Chen Kehua Returns

Well, yay! I'm now working on a large set of translations for Chen Kehua (陳克華), and have met with him a couple of times so far. He's a really interesting guy and I like his work a great deal. I'm aiming to have the set completed by October so we can submit it for the Taipei City Gov't fund that could help with publishing costs. Exciting stuff.

I also noticed that my earlier post on him is now the #1 result for an English search for "Chen Kehua" on the Taiwan Google. Hoho! Not that anyone ever searches that. Anyway here's another of his that I quite like:

Loneliness – Autopsy

What is this loneliness? Each night

I raise my knife to perform a self-dissection,

dreaming that in some corner of the body

I might find that hidden locus of infection.

In the small room, a rigid corpse

flat upon the disordered bed, saliva and vomited foodstuffs,

all filth sprinkled on an unclean bedsheet.

Slicing through the ribs, opening fine lines inward

I find the viscera still in good order

but lacking a waxy luster – I probe with my fingertips

and as expected find they have long since frozen, hardened.

It must be glandular, what with these intolerable

periodic eruptions, physiological phenomena

in the blood, or in the thick green bile -

I discover an entire cavity soaked in some kind of rare

and strange hormone, draw it out

and concentrate it, and inject the guinea pigs

to make observations.

(What is this loneliness?)

In the end those small rodents begin to know

and die one by one. I mark down:

In that narrow, crowded cage

they trampled upon one another; they could not see

their own path of reluctant corpses

And so I reach a conclusion. When I

suture up the wounds, return the organs,

daybreak outside the window, crowd of birds chattering in the trees,

in the corner of the lab the myna bird raises an anxious echo,

fiercely beating itself against the bars of its cage.

“Are you lonely?” I go to feed him,

offering up my entrails.