you will take nothing of it with you, and the seemingly contradictory feeling that something of it will, in some part of you, stay with you. The repeated references to the poet’s silence are significant – is this the silence of a foreigner abroad, or the silence in which beauty is best appreciated? Most intriguing of all is the ‘heart’ that rests in the sludge of the river Cam, that seems to speak of Xu’s desire to be suspended in the moment, his desire to stay in this dream of Cambridge that is reflected in the river. The poem’s imagery at once invites and resists interpretations of these sorts, but is a poem of feeling and desire more than one of ideas, and a poem of beauty. I suppose that it is impossible to know the beauty of the original from the English, but this translation has some beauty of its own.

How nice, anyway, that the Chinese have garnered this nugget of ephemeral beauty  from one poet’s stop inEngland – it’s good for more than just Manchester United shirts and discount Burberry!