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In honor of Beijing’s Summer Olympic Games, Atlanta Review’s CHINA Issue features poets now living and working in Mainland China. The inheritors of the world’s oldest and grandest poetic tradition, many of these poets suffered through exile and hard labor during the Cultural Revolution. The sparkling translations in this issue were done by Diana Shi and George O’Connell, a previous winner of Atlanta Review’s International Poetry Competition!
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The issue begins with poems about the experience of China by Western poets and travelers. Here are some samples from both parts of the issue.
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Introspection
Priscilla Frake
My room is made
partly of walls, partly
of leaves, partly of music.
Mornings I sit here
pondering the east
until it blooms and opens.
Everyone else I know
rushes through congested dark
to cubicles of doing, squares
of white unchanging light.
I know how lucky I am
but my luck is a kind of exile,
like that of a Chinese poet far from court.
As I sit in the sepia light,
I can feel an immense
imponderable weight, a lifting wind,
a giddy vastness.
My room is a Tang scroll
and I am that small figure
leaning heavily on a staff,
surrounded
by mountains, mountains, mountains.
The Rest of It
Lan Lan
I took the solitary path
trailing off into the deep cornfield.
I chose a house hidden in a forest
of pagoda trees and wild pea,
where canal water slid quietly past a bend.
The shadows of the trees, the softfallen leaves
stirred a little on the surface
then sank deep into dream.
What were they, I wondered.
A road? A house? The light
rippling Ophelia’s face?
I needed everything. Everything.
The trail hazy with dust, the forestkeeper’s house
unvisited, overgrown with green moss,
the ditch water silent as death—all
so clear, so endless.
Now I sit down, facing
a landscape spawning crazily—
golden butterflies, pagoda tree leaves
in a paper Eden
building their last tranquil slumber….
I Am
Lu Xixi
On the way home,
you see stones rolling,
saying “I am.”
You look up—
the entire mountain says “I am”
with its peaks
high and low.
Trees and fields
live in a melody
of “I am.”
The wind takes “I am”
from here to there,
hiding nothing,
forgetting nothing.
Ghost Night
Sun Wenbo
They’re here, the ghosts
come back at midnight,
raving through the streets.
Years ago, an old farmer said
if you held a red rooster
where three roads met,
you could see them,
grandfathers, great grandfathers,
eighteen generations of family.
A coward, I never dared!
To see their grisly visages,
torn flesh, eyes streaming blood,
I’d faint. I’ll stay at home,
burn ghost money in the courtyard,
pray they’re alright in the underworld,
and ask their silent blessing
on my ordinary life, peaceful
as the full summer moon.
A Taste of
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