Ladies and gentlemen, my first encounter with the new year was a kiss. Familiar lips. My wife and I exchanged wishes, then gazed into the New Year’s night, at the tall trees and over to the dark Hamburg-Ohlsdorf cemetery, where all the birds had sought refuge from the New Year’s fireworks. Behind the poplars on the railway embankment lay an island of silence, a secretive coast, but no one was there but the dead.
I saw life through the living room window, where friends clinked champagne glasses, laughed, kissed and embraced each other. We celebrated the demise of a year grown old; it had taken us a step further, and a step further toward death. Already a new one was beginning, hopeful- and eternal-seeming, as though the ferryman were greeting us at midnight by the Styx. Lacking a coin beneath the tongue, he didn’t take us with him.
The start of the year was cool. I fed the birds in the garden until April. A long-tailed tit turned tame and landed on the balcony one morning to watch me smoking and reading Emily Dickinson. But when it first turned warm and rained for weeks over the grey lilacs, this visitor stayed away as well, preferring to fly with the others to the Alster River. By early May the locusts on the riverbank still barely had leaves. Only in June did a few meager blossoms bud. The bees still chilled, sleep-drunk. No dragonflies.
The year didn’t start well, and didn’t get better. Following the Greeks, the crisis in Europe seized Spain. The European idea, an idea of pacification, deteriorated peu à peu into old resentments and a lack of loyalty and responsibility which we’d long since thought overcome. Every third word was money. We were forced to watch as the Syrians killed each other. War threatened between Iran and Israel, and in Italy houses and churches collapsed in earthquakes and a cruise ship capsized, filled with people who’d wanted to have fun. The Internet grew. The Net grew through the days. Rampantly. Already some were getting out the trimming shears.
Not much got better. Everything came closer and closer faster and faster. What improved seemed to be my tolerance for worry, my acceptance. I discovered the benefits and risks of protective postures. To see my body, goaded through the days by back pains, not as a tiresome shadow, but as a guide that speaks to me in the light of my sensations, that was what Dr. Wang asked of me in his tranquil practice for Traditional Chinese Medicine. Each consulting room had a swing-out heat lamp. Beneath its glowing sphere, Dr. Wang examined my tongue. He felt my dancing pulse. And not only did he palpate my back, the source of worry, he felt the feet on which I dragged myself along. In his office he sat in front of a wall of wooden boxes filled with Chinese characters. Each contained a different medicinal herb, and all of them together made up a sort of herbal keyboard on which Dr. Wang typed the description of my pain.
Walking along the bank of the Alster through Hayns Park in the evening, I still felt the needles in my back, legs and feet. I made tea with mushrooms, herbs, dried fruits that came from Dr. Wang’s wall of boxes and may have grown in a garden in the hill country of Guangdong-Guangxi. I pictured a Chinese woman preparing the same tea a hundred years ago, and her husband drinking it, a scribe who practiced his calligraphy from morning to evening in pain. I drank and observed the troop of tits searching for food outside the window. The long-tailed tits, I’d read, live in China as well. In the north they’ve been found as far as Inner Mongolia, in the west as far as Ningxia, and in the south they follow the course of the Yangtse.
That winter I finally realized, ladies and gentlemen, that in the fall I’d travel to a summery China! The September as writer-in-residence in Shanghai began to structure the year for me. I was translating Emily Dickinson’s love poems. One of the most beautiful is about travel, travel as the poet imagined it, since Emily Dickinson never did travel.
My River runs to thee –
Blue Sea! Wilt welcome me?
My River waits reply –
Oh Sea – look graciously –
I'll fetch thee Brooks
From spotted nooks –
Say – Sea – Take me!
Whenever I sat in Dr. Wang’s waiting room I looked as though through a window in time at an ink drawing hung on the wall. It showed trees, a river, a path on the riverbank with a couple about to kiss. Children were playing nearby. Birds were flying to the coast. I saw Emily Dickinson’s handwriting before my eyes. She never saw her poems in print. The swift calligraphy of her hand was just that of the drawing from ancient China.
That was the time of my reading tour with my translation of Sherwood Anderson’s American classic Winesburg, Ohio. I calculated I’d need three months to finish my new poetry collection, and when Traklpark was finished I started on the middle section of my interrupted novel Nie mehr Nacht (Never Again Night). The main character, a draftsman, is supposed to draw several bridges in Northern France that saw heavy fighting in the Allied invasion of 1944. But Markus Lee doesn’t want to draw anymore; everything seems too full of meaning to him. One might say that he feels kidnaped by the dictate of meaning. And so he thinks about the expression “to shanghai someone”. It was once used in Hamburg and other German ports to describe the maritime practice of getting a sailor drunk and dragging him onto a ship. The sailor woke up from his intoxication on the high sea and had to slave away on board until the next port.
China and Shanghai, ladies and gentlemen, are present in many ways in Hamburg. Chinese containerships lie at the docks. My children hardly have a single toy that doesn’t come from China. Chinese shipping companies have branches in the Hafencity. There are Chinese restaurants in every neighborhood. The closer my fall in Shanghai drew, the more Asian my summer became. I read new poems by Yang Lian and old ones by Li Bai and Du Fu. There seemed to be more and more Chinese people in the city, strolling through “Han Bao”. Hamburg, the name, goes back to the Hammaburg, an early medieval castle. It stood for centuries, but no one knows where. All that remains of the castle is its name: in the age of Li Bai and Du Fu, a “Hamme” was a wooded hill in a bend of the Elbe River.
I’m sure you’ve noticed how I’m conjuring up for you, bit by bit, the ink drawing in Dr. Wang’s waiting room in which I so frequently lost myself. The kiss on the bridge, the forest, the birds, the children, the path on the riverbank leading to the sea. And I’m sure, ladies and gentlemen, that you’ve already gathered from this brief speech at the start of my stay in Shanghai that all these motifs play an important role in my writing. I see bridges everywhere, starting points, chances to travel. Every poem elevates the free word and gives form to the love of life. As Yang Lian writes:
In flight wild geese write
The character for “human being” –
And find with all creatures their way to the light.
I toss children high, high into the air,
Indulge the sun with my smile.
With a smile I look forward to my time here with you, dear listeners, dear Shanghainese. I look forward to my impressions in a city that has stirred my imagination ever since I was a child.
(Translated into english by Isabel Fargo Cole)
