The Gift the Room Has Given to Time
Her sadness shows the dark edges of a Xerox copy
The clever questionnaire that clogs her throat
She still hasn’t found the right social circle
Third day already
Her fish stranded inside a sofa
The calendar dries out
An existence hollow as such
Denial borders on instinct
Crude words caress her ears from afar
Recent weather development isn’t looking good
She stands alone against the night’s light
The diagonal linking the stars and the Earth
Her room, in danger of melting
Plenty sunny days out of touch
An emergency test for a parachute
A key’s locked up all keywords
An arid and speechless room
She presses the numbers she knows by heart
Faxing herself to a garden far away
I’ve Given Up
1.
I’ve given up
At the corner for discussion and being discussed
I neatly take out a little bit of my body
As if it were the thickest yet unfinished confession letter
Trying to open itself
Faking the hurt in the wind
The leftover wine’s lost its name
I’m gazing at those slowly passing
I’m gazing as well as slowly passing
I’ve been given up
A striking punctuation point falls from my pocket
Far away, a street corner gets foggy
The passersby and taxis suddenly growing from it
Are carrying away what can be understood later
Who again has recorded whom?
The night is music mindlessly disposed of
Tables are clues’ hilly landscape
In the light, a few fuzzy words
In the light, a few fuzzy howevers
You can’t help
My May is army green
2.
Sunlight spilling out like honey
A distant gaze
Until stalking has also learnt about stalking
The entire over-sweet ocean
I’ve given up.
I can’t resist the changing weather between the lips
At once, I get swallowed into a dark cave
There’s blood
A prolonged and silent penetration
Strangers either hug, or converse
A couple of wrinkled merit certificates
Replaceable labels and expiry dates
Some disorienting sleep
A bed that’s lost its root, and versions of a story
Dreams are a suspect of over-plagiarism
All these:
Have been given up.
You’re an injection, slow as honey
Overloading, therefore, the seams of the body
3.
The fireworks are what remain in the sky
Luminosity is overused
At night, the cry for help goes soft
Did anyone hear that?
A room is temporarily imprisoning someone
Which allows sounds to form a lively band
You’re kind, but withering
Messing up the time through a sleep
You also borrowed some stable waves
Each time, you slowly leave a beach that’s not there
I’ve given up to know
A way of saying that quietly clings onto the center of a palm:
Clouds are the shape of lost souls
Once, far away, a blue-and-purple conversion
Spontaneous writing is ineffective, and is given up
The intersecting streets inside a house are given up
So is the hugging silent like spoons
(Somewhere far away is fuzzy and hard to distinguish)
I gradually turn around
And still can’t utter the first redemption line
4.
The sea is wet, so is the balcony
The crazy raindrops have wetted and bent the back of a building
It looks like a happy but shy plant
Lowering its head, overlooking with feelings
The only place a river would head to after it turns
A rainstorm is given up by the sky
It’s emphatically confessing
The mountains grow old because of listening
Still the proper rhetoric of comforting hasn’t been found
I’ve known by heart every word that needs to be said at night
Actions cease:
I’m waiting for the three tropical fruits I bought to rot
For my used clothes to overcome the body’s impediment
For the standard answer when I forgot to book a ticket
I delete outdated emails
The light is repeatedly reborn, then dead again
A giant private jet
Has yet safely landed
I’ve given up
I can never return to the door and open it again
Perhaps, I can hang the dry period before a rainstorm
Gently, around your neck
5.
I’ve given the most I could
Right before the body breaks
I realize I can’t offer any bright red appliances
To polish everything and make it what it was
My hands try to clean up, but in vain
I throw away long-standing things, and scavenge what can’t be a choice
The day before I move away
My emotions overthrow twelve kinds of hypotheses
I act indifferent to time, which throws itself on me
And I yell at the wall: I’ve given up
I’ve got the most I could
I’ve never succeeded in stealing a base
I cheer quietly for the midnight team alone
I don’t stare at the half-transparent summer
After I run in a couple of dim rain-speckled streets
Will there still be a city waiting to be reorganized like building blocks?
Will there be another me giving you the most he could?
Then, you prefer to be given up
And yell at the wall: I’ve been given up
Loving Underground Carparks
And then lower yourself/ to rock bottom
Like a secret drawer
That’s never been opened
Wordlessly bearing the assault of humidity
The left wing smells of petrol
Sniff it/ a war communicates in the head
Nights brewing one another/ an illegible withdrawal
A few kinds of conversations docking
A wrong number
Massive silenced experience
Each framed space has its owner
A calendar has thinned
Three Poems
Sun Tzu-Ping
translated from the Chinese by Nicholas Wong
Read the original in Chinese, Traditional
Listen to the original read by the poet:
Sun’s poetry is episodic and piercing. It usually specializes in expressing a moment, and speculates what invisible actions that moment thereafter induces. As a poet myself and a beginner translator, I am often drawn to poetry that takes leaps into little intellectual wonders. I would love to feel the poet’s mind (therefore, also mine) at work, when emotions are spread on the pages. For instance, “The Gift the Room Has Given to Time” is part of a trilogy written in an attempt to weave together the “night,” “time”, and the “room.” In those poems, Sun imagines how an unnamed (or perhaps imaginary) speaker’s life floats between darkness and space. In addition, the poet mentions that in his original Chinese version, there is a compulsion to rhyme, so as to imply the repetitiveness and futility of the mundane urban romance. The poet’s intent, however, may be surrendered in the process of translation. Sun’s interest in exploring the intricate relationship between the spatial and the temporal can be easily seen in “Loving Underground Car Parks,” on which he makes the following comment (my translation): “When we park our vehicle in a designated automated space, do we also arrive at a particular moment and stop there?” Sun’s poems fascinate me also with their obsession with revealing an urban loneliness that is not necessarily culturally specific. His work, as he would describe “I’ve Given Up,” is very much like a found notebook, with its scribbling already washed away by the rain. Whoever is reading it is tracing the residual language and reconstructing one’s desperate calling for another nonexistent one.
Sun Tzu-Ping graduated from the Graduate Institute of Creative Writing and English Literature at National Dong Hwa University. He is currently an editor at the Liberty Times. Chinese titles by Sun include Knowing Shadows《知影》(essays), Sentimentalist 《善遞饅頭》(poetry), and Male Bodies 《男身》(novel), among others.
Nicholas Wong is the author of A Better Way to Say Onlys (Noemi Press, forthcoming in 2021) and Crevasse (Kaya Press, 2015), the winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry. He is also the recipient of the Australian Book Review’s Peter Porter Poetry Prize. In 2019, his poem has been longlisted for the University of Canberra Vice Chancellor’s International Poetry Prize. Wong has contributed writing to the radio composition project “One of the Two Stories, Or Both” at the Manchester International Festival in 2017, and the catalogue of the exhibition “One Hand Clapping” (2018) at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. He currently teaches at the Education University of Hong Kong.
