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Ma Yongbo: Responding to My Deceased Father’s Order at Night (English & Chinese)
In the early hours, father’s order finally arrives—
telling our whole family to go and join him,
father’s troops have already reached a certain point,
leaving us, the military dependents, far behind.
In the compound, there are shouts of people and neighs of horses,
and the clatter of pots and pans ringing out in confusion,
elder sister hands each of us a triangular bag, stuffed with rations,
my wooden rifle gleams from being polished,
mother takes a long time to get dressed, in the pre-dawn darkness,
my three siblings and I wait for her to come out.
It is late autumn, and the journey ahead is dark and endless,
the horse-drawn cart creaks and groans
as it passes through the stubble fields after harvest,
I turn to look back at the sauce jar left beneath the windowsill,
I hit it several times with a stone, but I can’t break it,
some reddish rainwater still lingers inside.
At last, we arrive at the small town of Sifangtai,
only my father stands there,
at the crossroads shrouded in thin mist,
behind him, the 1960s-era town flickers in and out of view,
he is all by himself, with a heavy gun hanging from his military belt.
He smokes quietly, seeming a little uneasy,
his troops have already marched toward the Soviet Union,
leaving him—the commander—behind.
Why have we arrived so late? Father doesn’t ask,
perhaps it is us who left him behind somewhere.
~~~
夜里回应我去世的父亲的指令 马永波
凌晨，父亲的指令终于到达了
让我们全家去与他会合
父亲的部队已经抵达了一个地方
把我们这些随军家属落在了后面
大院里人喊马嘶，锅碗瓢盆叮当乱响
大姐分给我们每人一个三角兜子
装着干粮，我的木头枪磨得油光锃亮
母亲花了很长时间穿衣，黎明前的黑暗中
我们姐弟四人都在等着母亲出来
已是深秋季节，幽暗漫长的路途
马车吱嘎吱嘎，穿过收割后的留茬地
我回头望着留在窗沿下的酱缸
我用石头砸了好几下，也没砸破
那里还残留着发红的雨水
最后，我们到达了四方台小镇
只有父亲一个人站在那儿
站在薄雾笼罩的路口
他身后六十年代的小镇时隐时现
他孤身一人，武装带上挂着沉重的枪
他静静地抽着烟，似乎有点不安
他的部队已经向苏联方向进发了
只把作为指挥官的他留在后面
我们为什么迟迟到达？父亲没有问
也许是我们，把他留在了某处
~~~~~
Poem and translation 2026 Ma Yongbo
Ma Yongbo 马永波 was born in 1964, Ph.D, representative of Chinese avant-garde poetry, and a leading scholar in Anglo-American poetry. He is the founder of polyphonic writing and objectified poetics. He is also the first translator to introduce British and American postmodern poetry into Chinese. He has published over eighty original works and translations since 1986 included 9 poetry collections.He focused on translating and teaching Anglo-American poetry and prose including the work of Dickinson, Whitman, Stevens, Pound, Amy Lowell,Williams, Ashbery and Rosanna Warren. He published a complete translation of Moby Dick, which has sold over 600,000 copies. 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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Today I read VP after my usual meditation. The mornings are darker now and the outside fog leaves my altar without the rainbows that sometimes arise from morning sun and the beveled glass of the china cabinet. I find myself breathing with the poem and see my own father, powerful, but lost.
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thanks to Barbara, the altar at dawn, the mist, the morning light, meditation—it’s all so beautiful!
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I couldn’t express my feelings about the poem better than Laure-Anne. I was there, somewehere, as a child.
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thank you，our existence within words is so real.
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Haunting, so quietly haunting, that father standing at the crossroads — alone — the army having marched on, leaving him behind, standing in the mist, with his “heavy gun” — such chilling angst.
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Yes, there’s a chill air in this poem.
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Thank you! the scene in the dream is still vivid in my mind. As the commander, my father should have been with his troops, but he stayed behind alone to wait for us,it’s so strange.
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Thank you, Michael, for publishing this poem of mine that records a dream. Rereading it, I still feel a faint, lingering sadness.
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The sadness is palpable… the sadness is shared.
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thanks for sharing this. When I read such moving poems, my own memories come back, sit with me a while, remind me of what was and what I miss so much.
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Yes, the Chinese have a long history of the cycles of war. In America, we’ve barely begun that process.
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History is a cycle of the rise and fall of dynasties.
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thank you John, when I was a child, sometimes in the middle of the night, military vehicles and aircraft would pass from south to north (towards the Soviet Union). We children would run to the alley entrance to watch the excitement. That chaotic, restless atmosphere felt thrilling instead, and we had no idea of the cruelty of war. Years later, this memory found its way into my dreams and became an elegy for my father.
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Your comment is a lovely prose poem, Yongbo. What a gift you have.
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yes, when I was a kid, I loved watching movies about war on tv. If my father walked into the room and saw what was on tv, he would turn off the tv set. Everything he saw brought back too many memories of the suffering he saw.
but even that didn’t stop him from dreaming of the killing he saw. Often he would wake us all with his screaming from the nightmare the war brought him.
I’ve just written a piece about growing up with two parents who were in the concentration and slave labor camps.
it will be appearing soon in a journal here called War Literature and the Arts.
I could send it to you.
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please do send the piece, John.
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great! send it to me
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What I miss so much whether true or a dream or longing.
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On the fringes of memory, seemingly excerpted from a much longer story of arrivals and departing. There is an air that casts this poem toward the elegaic: that no-nonsense father in a serious time—little of it ever meant to be given to a child. We grow mysteriously from such into who we’re to become.
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Yes, it’s a timeless archetypal poem. The events may have happened in the 20th century AD or in the 4th century BCE.
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thank you Sean, the unspoken emotions deep in my memory, the marks left by my silent father and time—perhaps I understand them, perhaps I only half-understand. Yes, we grow amid silence and imperfection, or we become even more incomplete and silent.
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A haunting and precisely rendered poem. It will follow me throughout the day.
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me too, Luray.
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thank you Luray, I wish this sad poem brings you a little joy. Yes, sometimes sorrow itself is a comfort.
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