Three Poems on the Pandemic

Chinese characters often contain much more information than English letters. As a translator, it can be difficult to maintain the compact syntax of the source text. For instance, in Yu Jian’s poem “I Have Lost that Sadness,” a line reads “the spring breeze suddenly arriving overnight while pear flowers bloom.” This longer line consists of two shorter lines translated from the source language. Combining the syntactical content from two lines of the Chinese text into one single English line results in my being able to condense the linear form of the English-language translation, thereby better matching the structural compactness of content present in the Chinese.

Yu Jian always avoids punctuation in his composition, assimilating the patterns of classical Chinese poetry to his own poetry. Doing so leaves more room for readers to decide how to read. Syntactically, the poems are composed of fluctuating line lengths, balancing long and short lines that result in poetic free verse. Medieval Chinese poets traditionally combined this technique with strict poetic meter. However, poetic meter is often absent in a contemporary Chinese poem. Yu Jian’s use of fluctuating line lengths is modified according to the characteristic of vernacular language. In the poem “Time Flies,” for example, the poet writes, “I need to freshen up / to smoke a cigarette down the hall / to delete the mean messages in my phone.” In the source language text, strict poetic meter is unseen, and the length of these lines fluctuates. In my translation, I have preserved the fluctuation of line length to produce free verse.

Much of Yu Jian’s wok focuses on socio-political issues, and in this series, he demonstrates a strong interest in death and illness. In the poem “Time Flies,” the metaphors such as the crying laboratories in February, the ambulances of sadness, and the hypocritical funeral home all contribute to the overarching “death” motif. They echo some of the more uneasy subjects of the pandemic. Like the cloud, for instance, that is passing away, but does not want to die just yet. Or when Jian writes, “someone who does not want to wear a mask will die of an order      fear      pretense      panic      ugliness.” The person in question may very well be any one of us.