This Translation Tuesday, in honor of Mid-autumn Festival, we bring you five poems by the Chinese poet Ling Feng, in an immaculate translation by Jonathan Chen. The Mid-autumn festival, which originated in China and has since spread throughout East Asia, is a time for shared revelry among families—but not everyone can reunite with their families on this occasion, particularly expatriates living far afield. To commemorate the joy and sorrow of personal connections—familial, marital, platonic—across physical divides, we’re honored to present these five poems, which address love and longing with a singular attention to detail. In Ling Feng’s verse, a deep attention to the evanescence of life gives way to passionate descriptions both of the speaker’s beloved and the material world, a desire to cherish what is always passing. But the speaker’s attention to the transience of all things is ultimately a source not of despair, but of a renewed will to human connection in a fragile world: “let us sing together, you can dance if you want to, / so those who are distant can hear us.” Read on!
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soft wind blows in a single direction.
that which must have passed has passed.
at the moment when a place wraps itself around me,
people will be singing the entire afternoon.
that which must have passed, is past.
if there are tears, there is a heart.
if there are wounds, there is enlightenment.
people are as beautiful as the dust.
flowers are more lasting than forests.
if there are ten Hai Zis, then we must be innumerable.
let us sing together, you can dance if you want to,
so those who are distant can hear us.
all that we have missed for so long shall all come back to life.
descent
to be a happy person, why
start again from tomorrow.
if you open a window, you will be able
to find a song that belongs to you.
or perhaps, all the songs
belong to you,
just like all the warmth carried by this spring day
descending
on the tip of every strand of your hair,
on each atom in your body.
people are the creatures who receive this descending, but not
at this very instant.
love rises from a thousand places.
tears can only knock at the gods’ vaults in the skies.
all that is uncertain shall dance.
we do not need to sleep too long, people
who pull up their arms
can embrace the cosmos.
the frost and snow are beginning to melt.
the salt is forming in crystals.
i love you in symmetry
i love your cheekbones,
two mounds of connective tissue.
at times i need a place like this
to fall into deep slumber,
to be without worry.
and your chest,
two mounds of flesh,
like leaves that tremble with the wind,
or swirling, thin whirlpools,
where i find myself lost
though my mind is resolute.
until i find
the damp of your body,
effortless as it opens, and it closes,
as it winks at me,
like a wave in the early morning.
from the time we first met
until all of my yearning, and all of my promises
were utterly transformed
into a balloon, a star, a fish, a tadpole,
by standing, by walking, by mutual love,
transforming into the next me and you.
this life i love, it is this beautiful,
this symmetrical.
i love your two eyes, like petals,
how they cannot help but smile at me,
parted left and right, opening up and down,
like the skies and the earth,
like how light and shadow fit one another.
fireworks rise from the seabed
my beloved, do not ask me
the times that i think of you.
look at the thousands of homes lit up, such
complexity, all interlinked,
everyone has something to do with everyone else,
and the nights are no longer gloomy.
i know, your
eyes always carry hesitation.
but when you fill me up,
just as we fill up this space,
your eyes will never leave.
what i love
is also what we gestate.
if the heavens are shallow, then
the flames of the underworld will also subside.
everything that is rising, the core
of everything that vanishes in smoke,
that is the fate we can never foresee.
therefore, a spiderweb does not merely ensnare,
concepts are not mere glances, souls
are not merely judges of the body.
the truths of the world
are in its corners, where the gaze
of the gods is lacking
is where miracles can be born.
my beloved,
do not ask me when i love you.
my love, is like
another self, from my depths
it rises slowly, arriving
at the lips that have said goodbye to you,
from which the unspeakable has spilled, eyes
shaped like rings
are like the fireworks in perpetual
dance, carrying the warmth of the waters
rising from the bottom of the sea.
deep in the forest
there is a kind of greatness, surpassing
all people,
or all things, or all languages,
even utilitarians,
cowards, and the intrinsically
wicked.
there is no hell to go to.
in this world, there is no sin.
things, or languages,
are like the depths of the forest.
the forest is lined with artificial pagodas,
the clouds fall upon the land,
as if the earth falls upon the mortal realm.
the clouds and the earth smile together,
tumbling, being made into products.
in the deepest part of the forest,
only its innards are debating what’s real, and
which resurrections are inessential.
but the innards are not unclean, just like
the regularity of speech,
or how people invent stereotypes.
animals dash wildly as the forest buries the roads.
in the depths of the forest the graves of the universe are closed.
Translated from the Chinese by Jonathan Chan
Brian Zhang Yucheng, better known by the pen name Ling Feng, is a writer and doctor from China. His short stories and poems have been published in several literature journals including Youth Literature (青年文学), Beijing Literature (北京文学), Aves (小鸟文学), Hunan Literature (湖南文学) and West (西部). He has received the Zhu Ziqing Literary Award from Tsinghua University, the Future Science Fiction Masters Award for his short stories, and his screenplay, The Road Not Taken, was selected for the Outstanding Youth Film Drama Program of the Publicity Department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China.
Jonathan Chan is a writer and editor of poems and essays. Born in New York to a Malaysian father and South Korean mother, he was raised in Singapore and educated at University of Cambridge and Yale University. He is the author of the poetry collection going home (Landmark, 2022). His translations have appeared in Asymptote, poetry.sg, China Hands, and Journal of Practice, Research and Tangential Activities (PR&TA). More of his writing can be found at jonbcy.wordpress.com.