Editor’s Choice
Yang Jijun [Shandong]
The Old Boat Wood
The Chimney
Has the one with a machete ever been on the edge of danger
You’re forging iron at the boiler bottom, putting up a pergola skywards
We’re on the road towards death ever since our birth, putting on airs
But who dares to block the way out of Darkness
No one knows the darkness for all the white smoke emitting out
Weight is the only thing that has ever touched it
And no one knows that solitude
A century already? Not a single snowflake has yet been caught
But you’ve also got another possibility. In the pounding darkness
A wild pigeon flutters out
What has been lurking so secretly is the soul smoked out of body
You are squatting on top of the house while smoking a pipe
A Big Tree
Actually, it is not that old, were it not for the incense of sacrifice
It can be more gorgeous, were it not for the obscurities in the eyes of the sun
There are many legends about this tree, such as a certain person in a certain dynasty
Anyway, it is always that stout-stemmed in memory
Say that for an instance, it shone and suddenly eclipsed the starry sky
Which was witnessed by a wondering man at night
And let’s say that a rock with its frightening honk
Has still been lost among its twigs and leaves
Yet each year on that day, there is a man
With tears in the eyes, wiping the trunk as if wiping a crown
No one has asked him whether he comes from one of the mountains in a plateau region
Which is not conspicuous among others
Solitude
Like a restless sparrow
Hopping out of the flock pecking grass seeds
Like a solitary branch
Slanting out farther
But the flock is so lonely, for the earth is covered by snow
Only a little patch of which has just melted
But the wood is so lonely, for face to face, contending for reaching higher
And higher, trees huddle together but never embrace each other
But the dew glistens. Among the crowd you are far away from
Some are making fire
Some are talking heartily. You button your coat
And go back to them
My Life
In my childhood memory there was a well in the village
Which was different from the pit filled with rainwater
Even all the other wells dried up
It still provided for the whole village. Though it was dug deeper and deeper
Even in the year of the worst drought
You would always get a barrel of water from it, only if you waited with patience
So, at that time, it was not called carrying water
But called waiting for water
However, my life, you see, it grows bigger and bigger
Just like a pancake being cooked
And its middle part becomes thinner and thinner
Wholes exposed
It doesn’t have imaginary underground rivers likewise, or
The earthworm-like thread residues, nourishing it
The Quail
In the wilderness, barren with bare earth, grass is sparse
And short, which is hard for hares to hide in
There’s only the quail. With a sudden sprint, it takes off
Almost skimming over the ground, then lands ten metres away
Its nest is hard to find, unless you come across
That handful of grass for its shelter-building
But the wind has never blown it away; the rain has never flooded it
The snow, even, has never filled it up
Two quail eggs give it
Everything it needs for a home
This place, well, is neither for the cranes to be domineering
Nor for the sparrows to do the sneaky deeds
The bald-tailed quail not only lives on this low-lying saline land
But also marks its highland of spirit
Though it has no tail
It struts its stuff
The Bones
It is the old bones rubbed by crude salt
That are unyielding
They do not blackmail. The hard nuts they’ve cracked
Are heaps more
They do not bite the hand that feeds them. Until their death
They have never played up to the days
The skeleton does not collapse all of a sudden, each joint
Infused with arthritis and clamminess
Any need for primers? Enough collisions can make it
They are the cathodes of lightning and thunderbolts
Given a life-time mockery you got from the world
It’s high time you gave it a lesson
The Unmelted Snow
The softest has melted first
But you’ve hardened a bit
You are undoubtedly pure
With few specks of dust on you
It’s all due to your whiteness
Even a tiny spot of black will be magnified
Nothing left to stick to
You’ve purified the world
Do not let the world smear you
That man is grinding ink
It’s been a long time
And you should try harder
The Boat Nail
Of all my memory, there’s only fire
And bits of iron
Being the backbone of the boat
Now I live in the water
I like the ancient solitude from the outside world
But the waves have been flapping nonstop on me
The seemingly giant group of boats turns out to be desolate and weak
I clench fast
Even the wood gets rotted, I’m not easy to find
I penetrate deep
The most profound is not to be drawn out. This is the life
I try to manage
A Shipwreck
After a transitory berthing
Permanent combats begin
Days, solitary like the sky
And lonely like the stars, are much longer
But from the moment of tilt
You indeed took the boat of the sea
When it’s all darkness before your eyes
You’ve known everything about the seabed
This is the best place for you to return
As a ship
The Old Boat Wood
It was good wood originally
Then it turned old against the raging storms and waves
It is said that the tea tables made of it are crack-proof and damp-proof
That makes sense
If there was a crack, the whole world would be drifted
By the stormy waves withheld in its joints
If there was an invasion, what kind of tide it would be
That soaked by its century-old sea water
Now it is quiet. A length of deep dream
That is from another era, and that cannot be wakened
Now I’ll split it
And find out those silent iron nails
The Loneliness
A lonely village
A lonely tree
A lonely
Crow nest
So much rainwater
And snowflakes it has caught. That patch of whiteness you’ve seen
Might be the white belly of the magpie
On the high branch, it opens wide to the sky
Open wide to the sky
The nest built by spiny twigs
Is still dark
No matter how much light of the stars and the moon it has pocketed
Crows as black as it hop excitedly
But it is always strangely quiet
Strangely quiet
With the loneliness of the whole village held inside
At Twilight
It is at dusk. As expected
A cloud of sparrows, in the wood I pass by
Among the branches not clearly seen
Flap up apart
In all directions
The mess that cannot be perceived by the village
Is tiny and transient
I’ve no idea how far they may fly
Whether they come back respectively or by ones and twos
Or reassemble somewhere
With a whoosh, all together
Land into the wood in a smart curve
And then turn to nothing
As usual, as what has been seen in the daytime
(Tr. Ma Tingting；马婷婷 译)
About the Author:
Yang Jijun, an excellent contemporary Chinese poet, born in 1971 in Dongying City, Shandong Province. He is a member of Chinese Poetry Society and Shandong Writers Association. He has published poems in “Poetry Magazine”, “Yanhe River”, “Big River”, “Literature Monthly”, “Silver Poetry Magazine”, “Far Poetry” and so on. He won the 9th Xu Zhimo Micro Poetry Prize and the Gold Medal in the International Poetry Competition of World Poetry magazine. His major publications include “The First and the Point” and “The Man Who Walked through the Reed Field”, “Blacksmith”, “Screwdriver”, and “Bronze” (in Chinese-English).
About the Translator:
Ma Tingting, graduated from Shandong Normal University with a master’s degree in foreign Linguistics and Applied Linguistics, an English teacher at the School of Foreign Languages in Shandong Women’s University, member of the editorial board of Horizon Academic, the guest editor of Rendition of International Poetry and the regular translator for the columns of “international poetry” and “poets in China”. Poems translated by her can be found in many domestic and foreign literary journals and e-journals like Rendition of International Poetry, Poetry Hall, POMEZIA-NOTIZIE, and Young Creative. She has published her translation works Aphorisms from the Ancient Chinese, The Songs of Ah-J, Cruel Moon, Clay Tablets in Nietzsche’s Cave, Lonely Cloud, Love in the Cycles of Years, Black and White, and has edited My World, a bilingual album of poetry and painting.