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Ma Yongbo: Three poems translated from Chinese
Father
Walking by the lake with my father after the heavy rain,
a foot-deep in mud,
we trample down the green grass to keep going.
Many relatives are waiting for us in the village to celebrate a festival.
The black mud is mixed with yellow-rice cow dung,
the muddy sound accompanies us all the way,
we don’t speak, but our rubber boots bellow like cows.
The earthen houses have grown shorter;
their doors and windows looking like drawers pulled part way out.
My father and I are silent like father and son,
behind us, the green grass slowly stands back up again
dripping with black mud.
父亲
大雨后和父亲走在湖边
一尺深的泥泞
我们把青草踩倒，才能继续走下去
很多亲人在村里等我们一起过节
黑色的泥里混合着稻黄色的牛粪
泥泞的声音一路陪伴我们
我们不说话，胶皮靴子发出牛的吼叫
那些泥土的房屋更矮了
门窗像拉开一半的抽屉
我和父亲像父亲和儿子那样沉默着
我们身后，那些青草又慢慢立起来
滴着黑色的泥
~~~~
Okra
The beheaded okras, their dew-shiny heads
are crowded in the basket; countless black pupils staring.
They were John the Baptist preaching in the autumn wind,
carrying the bright rumour from the roof to the plain.
At this moment, Salome has stopped dancing,
standing quietly by the sorghum field as a village girl,
between the road and the field, her face
is almost expressionless, as if she had stood there
for centuries, as if history was just
a vague gossamer floating in front of her eyes.
The horse drawn cart hasn’t gone far, it will carry away
the love of the land, and one or two shy grasshoppers.
At this moment, her hanging sickle
reflects the white light of winter arising in the distance.
秋葵
被斩首的秋葵，头颅沾着晶亮的露水
拥挤在篮子里，睁着无数的黑睛
它们是施洗者约翰曾经在秋风中布道
把雪亮的风声从屋脊传过平原
此时，莎乐美停止了舞蹈
以村姑的形象静静地站在在高粱地头
在道路与田野之间，她的脸上
几乎没有表情，她仿佛在那里
站立了几个世纪，仿佛历史
仅仅是她眼前模糊飘荡的游丝
马车还停在不远处，它将载走
大地的爱情，和一两只胆怯的蝈蝈
就在这个瞬间，她垂下的镰刀上
反映着远方出现的冬天的白光
~~~~
The Steam of Poverty
In the translucent darkness, my elder sister stands on the ground
not far from the warm earthen kang where I sleep,
she is wrapping rice balls, carefully
removing the old tendons from the cabbage leaves,
the mashed potatoes exuding the steam of poverty.
She wraps the white mashed potatoes
but doesn’t let me eat them, I want to cry
but I can’t cry out loud.
It is very cold in the bungalow in the northern winter,
a familiar cough comes from the corner,
it turns out that my second brother is there,
and my sister’s daughter Weiwei
who seems to be only a little younger than me.
She keeps saying, “If you don’t play with me
I will go dance with the little Taoist priest.”
So we go out, I am on one side,
the three of them are on the other side
kicking a basketball that is already old and soft.
At this time, my eldest brother also comes,
and he finally kicks the ball into a puddle,
the open space between the houses is as big as a square
and full of puddles. Without my parents
those old houses and old alleys are long gone.
Only the fragrant heat of mashed potatoes
still lingers under the dim yellow incandescent light.
Notes:
kang – a bed found in northern Chinese homes modeled of earthen clay or brick and heated from underneath
贫穷的热气
半透明的黑暗中，姐姐站在地上
离我睡着的热土炕不远
她一直在包饭团，小心地
把白菜叶的老筋剔掉
土豆泥散发着贫穷的热气
她把白白的土豆泥包好
却不给我吃，我想哭
又怎么也哭不出声
北方冬天的平房，屋里很冷
一个角落里传来熟悉的咳嗽声
原来二哥也在，还有姐姐的女儿薇薇
年纪似乎只比我小了一点
她不停地说，“你们不和我玩
我就找小道士跳舞去。”
于是我们出去，我在一边
他们三个在另一边
踢一只已经旧得很软的篮球
这时大哥也来了，他终于
把球踢到了水洼里
房子之间的空地大得像广场
满是水洼。没有爸爸妈妈
那些老房子和老胡同早已不在了
只有土豆泥喷香的热气
还在晕黄的白炽灯下缭绕
~~~~
Poems and translations copyright 2025 Ma Yongbo
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Wonderful poems. Reading your dreams brought back so many of my dreams of my dad and mother. Thank you.
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Thank you! If you write down these dreams in poetry, I would love to read them.
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Deeply felt and gorgeous.
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thank you Lisa!
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These poems are utterly beautiful and see in a luminous way, if seeing can emit light. I love all three and will read them, which I first typed to “eat them” over and over. I especially find the images’ specificity wondrous, and almost in contrast yet supporting it, the mystery or mysteries each poem holds and points to. I need to find more of your work.
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Hahaha. Doesn’t Mark Strand have an early poem about eating poetry, ink running from the corners of his mouth? Anyway, I do like the sensuality of these poems by Yongbo.
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Thank you for taking the time to read these poems. The “light” you mentioned reminds me that poetry (or human beings) can indeed have several different ways of Seeing. Beyond Abrams’ “mirror and lamp”, could there be more ways for us to engage with the world? That’s a thought that comes to me right now. I strive to discover the certain mystery behind ordinary experiences, or just a hint of fate.
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Is this why I read poetry—beauty, connection, that physical sweet pain in the chest? How can words do that? Longing to return to something we’ve never experienced, with the sense that we have experienced it again and again? It is almost as if every acute pain and every exploding happiness can be found in the words that float in on this lighted small rectangular box I hold in my hand—words from other persons, other times, strange marks on a different medium opened up by another who cares to use their own understanding, not just of the words but of life and humanity, to show me what is inside myself.
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What a beautiful paragraph, Barb. Thank you! You’ve captured something eternal in the medium.
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Thank you, Barbara! The novelty of something I’ve never experienced before, yet the familiarity of déjà vu—some things in human nature may have always been there, waiting to be awakened by a single word.
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What strikes me most about these poems is that it could be (give a kang or two) be the experience of anyone, anywhere. And then I see those gorgeous morphemes, and suddenly they become words from another world.
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I can’t read a word of Chinese, but I think the way it looks on the page is beautiful.
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Thank you for your attention. Your words have reinforced my belief in the commonality of humanity, regardless of language. I find this very comforting, especially in an era where values are so divided.
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Yongbo these are very sensitive poems, thank you, your poetry always has such wonderful detail. You connect us to your work so closely, always with amazingly intricate and unique phrasing which defines your distinctive voice, like the last four lines of ‘Okra’
“The horse drawn cart hasn’t gone far, it will carry away
the love of the land, and one or two shy grasshoppers.
At this moment, her hanging sickle
reflects the white light of winter arising in the distance.”
Exquisitely beautiful !
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Lovely quotation, Helen. I love those lines as well. Thank you,
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thank you Helen, today I reread this poem myself, and its ending also gave me a chill. It seemed to contain a cruel premonition of the coming winter of life.
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All three of these poems in English bring me great joy in reading them.
Okra was one of my father’s survival foods in his early life of rural poverty. To see it as John the Baptist is truly remarkable and stunning in its connections to Western culture.
But your potato as a central survival food of poverty, accentuated by your link to the early painting of the potato eaters by Van Gogh, (one of my favorite paintings showing the survival of the human spirit), is nearly universal, isn’t it? The potato is also central to Irish culture.
Inspiration shines from all three poems. Okra is a bright star written by a bright star poet.
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My grandparents loved okra. In the rural south, it was a highly nourishing vegetable that grew easily in the sandy soil, a life saver during the Great Depression. Potatos, both white and sweet varieties, were staples as well.
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It seems that potatoes are the root of the world
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Thank you! You are right. My childhood experiences are mixed with the influence of Van Gogh’s paintings that I came into contact with as an adult, especially the dim yellow lights. I am still interested in bare light bulbs. There was always a bare light bulb hanging and swinging on the green porch of my house when I was a child, those tungsten filaments in the fragile and transparent pear-shaped glass are particularly puzzling to me.
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These poems are deeply grounded in Chinese experience, and very moving. Thank you for making them available in English.
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Thanks, Alfred. I admire your translations as well.
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Thank you Alfred for taking the time to focus on poetry during your travels. I’m still Chinese at heart, despite 35 years of immersion in English and American literature. Sometimes I honestly don’t know if these experiences are unique or too personal; they just haunt me for so long that I write about them.
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These are true gems — thank you to Ma Yongbo. These are poems to be read very slowly — which I did as day lifts here & only one bird sings…
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“as day lifts here & only one bird sings…”,I like this “lift”, it is so alive! There was only one bird singing… when I was in Nanjing, I woke up to the sound of birdsong almost every morning. Maybe, at the beginning, there was always only one bird singing, sparse, even tentative, and then the choir came on, very interesting. lovely day!
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Thanks, Laure-Anne. Your comments are so full of grace.
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Beautiful poetry. He magnifies the moment to moment experience, such as,
“She wraps the white mashed potatoes
but doesn’t let me eat them, I want to cry
but I can’t cry out loud.”
“My father and I are silent like father and son,
behind us, the green grass slowly stands back up again
dripping with black mud.”
The poem transmit the sensation of his experience, and then his thought. The reader is with him, in body, mind and spirit, step by step all the way.
Beautiful!
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Thank you so much for your thoughtful and heartfelt comments on this poem. It means so much to know that these small, quiet moments resonate with you. Thank you for taking the time to read these humble poems of mine so carefully.
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Thank you, Luz!
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Masterful poems! I will be revisiting them, especially “The Steam of Poverty.”
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Yes, this kind of experience is foreign to most American poets, but I think it’s similar to what a lot of migrants are experiencing in this country today.
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Thank you, Michael, for making these poems possible in English! This potato poem captures my childhood experiences. Northern Chinese people love potatoes, eating them almost every day. My mother cooked them in various ways for us, fearing they would become monotonous. Memories of poverty—-Yes, although I never went hungry—my father was a colonel—but nearly every family struggled with food shortages back then, relying on large quantities of potato, radish, carrot, and cabbage. The folk saying went, “Melons and vegetables provide half a year’s food.” This poem, a record of a dream, inadvertently captures the truth of a long-forgotten era.
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Thank you for these poems, Yongbo. They give us a glimpse of another world.
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Thank you for your encouragement!
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Already, I was fastened by deepest affection into leg-irons in the poem of mud— then came mention of okra and the chanticleer of morning sounded in the uppermost branches amid the babble of cicadas climbing the fusang tree. I’m done for, lost in the fog of potato steam. This is how my life shall end, barely will I recognize heaven when I arrive from this place.
“The world is full of medicine—say the Chinese—“What’s the disease?”
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What an interesting response to the poems, Sean. Thank you.
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Dear Sean，thank you very much, and I’m delighted to see your lovely comment. I also received the images of Han Dynasty ceramic artwork you sent to my inbox. It seems that the image of the East in Western culture still holds a great deal of potential. I know very little about Chinese antiques myself, but I’m more drawn to traditional landscape painting. My 1990s poems with their Scattered Perspectives were influenced by them. They differ significantly from the depth and fixed-point perspective of Western Renaissance painting. Together, they represent two different ways of viewing things.
WeChat’s Poetics platform featured these three poems, accompanied by Van Gogh’s painting. The two poems about my father and the steaming potatoes are dreams I recorded, with little literary embellishment, simply describing the dream scenes. I have over a hundred such dream poems, which I’m slowly translating into English.
https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/uBKIhvSbKYDiCO0O9IDjvA
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