沒有比淚水更乾淨的水

“在雲南紅土高原的西北，有綿延千里的小涼山，奔騰喧囂的金沙江，直剌青天的玉龍雪山，還有美麗動人的瀘沽湖。我就出生在那片神奇美麗的土地上。”

詩人來自普米族，一個只有三萬多人的民族，他的家在雲南小涼山脈的斯布炯山下、瀘沽湖邊的一個叫果流的村莊裏，他的父親是茶馬古道上的趕馬人，他的母親是果流村裏的“女王”，“她會唱的民歌如星星一樣多”。他説，他是那片土地上千萬個孩子中最普通的一個。他還説，作為行吟在那片土地上的歌者，他是幸運的寵兒。他幸運，是因為他深深愛着的那片神奇美麗的土地給了他生命，也給了他詩篇。

“I was born on Yunnan province’s high, red earth plateau, where the Little Liang Mountains stretch far into the north western distance. Here, the pounding Jinsha river thunders through gorges, the Yulong Snow Mountain pierces heaven, and here also is beautiful Lugu Lake, whose waters stir deep currents in all those who look on her.”

This poet’s People is a small one; the Pumi ethnicity numbers only around thirty thousand people in total. His home is a village named Guoliu, which nestles beneath Mount Sibujiong in the Little Liang Mountain range, at the edge of Lugu Lake. His father drives horse caravans along the ancient ‘Tea Horse Road’, a trade route between horse-rich Tibet and Yunnan’s tea-producing jungle regions. The poet introduces his mother as the Queen of Guoliu village, a lady feted for her ability to sing more Pumi folk-songs than there are stars in the sky. Luruo says he is a completely ordinary child of his land, just one among many others like him. He also calls himself a child of fortune – for him, it is a great blessing to make a livelihoods composing verse in his native place. The fount of his good fortune is the ethereal vitality of the land that he so loves, and which has given him life, and poems.

Yunnan poet Luruo Diji writes in beautifully arranged Mandarin Chinese, but his poetry has its source on the distant periphery of the Chinese cultural world; his poems take form in the red earth of the high plateau, in the lofty borderlands of southwest China, a region moulded by unrestrained acts of nature. His People, the Pumi ethnic minority, are long-time residents of a unique natural landscape bordering both th e Himalaya Mountains and deep sub-tropical jungles, home to giant snow-mountains and steep gorges, where the upper reaches of the Yangzi River rage and thunder. Many of the poems in this book take place among these great natural formations, dipping in and out of stories of the people that live there, the impressions they left on the land for a moment.

Luruo often presents his poems as material pieces of his homeland, the fine earth crumblings of the land’s inspiration passed through his hands, laid on the page. This collection is an emotional tribute to one of China’s most stunning wildernesses, by one of its children. ^[1] 

Part One—Songs from the Little Liang Mountains

The Little Liang Mountains Are Little 3

Choices 5

A Village That Won’t Grow Up 7

Lady Peaks 8

Blues That Won’t Blow Away 9

The River That Runs By Me 10

A Flock of Sheep Walk Through a County Town 11

The Year 1958 12

Making My Intentions Clear 13

Sky of Yunnan 14

Cold Blows the Wind 15

Birds in the Snowfield 16

A Poem from the Snowfield 18

Eagle 19

Watching the Sun Falls Down the Mountains 21

The Birchleaf Pear Tree 23

Birds of My Heart 25

Language of the Mountains 26

Wood Ear Mushrooms 29

The Beast Within 30

Conversation About a Dead Man 32

Light 34

Day 36

Wolf 37

Cuckoo 38

A Crow I Once Saw 40

Piccolo 42

Bachelor Town 45

The Sea on Its Back 47

River 48

Sieves 49

Broken Chapters 50

Over Distant Hills 52

Wood 54

Meeting on the Road 55

Saya Temple 57

Magpie 59

Short Songs 60

Snows of Mount Xuebang 61

Three River Gateways 63

No Water Cleaner Than Tears 65

I Do Not Know 67

The Yila Grasslands 68

The Meri Snow Mountains 70

A Potato Story 71

Fresh Flowers Bloom 73

An Ah-ma of the Yi People 75

Nothing Cleaner Than This 77

Holy Sibu-Jiong Mountain 78

Guoliu 80

Lightning Strike 82

Beggar 83

Blacker Than Night 86

Pig’s Trough Becomes a Boat 87

Crops on the Shore of Lake Lugu 89

Person Behind the Clouds 91

Home of the Immortals 93

The Question of the Great Sichuan Earthquake 95

Last Lesson 96

Asphyxiation 97

For Yang Guoqing 98

Ali Mountains — Sun and Moon Lake 100

In One of the World’s High Places 101

I Can’t Even Imagine 105

Angry Sea 106

Crow Pierces the Night 108

Shepherd in the Metropolis 109

Part Two—Loves of Lugu Lake

Love Songs from Lake Lugu 113

Walking Through Wedlock 117

Wind at My Side 118

Birthday Gift 120

A Sigh Is Heaved 122

Orchid 124

For Orchid 125

Bodhisattva in My Heart 129

Untitled 130

Snow 131

Lugu Lake 132

Other Kinds of Love 136

Speech 137

Cherry 138

I’ve Missed You Till My Heart’s Emptied All Out 140

Mountains of Joy 141

Long and Short 143

For My Dear Wife 144

Star-draped Moon-studded Woman 146

Missing You from Faraway 148

One Sunflower-lined Road 150

The Only Bone 151

The Horse of My Heart 152

Moon in the Crook of My Arm 153

River with No Name 155

Where from This Peace 156

Listen to the River 157

Some Unspecified Night 158

For a Far-travelling Friend of Mine 160

There’s Someone I’m Missing 161

Petals Bloomed of Leaves — Also Known as Longing 162

I always Was Too Impatient to Wait 163

Snow Peaks Fly Hither 164 ^[1] 

魯若迪基，普米族，1967年生於雲南省寧蒗縣。曾獲全國少數民族文學創作“駿馬獎”、《人民文學》優秀詩歌獎、首屆漢語詩歌雙年十佳獎、第三屆華語文學傳媒大獎年度詩人提名獎等。

Luruo Diji is a writer of the Pumi ethnicity. He hails from Ninglang county in Yunnan province, where he was born in 1967. His prizes and awards include: the Jun Ma prize for literature by ethnic minority writers, the People’s Literature magazine prize for outstanding poetry, the prize for Chinese language poetry in its inaugural year, and the nomination prize for poets at the third session of the annual Grand prize for Chinese Literature and Media, among others.