Translation Practice

    I was so curious about everything in my life that I was eager to find the answers on my own. What I wondered was too much, while what I knew was too little, which occasionally made me worried. So I hung around in the day, seeing, listening and sniffing, the smells of dead snakes, of rotten grasses, of butchers, and of, after rain, the kilns to calcine bowls. It was hard for me to describe what they were at the moment, but it was rather easy for me to tell them apart clearly. There was the sound of bats, the sigh of a cattle when being poked into throat by a butcher with a knife, the hiss of snakes hiding in farmlands and caves, and the faint sound made by fish swimming on water surface in darkness. Even if the volume of some of them was higher and some lower to my ears, I could still well remember all of them. Hence after returning home, I had numerous strange dreams when sleeping. These dreams, even after almost two decades, make me fail to sleep well at midnight. They take me back to the emptiness in the old days, but also to the dreamy universe.

      Reading My Life While Reading My Books  (Excerpt)

                      Author/ SHEN Congwen