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 READ MORE…