The Three Leaps of Wang Lun Read Online Free PDF Page B

studied Chinese, but whose spongelike mind could absorb the most disparate facts and images and shape them into a coherent symphonic creation. In the quarter century following
Wang Lun
, Döblin applied his vision and artistry to create half a dozen more epic novels, ranging in time from the Thirty Years War to the distant future, and from a shabby quarter of Berlin to the South American jungle. Most remain unavailable in English, and even where available, almost unknown. May this new edition of
Wang Lun
help to stimulate a long overdue interest in Döblin in the English-speaking world.
    Chris Godwin
    Stroud, U.K
.
    April 2014

Dedication
 
    Lest I forget …
    A soft whistling from the street below. Metallic motion
,
humming, rustling. Striking against my pen of bone
.
    Lest I forget …
    But what?
    I must close the window
.
    The streets have acquired strange voices these last few years. Mildew has spread beneath the stones; from every pole glass bowls a yard across dangle, grumbling metal plates, echoswilling drainpipes. A booming, jumbled roar of wood, mammoth jaws, compressed air, rubble. Electric flutesounds railgliding. Cars wheezing motors sail on their sides over the asphalt; my doors rattle. Milkwhite arc lamps spatter massive rays against my panes, tip wagonloads of light into my room
.
    I do not reproach this maddening vibration. Only I cannot see my way into it
.
    I do not know whose voices there are, whose souls feed this thousand-tonned vault of resonance
.
    This heavenly doveflight of aeroplanes
.
    These fluepipes coiling through the ground
.
    This flashing of words across a hundred miles
.
    Who benefits?
    Yet I know these people on the pavements. Their telegraphs are new. The grimaces of avarice, the hostile satiety of a blueshaven chin, the thin snooping nose of lechery, the coarseness with its heart doll-like in jellied blood, watery dogeyes of envy, their throats have yelped their way down the centuries and filled them with—progress
.
    Oh, I know that. I sleeked by the wind
.
    Lest I forget …
    In this Earth’s life two thousand years are as one year
.
    Winning, conquering … An old man said, “We go, and know not whither. We stay, and know not where. We eat, and know not why. All this is the mighty vital force of Heaven and Earth. Who can here speak of winning, possessing?
    I shall sacrifice to him behind my window, to this wise old man
    Lieh-tzu
    with this impuissant book
.

Prologue
The Attack on Chao Lao-hsü
 
    Darkly the ridges of the Hsi-shan marched inland from the coast. A long way from the golden coast rose the mass of the Tu-shan, only reluctantly, as if they might desert it, leaving the flowerstrewn hills to lie beside the yellow-grey water. In the bright air lines shimmered beyond and above the mountains. They were the peaks of the Pien-wai; they were oscillations, resembling the eyebrows of a woman.
    It was evening on the Gulf of Pei-Chihli.
    The sea beat higher and brighter on the rocky shore. The warm turbid waves carved grooves in the sand around the little junks on the beach. During long harsh hours the sun’s rays had lashed the water; now they rebounded. The sea had covered itself in an armour which, it is said, is the back of the P’eng bird. When the P’eng rises up and flies to the southern seas, his scaly body stretches millions of miles and his gigantic wings are able to propel the clouds. A soft haze glided over the surface, gathered loose and thick like cotton wool. The sun’s rays draped themselves in loose folds of mist. Moments before a round furnace in the sky had roared forth heat; now the fire was sintered over. A misty shade had suddenly been placed over the world. Things swelled into one another.
    The shouts of the harbour workers came muffled from the Customs House. Beside the harbour lay the old town of Shanhaikwan. House shouldered house. Low broad mud huts in narrow alleys, slender wooden structures, ponderous warehouses andpawnshops, a few brightly