Poems of Dr. Ma Yongbo

Ma Yongbo was born in 1964, Ph.D, representative of Chinese avant-garde poetry, and a leading scholar in Anglo-American poetry. He is the founder of Difficult writing and objectified poetics. He is also the first translator to introduce British and American postmodern poetry into Chinese.
 
He has published over eighty original works and translations since 1986 included 9 poetry collections.He focused on translating and teaching Anglo-American poetry and prose including the work of Dickinson, Whitman, Stevens, Pound, Amy Lowell,Williams, Ashbery and Rosanna Warren. He published a complete translation of Moby Dick, which has sold over 600,000 copies. He teaches at Nanjing University of Science and Technology. The Collected Poems of Ma Yongbo (four volumes, Eastern Publishing Centre, 2024) comprising 1178 poems, celebrate 40 years of writing poetry.
 
 
 
 
You will still fall in love with things that are fading away time and time again
 
There are places you will never visit again, your body 
turns elsewhere and keeps drifting on, carrying seeds of light— 
yet your heart returns again and again to all the details: 
common, nameless wildflowers by the hedge, pale expressions of empty houses,
the last uninhabited low alley in the village, 
the most ordinary rivers on the northern plains that branch and converge.
 
Why do you keep falling in love with things that are fading away, 
like falling in love with countless parallel versions of yourself?
The repeated turning in front of the mirror, and the rapidly darkening hall afterwards,
like a salvage diver for sunken cargo, wading through tides of forgetting again and again, 
only to rescue relics that have lost their form. 
 
The language you use is the same; it is not the barbed tongue of a beast
that can hook into connective tissue and muscle,
but merely a cat's soft kiss, bringing only harmless dampness.
You wish your language had a metallic taste;
you wish your salvation were also ruthless destruction.
 
Yet you still love with those fleeting encounters in their fading:
for example, at the only lit courtyard in the shadow of a mountain, 
reciting Yeats's "When You Are Old" to some enthusiastic stranger,
a young wild boar that scurries away from the path where you walk, 
the green ripple before it vanishes into the depths of the cornfield, 
and all the countless years before you yourself fade away.
 
 
 
 
White poplars
 
When snow falls, some are bound to depart,
winds sweep snow across the valley.
You stand quiet as leftover apricots in autumn rain,
speechless and still.
As if I have returned from perilous lands,
bearing more breath of life.
 
Windows are tightly shut long ago,
a few wild flowers tucked in door cracks,
withered too soon,
failing to ripen their fruits.
All this happened ages ago, ages ago,
our wedding has long ended,
like our lingering gazes resting on the threshold.
 
You lean gently against me,
your round fruits no longer roll away.
White stones outside lie like resting lambs,
neither drawing near nor wandering off,
bright and mild in peace.
 
Some can never become another soul,
so they inscribe words in snow,
leaving dripping beads upon the roof.
Water slips down poplar trunks,
unveiling eyes hidden in bark.
 
Then we wander far away,
resting our hands calm.
You circle round the poplar tree,
the poplar circles round me,
while winds sweep snow across the valley.
 
Winds sweep snow across the valley,
I shall wait for you ahead all the same,
letting the wild wind freely blow.
 
 
 
Snapshot
 
Pale, disheveled, solitary,
as if unrelated. You grin foolishly,
then turn stern in another frame, standing behind your mother.
Flowers crowd the lawn. Autumn arrives in a blink.
In the trimmed grass, insects hum their songs.
 
Love persists. Amid the yellowing, you discover
a wreath of blue blooms encircling pebbles and thistles—
Nature’s offering—all things burn fiercely in the void’s fire.
Barbed wire sketches the landscape’s borders; gossamer glints
over plowed fields. “Dust resides in all things.”
 
Some vanish swiftly, only to reappear in shifting backdrops.
You’re six, wearing a sun hat, clutching
the red plastic-covered “Quotations from Mao” at your chest.
Father wears a military uniform, medals gleaming.
 
Second brother stands on the other side, also holding the book,
eyes slanting elsewhere. In the yard,
you grip a red-tasseled spear at the crowd’s edge,
face adrift in confusion.
 
The nameless girl you secretly adored
dances as the White-Haired Girl at the crowd’s centre, spinning—
your first taste of disappointment.
On the university campus, broad-leaved phoenix trees drip autumn rain.
Your cheap floral suit lies crumpled on a stone bench.
Flowers carpet the lawn again, roses or perhaps
it is that outfit you wore, churning in the wind.
 
In the same outfit, you reappear on Harbin’s slanting streets,
bearded, combative, alone,
purple lilacs shrouded in mist behind you.
Soon, a young woman smiles beside you, radiant,
soon, a boy in a sun hat stands before you, solemn,
clutching a Transformers toy.
 
Soon, he digs for shells naked on a mudflat,
sunlight and silt sliding down his glossy limbs.
Autumn returns. Grass seeds crackle under the island sun.
Sometimes you stay home, imagining
mother and son shrieking in water,
then returning half-asleep,
arms full of damp clothes and branches—
like a colour photo suddenly emerging
out of a jumble of grey memories.