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Conversation by the Autumn Lake

The external world is also the inner world, for example,
on a lake darkened by pine trees, a man counts his beard
then proceeds to count blue delphiniums, thus he sees
the bow of the boat wedged into the sandy shore: our way
of entering the inner world seems a bit crude,
but perhaps no one will get hurt there.
What will you find there? Incomplete shells,
footprints? Or some weird branches?

From the distant sandbank comes the lonely cries of wild ducks,
like abandoned tin cans, separated
far away, almost dull,
occasionally one breaks free from a small cloud shadow,
only to land in another cloud shadow again.
Why do you call these your inner world: the autumn lake,
the leaves, our wrinkled ears, thoughts
between breath and wind? Although

no one is satisfied with the shape of themselves
in everything. Does this mist come from
the lake or from your eyes?
You can’t see me. I’ve been silent,
but you think I’m still talking,
saying what you imagine I should say.
The gurgling of water becomes clearer now,
is there an outlet in the lake, flowing to a place below?

How to imagine the shadow of the lake, the shadow of a poem
or the forgery of a poem. Sand. Dogs. The sun shines for a moment,
this makes sense. Your self is a stone, grass, a fish in the water
or perhaps a stick, a number, an island
Then who are you? Break free from the cloud shadows in your heart,
see the boat cut through the green surface of the water
hear the rustling flutter of wild ducks before diving into the inner world.

Superficial Snow

Undoubtedly, the sky favors what’s low lying
That enchanting sense of security. This snow
makes the room even darker, the windows
seem to have moved further away from the walls.
Snowlight streams in, stiffening like your finger joints,
You could easily leave that rugged chair,
It’s the skeleton of an old friend,
Embracing you from behind, whispering to you,
Being alive is a cold spherical doorknob,
You know the silence of snowfall,
Different from the premonition of a still earth,
Different from the blind shouts that follow,
Like white noise compressed in foam balls,
A person wading in the pond of that ball,
Trying to get to the bottom of things. But how to receive
The gift from a superficial snow,
How to extract concentrated uranium
From a fluffy fragment, a snow has fallen,
It will fall again and again, under different names,
Gathering the foundations and cornices of shattered heavens
In a roughly stitched pocket,
Its requiem buried in its own darkness,
Abandoned mines, valleys, libraries converted
From bomb shelters, their unvisited chambers echoing with sighs from nowhere,
Countless expired books and periodicals lying stagnant,
But what can one do, even if this snow is a choir with a muffler,
Even if the arbitrary conductor has scrambled the score,
So that moist snowflakes plop from the wires
Onto the umbrellas of passersby, tilting the red ones slightly,
And snow on the pine trees and showers of shades under trees
The scent of old catalogs, the fire of reading, coal on the road,
In the slowing vortex of transparency, a snowflake
Perches on your nose tip, this pale soul whispers to you:
‘I will only be seen once, that’s the essence of things.
I escaped from a riot in the depths of the universe to report to you,
That message has been lost in the endless journey,
Perhaps we’d better forget it.
Forgetting is the ultimate wisdom, but
Continue to sing, since you cannot bear
To call other things by similar names.’
It so says, gently turns around, and returns to
That eternal and fleeting queue, soon disappearing
Along a glass piston that rises and falls incessantly,
Perhaps, that’s where your difficulty lies,
Tearing off a faded label from a swift, continuous and abstract action,
A snapshot, hanging it on the trembling horizon for development,
An exaggerated vacant posture
No longer pointing anywhere, or perhaps
Pointing to a place that has already changed,
Is this the anticipated definite moment
In the chaotic mass around the lake,
The willow branch inserted into the water spreading ripples,
All desires beyond this
Are just a horse sweating in the dark,
Constantly shifting the invisible weight from side to side,
Or entering an empty Senate after a political murder,
Witnessing the turmoil of dust on sunlit marble,
The dictator and assassin are no longer present,
Ah, so you’re also among them! His exclamation
Is a snowflake exhaled from a dying mouth,
Ah, the infinitely compassionate requiem finally established,
The magma inside things cools down gleaming,
Solidifying into an end understood by no one,
Good or bad, snow continues to fall,
Surface snow falls on the surface of all things,
This southern snow won’t linger too long
But it temporarily halts the disappearance of one person.

Cosmology in Winter Rain

How long does the universe expand, how much longer can I live?
If it’s still expanding, why haven’t I been stretched out?
The images humans paint on the surface of a balloon
Will only get bigger and thinner,
Too distorted to recognize.

If this culturally irregular ballooning
Causes leaks everywhere, one day we’ll
Snap back, a burst balloon
Stuck to a child’s face.

In a small fluctuation of cosmic heat death,
We live, contemplating the universe’s expansion,
A group of mice, while the owner is away, under the floor
Crawling around, dragging bellies, rattling bones.

How much longer can we live, how long is the universe?
Who’s blowing us up like a balloon,
Putting the frying pan of the Milky Way on the wall to cool?

His father came home from work
With a newspaper tube from beyond the river,
In boredom beating on passing things,
There’s news about white dwarfs
But already blurred by a winter rain.

Line by line retranslation of Ashbery

Waiting makes time democratic, you just said so
Then a white horse ran by, repeatedly running back and forth
Like a messenger passing straight through various rooms from the front door
Out through the back door, I waited like this for twenty-seven years.
Initially it was the honey of distortion brewed in the rooms distorted in your convex mirror
And that gesture was both an invitation and a refusal
Unfolding for me a moment that fluctuated incessantly
A crack that exists, the circulation of water in the ocean
A ring formed by a self-devouring serpent in motion
In between is the void filled with power
This mirror of others reflects oneself at the same time
Allows all the images of leaves stacked in the depths of the mirror to remain
Like a demon in a bottle floating on an infinitely transparent surface
Longing for the light of your face, symbolic stones
They only stop temporarily in order to focus
Forming some kind of meaning, then they are quickly swept away
By the randomness of a hasty retrospective flood
This is more like a dream that a person struggles with but still cannot wake from
Maybe he doesn’t really want to wake up
Finding himself in an uninhabited street
In the silence just as the last bus leaves
In the steam, the taillights flicker dimly
This is a climate without scenery, it is something nameless
Moving, appearing and disappearing, erasing some, and then adding some from the void
Adding something, originally the messenger and the message were one
How to receive the infinite return of the Möbius strip
What you have experienced, you know nothing about
And poetry is an understanding of this pain, and also a forgetting
Whether the reward is a reed flute, or separation of body and head
It will all enter a distilled space
Like bees living in the nest of the sun
And these, whether they are enough for me
Pretending that nothing happened, continue to sing
This may be the barbarian plundering in Rome
Defined safe zone, several temples scattered on hills
Let us continue with determination
Tell others the symbolism, and show the mystery to ourselves

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Ma Yongbo was born in 1964, Ph.D, representative of Chinese avant-garde poetry, and a leading scholar in Anglo-American poetry. He has published over eighty original works and translations since 1986 included 7 poetry collections. He focused on translating and teaching Anglo-American poetry and prose including the work of Dickinson, Whitman, Stevens, Pound, Williams and Ashbery. He recently published a complete translation of Moby Dick, which has sold over half a million copies. He teaches at Nanjing University of Science and Technology. The Collected Poems of Ma Yongbo (four volumes, Eastern Publishing Centre, 2024) comprising 1178 poems, celebrate 40 years of writing poetry.

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