史震林·《西青散记自序》英译

Preface to West-Green Random Notes

Shih Chenlin

When I was a child, I was frightened by the sudden alternations of light and darkness and was told that it was night and day. I was mystified by the sudden appearance and disappearance of beings and was told that it was birth and death. People told me to distinguish the stars and said, “That one is the Sieve, and that one the Dipper.” I learned to distinguish the birds and was told this one was a raven and that a magpie. This was how my knowledge began.

When I grew older, I gradually lost the wonder at the sudden alternations of light and darkness and appearance and disappearance of beings. Sometimes in the maze of confusions I let my spirit soar upward to space. Looking down at the sudden changes of light and birth and death of things, I felt a twinge of sorrow. I remember that once in my childhood, I was going to feed a hen. Someone told me that its young chicks were there. I crawled over and saw two chicks hiding from under the wings of their mother and peeping at me. I was seized with a sense of sorrow and forgot about the feeding. This was how my sorrows began.

Once I was crawling along the garden walls and found an object. I was going to eat it like a piece of pastry. People laughed at me and said it was a piece of rock. On this rock stood one word, “West,” and another word, “Green,” and I was forced to learn these two words. This was how my reading began.

It is a piece of rock, hollow at the center, still facing me on my desk, where I am writing these Random Notes.

Composed in a dream,