Soul of the Felt Cloak (Jieshyr yyr hla)
Rent from DeepDyve- Soul of the Felt Cloak (Jieshyr yyr hla)
Translators' Note
The Yi minority is one of the largest ethnic groups in China, numbering about seven million. Living in the mountainous regions in the southwest, the Yi comprise dozens of subgroups, including the Nuosu. Descendants of an ancient, independent mountain kingdom, about two million Nuosu today live in the Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture in southern Sichuan and northern Yunnan provinces. Aku Wuwu is regarded as the creator of modern poetry in the Yi language. He writes in both the Nuoso dialect and Chinese, and so far has not allowed his Nuosu poems to be translated into Chinese.
"Soul of the Felt Cloak" is about jie shyr, traditional cloaks that are made of felted wool and are an essential part of the material and spiritual identity of Yi people. The cloaks are worn by day and used as blankets at night. When hunters are in the high mountains, they need only their felt cloaks to warm their bodies. At age fifty or sixty, Yi people prepare their funerary clothes; when they are cremated, their bodies are wrapped in dark felt cloaks, to warm and comfort the souls.
When we wear our felt cloaksThe warm souls of the cloaks enfold us.Our bodies are warm,Our souls are warm.
In our homeland, the mountains riseAnd the ridges plunge into deep valleysOne after another, mountains and valleysRising and falling, the ridges covered by trees,And the trees are the mountains' cloaks,And in the deep valleys the streams flow, [End Page 93] They, the veins and arteries of the mountains.
The makers of traditional cloaks are wise—The felt pleats they fashion are like our land.Wherever Nuosu people go they are enfoldedIn the mountains and valleys of their native land.
And the wisdom of the grandfathers' generationsLives in the trees and vegetation that cloak the ridges,And lives in the rise and fall of the waters in the valleys,And lives concealed in the pleats of the felt cloaksThat the generations of today continue to wear.
Whether we are young or old, on the day of deathOur souls will travel on their wayWrapped in a felt cloakPleated like the mountains and valleys of home.In death, we are wrapped in the wisdom of our forebears.Wrapped in our native land, our souls goConfidently and calmly to the place of our ancestors.
No matter if we are wealthy or poor,A felt cloak must be placed upon the bodies of our dead.And unlike the traditions of other places,In death our souls go cloaked in our native land,Returning to our ancestors all they have given us.
The cloaks' wool, black as the bottom of a gorge,Holds our souls firmly within our cloaks;That gorge so black and deepHolds everything within its pleats;Gathered together the deep pleats rise and fall,Like piles, like walls of black stone,Holding the souls of the people, holding the black,Invisible power gathered there deep in the pleats.
In the expansiveness of Nature,A felt cloak when unfurled seems narrow,In the vastness of earth,The Nuosu's homeland seems small:But life is not measured by narrow and expansive,Souls are not measured by small and vast.This principle cannot be overturned by human beings. [End Page 94] Though the rumblings of landslides in distant landsResound within our homeland,We embrace the soul of our native earth,We embrace the wisdom of our ancestors,We press them within the felt of the cloak,To warm us forever—our eternal, black banner.
Translation from Nuosu by Mark Bender with Aku Wuwu [End Page 95]
Aku Wuwu (known as Luo Qingchun in Chinese) is a professor of ethnic literature studies at the Southwest Nationalities University, Chengdu, Sichuan Province. He has published several volumes of poems in the Nuosu dialect of Yi, as well as a body of work in Chinese. English translations of his Nuosu poems have appeared in Mänoa, Rattapallax, and Basalt.
