Xu Jiang
TRIVIALITIES: LONG AND SHORT

The France I used to like has disappeared,
Paris is thronged with people from places
very far away from the outskirts of Gaul.
The America I used to love
has gone back into the movies.
Many people who live there now are villains from fiction,
Robert Penn Warren, William Styron, Faulkner and Steinbeck.
Hemingway characters have been condensed into fairytales.
And those bumpkins ridiculed by Thomas Wolfe,
they would like to hold the world by its throat as a matter of course.
I am thinking of Ellery Queen, Bogart, Jack Nicholson
and all sorts of Pacino,
standing between shadows and light, DeNiro people.
I am not sure whether the lives
described by the great Annie Proulx and Ring Lardner
have really existed.
If it really was like that,
then Philip Roth and Salinger, those two masters,
they didn’t have it any easier than Bernard Malamud or myself.
The Britain I liked and also hated,
the world of Dickens, Hardy, Emily Brontë, Evelyn Waugh,
also the world of Guy Maddin.
Chaplin and Hitchcock, they came from England,
no matter if they thought of it as their grandmother‘s home or whatever,
that kind of world is gone, no-one can go back to it.
Italy, of Umberto Saba’s bitter poetry,
of Tornatore’s splendor,
Fellini’s ghosts and deities,
a world has gone under but another world has not risen.
Poor Barcelona, poor Spain,
aside from Messi, what else can you make me think of?
The bullets shot at Lorca?
Thick smoke covers Cervantes and Unamuno.
But you are singing, saying what does this have to do with you?
As you go north, farther north, everywhere north in the world
you’ll run into people drinking forever.
They are crawling out of Ibsen, Hamsun, Dostoyevski’s White Nights,
Crawling all the way till today until half of what Solzhenitsyn described is gone.
I really don’t know if this is a good thing or not.
Neither Tolstoy nor Maupassant nor the wisdom of Martin du Gard can advise me.
Old Hesse stares into the distance with his Steppenwolf eyes and doesn’t speak.
At this time everyone can understand a little why Stefan Zweig and Richard Strauss broke down.
Bukowski didn’t care about any of this, he drank a bottle and went on writing.
Pasternak screwed up his horse face and stared at a row of trees in the snow.
Wandering souls drive their chariots, circling and circling,
soundlessly crushing expectations and fear;
crushing Nietzsche and Stephen Hawking, actually
all of this can be seen to belong to Stephen King.
But it’s ok,
just be glad it’s still ok,
food is eaten, television’s turned on.
Ineffective dreams are about to start,
about to start again.
You will wake up, we will wake up,
from utter sadness, wake up to enter
indefinite nights, poisoned days.
Yes, everything definitely indefinite.
Let us clear away this forest,
let us see the distance in the past.
Not so we can see the past,
but so we can see once more
the distance we longed for.

Translated by MW on May 2nd, 2021

新世纪诗典作品联展#徐江#(32.0)

伊沙推荐：徐氏现代感怀赋体诗，是徐江在一首决胜争奖时惯用的杀手锏，确实能够展示一名诗人的综合修养与实力，但在我的评判中并非次次都奏效，取决于真知灼见与书生义气所占比例之多寡，当然是前者百分比越高就越好。本诗不算高也不算低，所以入典推荐但不染指荣誉，好在作者新近刚获李白诗歌奖新世纪中国十大诗人奖并继续保持满额。

Calligraphy by Huang Kaibing

况禹点评《新诗典》徐江《杂事诗·长短调》：本诗的缘起当然是横行全球的新冠疫情，主题则是这一疫情下文明的崩溃与混乱，以及人所应持有的正确反应。属于作者当下题材的作品中，最重要的主题之一。

Calligraphy by Huang Kaibing

黎雪梅读《新世纪诗典》之徐江《杂事诗.长短调:》这是一首关于疫情的诗歌，在诗中你能感受到各种秩序的混乱，无论欧洲还是美洲；你还能遇见很多熟悉的作家及诗人的名字，仿佛跨越时空，他们都站在你的面前，与你探讨自由、正义和死亡等有关人类存在最基本的问题，也许每个人的观点不同，但人们还是看见了远方的曙光，这正是人类的希望所在。

黄开兵：密集恐惧症——抄了两个多小时！孩子都快看完两部电影了。推荐词部分特意用了朱墨书写，避免因为密集而难以辨别。视觉效果不错！

Calligraphy by Huang Kaibing

黄平子读徐江《杂事诗·长短调》

——《新世纪诗典》3682

黄平子读诗：百度了一下“长短调”，由于该词涉及到音乐、摄影等知识，徐江老师又将其运用到诗里，我还是搞不大明白。不懂不装懂，这是我的读诗原则。猜一下：该诗叫长短调，大约是前后两节写了不同的内容，用了不同的手法吧。从“我喜欢的法国消失了”到“所有这些你也都可以看成是斯蒂芬·金”是诗的第一小节。诗人从法国开始，先后写到美国、英国、意大利、巴萨罗那、西班牙、北方、更北方、全世界所有的北方。诗人通过追忆那些逝去的大师们，最终发出感慨：“一个世界沉没了可另一个世界并没有升起来”。从“不过还好”到“我们过去向往的远方”是诗的第二小节。诗人由回忆回到现实：“你将醒来我们将醒来/从确切的悲伤中醒来”。过去很美好，现在不尽人意，不过将来肯定会更好。徐江不是悲观论者，这一点，诗写得很清楚：“不是为了看到过去/而是为了重新看一看/我们过去向往的远方”。第一小节偏叙事，第二小节偏议论。从百度关于长短调的定义来看，第一小节应该属于短调，第二小节属于长调。不知道有没有搞错。好几个诗人都说这是一首疫情诗。我觉得不是。《长短调》缅怀的是逝去的大师和过去璀璨的文明：“那样的世界今天的人现在都回不去了”。

2021年5月2日21记47分

Calligraphy by Huang Kaibing

马金山｜读徐江的诗《杂事诗·长短调》的十一条：
1、文字燃烧思想，现实成就诗史；
2、当代性，即先锋性。活出文明，诗写人生；
3、徐江，毕业于北京师范大学中文系。1991年创办《葵》。著有诗集《黄昏前说起天才》《徐江的诗》《花火》《雾》《杂事诗》《我斜视》、诗学论著《这就是诗》《现代诗物语》等二十余种。主持编选《1991年以来的中国诗歌》《给孩子们的诗》。五次荣获新世纪诗典“李白诗歌奖”。曾获首届亚洲诗人奖、《世界诗人》2006年度国际最佳诗人；
4、徐江的诗，尤其是短制系列作品，是极其少有的值得我整理打印出来一读再读的，其作品给我最多的意义在于丰富与智慧，并且文字的言外之意，何等绚烂、精彩；
5、《杂事诗》系列，对于诗人徐江来说，应该是尤为重要的，不仅如此，对于新世纪的诗坛来说，何偿不是一部重要的作品呢，既有个人化的印记，还有时代的呼吸与脉搏，庞大而丰富；
6、本诗写作的背景，毫不回避的是现实与疫情，不只如此，还有个体的情感与生活，除此之外，还有审视的眼光和内在的格局，均对世界物象的触感具有智性的广度与深度；
7、诗里行间，不仅有细小的颗粒，还有辽阔的世界性建构，在纹理细腻的情感排列中，既有清晰的空间，还有现代的文明，锋利而又鲜活；
8、浓厚与庞杂，是这个世界的秩序，还是我读这首史诗的深切感受，几乎每一节，都是芬芳，都是灿烂与文明，这是很多作品所不具备的，而此诗有，想要的一切；
9、未来可期，这是本诗给予我提供的精神价值，传递健康积极的生活态度与思想观念，也是此诗给予的力量；
10、本诗给予诗人的启示：“伟大的诗，源于伟大的时代，而这个时代，何尝不是伟大的历史时期呢”；
11、时代之诗，文化之诗，文明史记。