Sent
To be alone, he resolved to leave himself.
To relieve the pressure, he remembered
to erase further feet from the mountain path.
Birds. The starlight
flings itself into the darkness again. Wheels
don’t work as wings. In the river, fish
capsize, speed skates on alcohol, this isn’t
the cut-off north, and when he speaks of poetry, he speaks of one in the world.
Hide
Magical strangeness and a magical hold on the high ladder,
the fairyland is more the feet treading the foot of the mountain.
Below his feet is emptiness, a farewell to magic,
and below the snow isn’t a mountain, the clouds inwardly
traverse an impasse, insightful eyes tire, empty hands hold the impure heart.
When his loins are happy, her descent doesn’t matter, happy loins entwine
extremes of happiness: snowflakes suddenly outrun the snow, strands of clouds
wet Langcang River,
and the mountain is a well, the frogs are renovating, the monasteries hatch new
nunneries for him.
Connect
Rocks like the heart, never born never extinguished.
The assembled man chooses a mountain slope,
grateful for cuckooflowers threading into cuckoos.
Sweet sounding, so sweet sounding.
A bowl-mouthed resonance of red and pink,
bowl-mouthed scissored snow and frost
But the body is past its midpoint,
scaling mountains, the mountains don’t move,
a ten-year refrigerator, an ounce of vastness.
Lost
The landscape has an emptiness,
the first half of life: sweeping
disgorged plum blossoms, marijuana reciting scripture,
a meter of unleapable emptiness.
In a phrase, his everything
is held aloft: a starlit sky sending down fine numbers
without end, smoked meat and a boiled heart.
The emptiness has a landscape: what an
unleapable tiger, what reasonlessness.
Seek
Spirits go straight to the head, Lake Erhai
nears Mt. Cang, on the roof he’s
perusing local chronicles, hearing spirits rinsing human shadows.
The drying racks are close to the clouds, the liquid throat
closes in on timely rain, he’s watching self-understanding
near self-misunderstanding, forgetting his home to approach afar.
A flower of rain before the wind comes,
a line of correspondence: a man with no worries
in a cable car, sending up snow to the summit.
Substitution
The airplane sprouts scales, he realizes: can nothingness come to something by
flying?
The airplane sprouts toes, he responds: on an endless night what’s a brief
massage?
The airplane sprouts horns, he forgets: if cares leave will the heart return?
from Borrowed Meanings
Han Bo
translated from the Chinese by Eleanor Goodman
Read the original in Chinese, Simplified
Listen to "Sent" read in the original Chinese by the poet:
Han Bo loves to play. He likes sounds and sound effects, puns and neologisms, mixing the concrete with the imagined. Although each of these compact poems tells a story, they rarely read as linear but instead whip themselves up into little dust devils of scintillating particles. Meanings shift depending on where the reader puts the emphasis, images revolve and molt, and the effect is never that of a static picture but of images appearing out of and vanishing into the whirlwind.
One of the challenges of translating these poems, then, is simply to figure out which particle goes where, and exactly how they’re working together in the original. Then the task quickly becomes how to turn what looks like prosy explanations into something that shimmers and shifts in English as it does in the Chinese. To achieve that, playfulness, abandon, bravery, and a certain risk of folly are required. The point of these poems is not simply what is being said but the indefinability and effervescence of the language itself.
These poems are characteristic of one mode of Han Bo’s writing. He has many modes, just as in life he plays many roles: scriptwriter and theatrical director, visual artist, curator, magazine and travel writer, and of course, accomplished poet. Like his longer narrative poems, in effect although not in technique, these short verses drop the reader into perfectly contained miniature worlds, complete with characters and scenes, rich details that engage all of the senses, and surprising juxtapositions that in their odd unity tease at the edges of rationality. All the reader has to do is let go and fall in.
One of the challenges of translating these poems, then, is simply to figure out which particle goes where, and exactly how they’re working together in the original. Then the task quickly becomes how to turn what looks like prosy explanations into something that shimmers and shifts in English as it does in the Chinese. To achieve that, playfulness, abandon, bravery, and a certain risk of folly are required. The point of these poems is not simply what is being said but the indefinability and effervescence of the language itself.
These poems are characteristic of one mode of Han Bo’s writing. He has many modes, just as in life he plays many roles: scriptwriter and theatrical director, visual artist, curator, magazine and travel writer, and of course, accomplished poet. Like his longer narrative poems, in effect although not in technique, these short verses drop the reader into perfectly contained miniature worlds, complete with characters and scenes, rich details that engage all of the senses, and surprising juxtapositions that in their odd unity tease at the edges of rationality. All the reader has to do is let go and fall in.
Han Bo was born 1973 in Mudanjiang, Heilongjiang, and is an award-winning poet, playwright and director, travel writer, and artist. He has published five collections of poetry, most recently Temple of Arrival and Departure, and six books of travel writing.
Eleanor Goodman is an award-winning translator and author. Her first poetry collection is Nine Dragon Island (Zephyr Press, 2016), and her translations include Something Crosses My Mind: Selected Poems of Wang Xiaoni (Zephyr Press, 2014), Iron Moon: An Anthology of Chinese Workers Poetry (White Wine Press, 2017), and The Roots of Wisdom: Poems by Zang Di (Zephyr Press, 2017). Her newest translation, In the Roar of the Machine: Selected Poems by Zheng Xiaoqiong, is forthcoming in The New York Review of Books poetry series. She is a research associate at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University.
