Page 70 - Costellazioni 5

PATRICK COLM HOGAN, Affective Space and Emotional Time

xún xún mì mì
lěng lěng qīng qīng
qī qī cǎn cǎn qī qī.

In my version:

Scan. Search. Seek. Strain.
Cold. Remote. Clear. Alone.
Chill. Bleak. Cruel. Cut. Woe. Shame.

In order to capture some of the semantic resonance of the opening, I
have not preserved the repetition; nor have I managed to sustain the
monosyllabic rhythm. However, the fragmentary quality of the trans-
lation parallels that of the original. The formal point is that time is
passing with excruciating slowness. Each moment is obtrusive, strik-
ing the reader with its weight.
Of course, the meaning is crucial here. The speaker is searching
for something. It is cold, and she is in some remote place, isolated,
waiting. The traditional understanding of the poem is that the speaker
is Lǐ Qīngzhào herself, writing after her husband’s death. The poem
recounts a recollection of an evening when she was waiting for her
husband to return. The waiting and worry stretch out the time. It also
recounts a later evening when she recalls her loss. Then sorrow stretch-
es out the time as well. Later in the poem, the formal pa ern recurs
with the same effect: “diǎn diǎn dī dī” (

; “Dripdrip./Drop-
drop”), with dī (
) recalling not only raindrops (yǔdī,
), but also
teardrops (lèidī ; cf. McCraw 105).
This formal pa ern contextualizes the poem and is important,
but does not in itself add much to our understanding of time and emo-
tion. Consider, for example, “scalar timing theory”—“the dominant
model of timing for the past 30 years” (Wiener et al. 1)—which posits
a pacemaker (defining time units through pulses), a switch (to signal
the beginning and end of some segment), and an accumulator (provid-
ing a summation of the pulses, thus defining the sense of duration). 14

14
For an introduction to Scalar Timing theory, see Church, “A Concise Intro-
duction.”

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