Three Poems

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.