The Three Leaps of Wang Lun: A Chinese Novel (Calligrams) by Alfred Doblin

Author:Alfred Doblin
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9789629969332
Publisher: New York Review Books
Published: 2015-01-12T16:00:00+00:00

When a month had elapsed since the founding of the kingdom a festival was held in the capital. This festival has been described many times; poems were composed about it; even Ch’ien-lung alluded to it in some later verses. Almost everything we have is a phantastical distortion of the event.

All work, even military duty on the border, ceased for six double hours. Trumpets blew in the morning on the streets of the capital. They were deep, dreadful, jolting blasts devoid of music, piercing screams of frightened shades, cries for help from the dead to the living, uttered with increasing force so that it seemed the blaring would at any moment become corporeal and fall damply around the shoulders of passers by. The blasts approached, receded, emanated from all around; it seemed the town was surrounded by them.

From the back streets emerged creatures in strange disguise. They appeared from nowhere, sprang from the earth under the noses of the spruce strolling citizens, flitted past the houses, crouched down in front of sedan chairs and dumbly blocked their progress. There was sudden laughter when the apelike brown and black creatures jumped onto the shoulders of sober men, crossed skinny legs on their breasts and, satisfied, with a loud bleat grasped a low gable end and swung free.

In the main street, called Yellow Beam Street, citizens promenaded. Brothers and sisters took over the empty market square and began to make soft music. The fine shrilling sounds of yüeh-ch’in strings rose with a hypnotic sweetness and monotony into the autumn air; the shuang-ch’in, the octagonal guitar, joined in: a chirping, then regular, abrupt chords that formed a chain of golden links, scattered like grains of rice on the soft ground.

While the voices of the sisters swelled and faded in accompanying song, sober promenaders, climbing bowing from their chairs, transformed themselves into playful blue and red Pekinese, ran at the others on all fours, romped on the roadway and howled comically at the festive music. Here just now a couple stood in polite conversation, leaned shoulder to shoulder in front of a shop; all of a sudden one collapsed, pulled a turtleshell over himself and waddled off. The music continued unperturbed. Bamboo flutes blew; as the poem says: The notes drew themselves out, supple as silken thread.

In the streets jugglers, athletes, conjurers, grotesque masks twirled in and out. Clacking, twanging, nasal hornblasts. A lean queueless man, made up all in white, in a long, narrow white gown with a black sash, squatted low on his stool. Around him crouched three grown white tigers that he held by plain coloured leashes. The beasts stretched, scratched the ground with their claws. Suddenly there was a scream, a tumult of people. The tigers made off with great strides, pulling the white man behind them by the leashes. He half flew through the air, his mouth a circle in his fear. They scrambled up to a tiger column at a street corner, sniffed, sat down one beside the other,

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