This Translation Tuesday, we invite you to savour three poems by the award-winning Taiwanese poet Yen Ai-lin, whose work meditates on femininity, motherhood and the body. The poems here, translated skilfully by Jenn Marie Nunes, reflect the changing trajectories of Yen’s poetics as they move chronologically from “Wintering Love Animals” (first published in 1982) to “Femaled Ocean” (2008) to “Reed’s Song” (2017). Throughout this suite of raw and imaginative poems, Yen’s frank and sensuous voice shines through.
Wintering Love Animals
In winter
we burrow in the nest of blankets,
like animals seeking warmth.
Dear child,
you greedily suck my nipple,
wet mouthing, as if to say
“Your two breasts are so primitive,
your nipples so classical,
your temperature so Eastern……”
Yes, our position
is a primeval act seeking fire
through friction, endlessly mining
our own civility for fuel.
Dear child,
before sleepiness attacks
we’re both Pleistocene creatures,
still longing for a life erect.
But, let’s stay curled in bed!
Use flesh to build the first cave,
conceal our reluctant evolution.
Femaled Ocean
Originally the shore had no shore
Waves just came and went
Enter Buddhist nature
Without a sense of time
Simply chewing over the taste of earth
A simple age
Without edges
But she arrives, uses two eyes
To gather it all together
Standing on the shore she becomes a cliff
And tranquil waves begin to surge
From her pupil drops one clear full stop
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Down
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A sun already hidden in the sea
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All because of this teardrop
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Seethes 。。。 。。。
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Reed’s Song
Worry paces slowly, meets the river
Under foot a swath of city reflected
I throw my shadow into the water
I live in a strange high-rise across the river
Time and space melt into a pool
Hardware and body muddle
Truth already empty, I yield like a drop of water
The river’s edge closer than I to sky
Reeds on the far side
Sway more gently
Than the love at my side
My starting off
Shouldn’t have a nothing goal
Worry paces its way back
End point already not the start
Across the river people are watching me
Translated from the Mandarin by Jenn Marie Nunes
YEN Ai-lin (顏艾琳) is a Taiwanese poet, well-known for the unabashed femininity in her poetry. Yen is the author of many books of poetry, including Bone, Skin, Flesh (骨皮肉, 1997 and 2018 ), Devouring Time (吃時間, 2019), and recently, Hello (喂, 2022) an art publication about the interaction between the text and consciousness. She has also won many major literary awards, including the Wu Cho-Liu Literary Award (吳濁流文學獎) for new poetry, the Chinese Literature and Art Literary Award (中國文藝獎章), and Poet Laureate of the Reciter Poetry Festival (第一朗讀者).
Jenn Marie Nunes is the author of two full-length collections of poetry: Those People (Dog’s Heart Press, 2020), winner of the National Poetry Review Press Book Prize, and AND/OR (Switchback Books, 2015), winner of the Switchback books Queer Voices Award. Her poetry, fiction, and translations have been featured in a many journals, including Journal of Chinese Literature and Culture (2021), Asian American Writer’s Workshop: The Margins, Transpacific Literary Project (2019), Sixth Finch (2019), Action Yes! (2015), Tupelo Quarterly (2014), Café Irreal (2013), Black Warrior Review (2013), and The Ninth Letter (2012). She is currently pursuing a PhD in contemporary Chinese literature and translation.
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