Before the Character for Love

If The Welcome Pavilion mourns the loneliness of the remnant, Turandot, Once More is a work in which art consumes a life. From conception to final line it took only three days — impossible, had the translations not already been completed years before. My thoughts ran without rest. At one moment I became Yuan Chengmo, grinding dense ink and writing in the Su style, letting the characters carry emotion; at another I was the Unknown Prince, unable to relinquish either woman, pouring an undivided heart into every aria. When at last the thought came to rest, I found myself, for the first time in my life, entirely spent. Opera, translation, calligraphy, memory — all poured into the work until the pages stood complete. As the work neared its end, the writer, too, had offered himself up.

Rereading Turandot, Once More, I suddenly saw it: Chengmo is the first remnant of the Cape Universe. Though he calls himself a stranger to this land, everything he writes remains faithful to the old country. Dispersed across an immeasurable universe, cast upon the wild expanse of the Cape, he writes a homeland into being — flying white is the fracture of time, empty space is the seam of place; within those fissures of time and space, solitude quietly hides. Longing bends the years; memory fabricates the homeland anew; where the brush pauses, homesickness breaks through. Chengmo is a remnant in diaspora. The Su style is his mourning for the country he left; Yongshi and Jiali are themselves the shape of that same devotion. For Chengmo never truly returns to his homeland — he only lets the brush return to the people of the past.

Turandot, Once More leaves every dramatic turn to the Chinese characters themselves. To dismantle each character is to pass through a trial. It begins with 敗 — defeat — foretelling from its very first stroke that no one in this drama shall triumph; it closes with 詩 — poetry — revealing at last the riddle at the heart of the piece. The work refuses the climax of victory, anchoring itself instead in the memory of a first meeting:

I am writing poetry.

Princess Turandots three riddles are brilliant, yet the true riddle of this opera is this:

What is love?

As the Princess presses forward step by step, Liù answers with her life:

Love runs deep,
hidden in the smallest chamber of the heart,
never spoken to anyone.

Whenever I hear this aria, sorrow returns with it. Deep feeling is itself poetry; only in remembrance do we know how deep. Where love reaches, gender dissolves, nations fall silent, and art forgets its own boundaries — only love, undivided, remains.

Jialis puppet — hair undone, the golden phoenix about to fall.
Yongshis needle — worn thin, the record nearing silence.
Chengmos brush — flying white broken, the stroke about to collapse.

To love too much is to spin oneself into a cocoon. To love past feeling is to stagger, numb and drunk on grief… The three riddles are solved — yet who has won? Who, in the end, is triumphant?

True feeling never takes victory as its end. Turandot, Once More strives only toward an unreserved depth — a depth ground into every stroke of the brush, every horizontal and vertical, every dot and hook, until the iron inkstone itself is worn through. To paint feeling and scene is not merely to re-enact Turandot stopped at the point where the Maestro laid down his pen, but to exhaust art itself for the sake of a single character: love. Before the character for love, no one triumphs. Art spends all it possesses only for the depth of feeling — and where feeling is deep, poetry rises of its own accord. When art has consumed an entire life, the unfinished work halts forever at the instant Toscanini lowered his baton — mourning both the Maestro and Liù, in homage to profound feeling.

Poetry: the radical for speech beside the radical for temple. Silence conspires with a thousand unspoken words, on the verge of wild, incoherent speech; the pagoda that should stand in solemn majesty is already ruined walls… Hanshan Temple, Lingyin Temple, Longcui Nunnery, the Pavilion of Ten Thousand Buddhas… all falling into ruin. Then comes the final stroke — faltering, reaching toward that last small chamber of the heart, where everything falls into disorder; every horizontal and vertical exhausted and blunt, and with this last drop, the ink runs dry…

I am writing poetry…
am writing poetry…
writing poetry…
poetry…

河水再流：
再寫杜蘭朵
杜蘭朵公主（歌劇譯本）