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Helen Pletts: In the Presence of Things Flying Slower in a Grey Dusk (4 Poems in English and Chinese)
Translated by Ma Yongbo
sunlight cornering the twist of the earth again
growing the sun-warm paper where the printed spiders’ feet gather.
The tiny feet from China hold a set course, tiny black toes kick out at their edges.
The poet is researching the word ‘happy’ and the tiny black feet
come and go across the page. Rain from the Tang dynasty has re-surged,
all feelings gather in a fine mist, and lighter still is the joy of rain as a witness
to the landscape of fear fleeing like mist up the mountainside,
her tattered white veil rising like a startled cry from a mouth
15th October 2025, after coming off medication which produced extreme
and unbearable side effects and re-examining a translation of Du Fu
阳光再次笼罩着地球的旋转
太阳将纸页晒得暖融融的，印刷体的蜘蛛脚印在那里聚集。
来自中国的小脚丫循着既定轨迹，小小的黑色脚趾在边缘处轻弹。
女诗人正在研究“快乐”这个词，而黑色的小脚丫
在纸上来来去去。唐代的雨水再次涌现，
所有的情感凝成薄雾，而更轻盈的是雨的欢悦，见证着
恐惧的景象如同雾气在山腰上消散，
她残破的白色面纱扬起，像嘴里发出的一声惊叫
2025年10月15日，停用产生极难忍受的副作用的药物后，重校杜甫诗作的一篇译文
~~~
the poet on crossing darkness
without light, the stars become our silver constant.
Unfolding light is a skill darkness cannot fathom
when the moon is absent. And so the stars have brought
their blanket of white to show us how not to disappear
in black, how light is fearless, touches us at the edges,
and as we become accustomed to the gloom
we are the ones holding each other in silence
31st August 2025, written after standing under the milky way
in deep night in the garden
女诗人论穿越黑暗
没有光，星辰便成为我们银色的常数。
展现的光是黑暗无法探测的技巧
当月亮缺席的时刻。于是，星辰带来了
它们白色的毯子，向我们展示如何不在黑暗中
消失，光是如何无所畏惧，触及我们的边缘，
而当我们逐渐习惯了昏暗
我们便成了彼此默默相拥的人。
2025年8月31日，在深夜的花园里，静观银河之后而作
~~~
moth breaths touching as
light as our moth breath, circling contentment,
showing light only where the dark is no more.
We are startled by warmth, our saturated bodies
have unfolded their wings from our moth brown fur,
our warm breath escaping like invisible wings
we have created to follow after us
16th August 2025
飞蛾的呼吸触碰着我们
轻盈如我们飞蛾的呼吸，盘旋着的满足，
只在黑暗消失的地方才显露出光明。
我们被温暖所惊，透湿的身体
从飞蛾的棕色绒毛中展开翅膀，
温暖的呼吸如同隐形的翅膀一般逃逸，
我们创造的东西追随着我们
2025年8月16日
~~~
in the presence of things flying slower in a grey dusk
what starts all this is something darker in the centre of a white rose;
backing out of the petals and arching its own back.
And now the wind has dropped, the wings are without weighted force
and so they work awkwardly, as if slowing bees are in fact mechanics
of the air and we had never noticed this. Wings cranking into airlessness,
they are already attaching themselves to the oncoming darkness.
Darkness is a nest of flightlessness for bees too tired to turn the gears
31st May 2025
灰暗的黄昏，面对着飞得更慢的事物
这一切的开端，是白玫瑰花芯中某个更暗的东西；
它正从花瓣中退出来，弓着背。
此刻风已停息，翅膀失去了承载的力量
于是便笨拙地扇动，仿佛减速的蜜蜂，实则是
空气力学的产物，我们从未留意。翅膀在无风的空中摇动，
它们已经把自己附着在即将来临的黑暗中。
黑暗是蜜蜂无法飞翔的巢穴，它们疲惫得无法转动齿轮。
2025年5月31日
~~~~~
Poems in English copyright 2026 Helen Pletts
Translations copyright 2026 Helen Pletts and Ma Yongbo
Helen Pletts is a British poet based in Cambridge, UK, whose work has been translated into Chinese, Bangla, Greek, Vietnamese, Serbian, Korean, Arabic, Italian, Albanian and Romanian. She is the English co-translator of Chinese poet Ma Yongbo.
Ma Yongbo is a Chinese poet, translator, editor, and scholar of postmodern poetry. He has authored or translated more than seventy published books. Ma is a professor in the Faculty of Arts and Literature at Nanjing University of Science and Technology. His translations from English include works by John Ashbery, Emily Dickinson, Henry James, Herman Melville, May Sarton, Walt Whitman, William Carlos Williams, and many others.
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These poems are pure word magic.
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Thank you Rosemary, you are so kind.
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Aren’t they?
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Thank you Michael, Yongbo and I love being a part of the Vox Populi Community
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Thank you so very much Sean, your words mean a great deal to me, I am deeply honoured to have Ma Yongbo 马永波 as my official translator. Last year I faced a terrifying illness at the same time that I was writing these poems.
The on-line magazine Jade Moon https://jademoonmag.carrd.co/ Ivana Milanovic, Editor-in-Chief, recently published an interview in Issue 3, with Ma Yongbo and myself about how we work together entitledEchoes of the Soul, Poetic correspondence: Ma Yongbo and Helen Pletts
Here is the Chinese link of the interview too https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/iWt6bw5csxfQ1A0n-VniUQ
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Thank you so very much Sean, your words mean a great deal to me, I am deeply honoured to have Ma Yongbo 马永波 as my official translator. Last year I faced a terrifying illness at the same time that I was writing these poems.
The on-line magazine Jade Moon https://jademoonmag.carrd.co/ Ivana Milanovic, Editor-in-Chief, recently published an interview in Issue 3, with Ma Yongbo and myself about how we work together entitledEchoes of the Soul, Poetic correspondence: Ma Yongbo and Helen Pletts
Here is the Chinese link of the interview too https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/iWt6bw5csxfQ1A0n-VniUQ
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“backing out of the petals and arching its own back.” In these I feel texture. The cool of the rose petal, the chitinous body of the backing bee, the mist on my skin, all captured so delicately that words and senses blend.
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Thank you Barbara, I actually spend a great deal of time watching small insects. One night, I was walking our dog Sasha and I passed by a scented bush and noticed that inside each bloom were the most unusual insects resembling fluffy stamens. I also go out into our garden at night with a torch and the most amazing find was an albino spider sitting inside the white bloom of a snow white peony.
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Such stunning transltions of the Chinese. I’m so taken with “the port crossing in darkness”: “And so the stars have brought/their blanket of white to show us how not to disappear/in black, how light is fearless…”
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*poet
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Thank you Ellen, I think co-translating the Chinese poetry of Ma Yongbo has drawn me closer to his own poetic style, and he has also shared with me his own Chinese poetry favourites by Li Bai, Li Yu, Du Fu, and Li Qingzhao. I value this influence greatly.
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“light as our moth breath, circling contentment,
showing light only where the dark is no more.” So many lines and sentences that made me want to read them twice — such quiet, arresting beauties.
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Thanks, Laure-Anne. I agree.
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Thank you Michael
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Thank you Laure-Anne, for your kind appreciation for my poetry, I have a fascination with small insects and see them as a much larger part of my own view of the world. I visited my father recently and he asked me what he could do to protect his woollens from being eaten by moths. As we were talking some tiny golden moths appeared and hovered around us and they were so enchanting that I found myself feeling such an affinity with them. I promised to help my father find a way to protect his woollens without harming the moths. Every day I am in total awe of nature, and this never changes.
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Helen’s poetry is full of delightful details: a spider twitching its tiny legs, a bee bowing its back as it retreats from a flower’s heart. Her poems contain no grand moralizing; instead, she weaves humanity and nature directly into one another, like the quiet breath of spring on a branch. I am delighted to have recreated this poetic spirit in Chinese.
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Beautifully said, Yongbo. Like you, I love Helen’s lyricism:
‘our warm breath escaping like invisible wings’
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Thank you Michael
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Thank you Yongbo, you have spent many hours translating my poetry and so you know me very well. In fact, you have now translated over 500 of my poems, during the last two years that we have been working together. I never decide what to write about, I just see something and then start to write, or your response poems to me will unlock my response back to you and I just start writing in my head. I have had to pull over to stop driving in order to write a poem. When I see nature it is always that glimpse of beauty that has left me breathless. I pass a high roof on a road I often drive along and on this roof are white doves arranged like white pauses, just sitting there and as I get closer they often all take off together, and just for a moment the view is so miraculous. These are the very small scenes that I love.
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How I love these earthly divinities in verse where insects and starlight have trodden. How they all seem one and the same in this temporal world that sends me deeper into a once unbelieved religion. Writer and translator have met perfectly in each line and become lovers by breath and hand and tongue.
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yes… as you say, ‘by breath and hand and tongue.’
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Thank you Michael, Yongbo and I are both so at ease with each other that although we both work very hard we have reached such a clear understanding between us that it does not feel like hard work at all. Even the eight hour time difference does not defeat us.
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Sean, thank you, I have replied to you but it has come up as a new comment further up the page
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