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Lin Huiyin, 1904-1955 (Unknown author/Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain)
Mike Fu’s Note: I find myself drawn to Chinese writers situated at the interstices of history, culture, and language, and whose literary works demonstrate a hybrid subjectivity, whether overt or implicit. Lin Huiyin came of age in the period following the May Fourth Movement of 1919, which revolutionised and vernacularised Chinese literature and profoundly influenced the culture and society of the Republic of China. Her upbringing and education in the anglophone world, as well as her ties to the ill-fated poet Xu Zhimo and passionate architect Liang Sicheng, provide another frame of reference for her literary style.
“You Are an April Day Incarnate” is one of Lin’s most famous works. Both this poem and “After the Rain” deploy uneven end rhymes and rhythmic repetition. Lin’s evocations of the natural world are a sublimation of her emotional landscape and interiority, in the spirit of the English Romantics. I strive to capture the essence of her words by establishing a deliberate diction and cadence in English, even when it means deviating slightly from a literal translation.
For instance, the first and last lines of “You Are an April Day Incarnate” are essentially identical in Chinese, but I offer two separate renditions of the same phrase to more elegantly open and close the framework of the poem in English. In the same vein, I have elided the repetition of the last two characters in “After the Rain” in favour of presenting a fragment, which I believe functionally conveys the same decisiveness of the original text. I also play with definite and indefinite particles in the limited space of this poem to create a whimsical texture and tone. These and other choices represent my highly personal interpretation of Lin’s writing and the modern subjectivity that she embodied and performed.
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YOU ARE AN APRIL DAY INCARNATE
你是人間的四月天
I say, you are an April day incarnate,
Your laughter casts brightness to the wind;
And to the light of spring, twirling ardent.
You are the soft clouds of an April morn,
Twilight’s tender breeze,
The stars’ twinkling ease,
Upon flowers a gentle rainstorm.
That lightness, that charm, you are,
Of flowers you wear a glorious crown,
You are innocent and profound,
The moon in the night sky unbound.
Like golden earth beneath snowmelt
And freshly sprouted green, you are,
A tender and joyful plume,
White lotuses drifting through dreams.
You are bloom after bloom,
Songbirds twittering in roof beams.
—You are love, warmth, and hope unfurled,
You are an April day in this world!
你是人間的四月天
我說你是人間的四月天
笑響點亮了四面風;
輕靈在春的光豔中交舞著變。
你是四月早天里的雲煙，
黃昏吹着風的軟，
星子在無意中閃，
細雨點灑在花前。
那輕，那娉婷，你是，
鮮妍百花的冠冕你戴著，
你是天真，莊嚴，
你是夜夜的月圆。
雪化後那片鵝黃，你像;
新鮮初放芽的綠，你是;
柔嫩喜悅，
水光浮動著你夢期待中白蓮。
你是一樹一樹的花開，
是燕在梁間呢喃，
——你是愛，是暖，是希望，
你是人間的四月天!
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AFTER THE RAIN
雨後天
How lovely the day after the rain,
A swath of lush grass across this plain!
My heart wafts onward as the wind twirls,
A wind whirls:
Whirling wild grass, leaves crisp,
Twirling a cloud mass into a wisp—
Of smoke.
雨後天
我愛這雨後天，
這平原的青草一片!
我的心没底止的跟著風吹，
風吹:
吹遠了香草，落葉，
吹遠了一縷雲，象煙——
象煙。
How to cite: Fu, Mike and Lin Huiyin. “Two New Translations of Lin Huiyin.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 27 Jan. 2024, chajournal.blog/2024/01/27/lin-huiyin.
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Lin Huiyin Portrait. Photograph retrieved from Fujian Daily. Date Unknown.
Lin Huiyin (poet; 1904–1955) was a pioneering architect, writer, and historian. Born in Hangzhou, China, she was educated in England and the United States, where she pursued courses in fine arts, architecture, and set design at the University of Pennsylvania and Yale University. Lin was romantically linked to the romantic poet Xu Zhimo before his untimely demise. She married Liang Sicheng, son of a prominent politician, and together they established the first architecture programmes at Chinese universities. She wrote poetry, stories, and essays throughout her life and sought to integrate Chinese aesthetics with modernist techniques. Lin died from tuberculosis in 1955. The Chinese American architect Maya Lin, designer of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, is her niece.
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Mike Fu (translator) is a writer, editor, and Chinese-to-English translator. His translation of Stories of the Sahara by Sanmao (Bloomsbury, 2020) was named a Favourite Book of the Year by the Paris Review and shortlisted for the National Translation Award in Prose. He is a co-founder and former translation editor of The Shanghai Literary Review, and an affiliate faculty member of Antioch University’s MFA in Creative Writing programme.