诗五首

These poems are from a collection of Ya Shi's that I've recently assembled and translated, and for the title of the whole book I'm considering Floral Mutter, a phrase from his poem "Brief Sentences." This poem gets to the heart of one way I encounter Ya Shi's work: as a generous donation of cool air from the animal-poet to the animal-reader. I see his poems as sources of oxygen underwater—unexpected relief from the asphyxiating mix of stricture, predictable expectations, and artlessness that we swim through every day. So when I translate, I pick some mix of his most widely loved work and the pieces I need in my life the most. This suite of five poems is mostly made up of the latter; the work that I found hanging in front of me like an air bubble, uncannily defying gravity, shimmering in the dark.

The serious pursuit of free play and the production of much-needed conceptual space also plays a big role in the way Ya Shi and I collaborate in revising poems. The thinking that goes into a Ya Shi poem is voluminous, orderly, and strange, such that when I get a rare chance to sit with him and ask questions, each exegesis echoes across all the pieces I've translated, and I end up rewriting about twice as much as he suggests. For me, it's a brutal linguistic marathon; somehow, though, it never feels like work. We drink tea and smoke cigarettes and eat as well as we possibly can (in Sichuan, this means that we eat as well as anybody in the world can). These poems don't flinch from pain, but they were written by someone who believes in joy, and I hope I've been successful in bringing some of their joy to you.