Self-Portrait as the Mountain
By Xin Qiji
Translated By Shangyang Fang
Translated from the Chinese
to the tune “he xin lang: toasting the bridegroom”
Now that I am old and those who crossed the mountains and oceans
with me are now parts of the mountains and oceans,
I still call those dirty skeletons: my friends.
My friends, now that my white hair is thirty thousand feet long,
taking up so much room around me, nothing in this life
can’t be concluded with a laugh—all those infatuated dreams
of fruitless desire, years in the military, and my ambition
in politics to serve my nation since youth, all these are like the porridge
dumped into a slop bucket. What can make me happy? What
has ever made me happy? Suddenly, I recognize the blue mountains
as dashing and handsome, didn’t know all the while
the blue mountains thought the same about me. After all, we look similar—
the same wrinkly crags and cliffs, mosses and mustaches,
and now, the same stone-heart we share.
With a pot of wine, I scratch my head at the east side window,
wondering if Tao Yuanming felt the same after he finished his poem
about the halted clouds. What do those politicians
drunk at the left bank of the Yangtze understand about the true nature
of drinking—with their feet in sewage, they fish feverish dreams
about fame and money? I turn to holler at the empty landscape,
to startle the clouds and the storm surges.
I don’t feel sorry that I can’t meet those dead
ancient poets. Instead, I feel sorry for them
for not being able to drink with me, a man writ large, unbridled and wild.
Friends, I am understood only by the mountains, your buried bones.
Source: Poetry (May 2025)