泰姬陵之泪（节选）

Ouyang Jianghe wrote “Taj Mahal Tears” after a trip to New Delhi in 2009 to take part in the Almost Island Dialogues between Indian and Chinese writers. A visit to the Taj Mahal moved him to tears—not only because of the beauty of its ivory architecture amidst its surroundings, but also because of the story of its creation: it was commissioned in 1632 by a Mughal emperor in memory of his wife, who had died in childbirth with their fourteenth child, a girl. Overcome with thoughts of his own daughter and ex-wife, he began writing a poem that ended a decade-long period in which he had composed very little, to initiate what he considers to be the third stage of his writing career.

The poem is, of course, about the tears that fill relationships between men and women, but it is also about the relationship between god or gods and man as well as the relationship between India and China—not to mention both countries’ relationships to their histories. Parts of the poem take place in, and take advantage of, the vocabulary of fungibility and modernity; other parts excavate an archaeology of historical lexicons, including Buddhist terminology and a broad scope of literary and cultural allusion. As a translator, I had in mind the English of a handful of poets known as practitioners of ethnopoetics, investigating the deep recesses of the self at the same time as the wide resources of the planet. As Ouyang writes, “the mirror image glances back.”