Vox Populi
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Ma Yongbo: Frost on the Window
Translated from the Mandarin by Ma Yongbo and Helen Pletts
It is spring now and the frost on the window is gradually thinning.
Once it drew distant mountains and tangled trees on the glass.
Once it led a boy to an uninhabited path
and trapped the only shining light in a sinking net.
Of course, these are all just memories;
it cannot hold on to everything that is disappearing
allowing that boy to walk further and further on the window,
until today—a white trap.
Undoubtedly, frost is a product of the battle between coldness and warmth.
At night, it’s like a group of children peering through the window
longing for our warm lives
with wide, crystalline eyes. The first glimmer of the sun
starts in the frost on the window,
becoming louder and louder like a burst of praise.
I lean on the windowsill, watching the patterns on the glass
gradually turning into vapour with my breath,
transforming the window into a misty mirror
like the damp coldness between language and reality.
~~~~
窗上的霜
已是春天，窗上的霜渐渐稀薄
它曾在玻璃上画下远山和纠结的树丛
它曾把一个少年引上无人的小径
让惟一亮着的灯陷在下沉的网中
当然，这些都是回忆
它无法挽留正在消失的一切
让那个少年在窗上走出更远
直到今天——一个白色的陷阱
无疑，霜是冷暖交战的产物
在夜里，像一群孩子扒着窗户
窥视我们温暖的生活
睁大晶状的眼睛，而阳光最初的闪耀
也是从窗上的霜中开始的
越来越响亮，像一阵赞美
我趴在窗台上，看窗上的花纹
渐渐化成一片水汽
和我的呼吸一起，把窗子变成氤氲的镜子
我们就透过这模糊的镜子观察事物
在语言和真实之间，触摸到潮湿的冷意
2001年3月11日
~~~~
Translation copyright 2024 Ma Yongbo and Helen Pletts. First published in Polis Magazine, edited by Eva Petropoulou Lianou
Ma Yongbo is a Chinese scholar 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.
Helen Pletts is a poet and translator who lives in the UK. She has worked closely with Ma Yongbo since February 2024.
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Every poem I’ve read by Ma Yongbo so far (only here at VP; so happy for the introduction to his work) has put me into a kind of trance. I have never seen so much in frost on a glass as he has – whole worlds.
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I’m happy to introduce VP readers to Yongbo!
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What a joy to read a gorgeous poem to begin my reading day!
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Just so!
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Thank you for introducing me to this beautiful and accomplished poet.
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Yongbo is an important poet and translator in China. We’re lucky to have him here on our pages.
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“At night, it’s like a group of children peering through the window
longing for our warm lives
with wide, crystalline eyes.” In a place where I rarely see snow or ice, this poem pulls up the longing I felt sitting in front of the fireplace at Christmas in a room scented with pine and cocoa.
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yes!
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At each image I so enjoyed pausing a while to remember, along with Youngbo, those quiet moments of mesmerizing transformations for us alone, right there, on a little pane of glass, as our breath, or fingertip, make that magic happen —— then slowly reveal the world beyond…
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beautifully said, Laure-Anne. Thank you.
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This is a wonder of composition and translation. Ma Yongbo gives us a deeply sensitive feel for frost on a window, but also the several turnings of the poem at the end. There he points through the frost imagery to the world outside the contested window pane.
The translation is marvelous too, almost incantatory in places. Musicality, if you read Frost on the Window aloud, seems a gift a great translator can enhance or create as Helen Pletts does here.
Thanks to Vox Populi for embracing this poem.
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Thank you, Jim. I really appreciate your intelligent and sensitive responses to the poems in VP.
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Hello Jim, thank you for your wonderful and truly insightful comments, we are both grateful for them. The musicality you can hear is already in the Chinese, even the repetition of ‘Once’ and it is my job to find it, only that, and nothing else. This poem is Yongbo, without any embellishment from me, just Yongbo, in English but it is still a Chinese poem and it still has the authentic author’s voice. When I first read this poem I fell in love with it, and it is one of my favourites. I am delighted that Yongbo’s poem is here in English, as well as Chinese, to be enjoyed by many more readers and continue to be enjoyed for many years to come.
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Hello, Helen,
Thanks for your thoughtful reply. It is one of my favorite poems from Vox Populi too. Ma Yongbo enhances frost’s beauty and evanescence through his delicacy of words.
He does so well with transforming frost into symbol, without losing its central sense of a borderline of various occurrences. It seems the perfect poem for collaboration, and you two seem the perfect pair for these forays between languages.
It crossed my mind, with your dual skillsets, has he ever translated a poem of yours into Mandarin, etc.?
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Another gorgeous poem, Yongbo. You made me remember my childhood, with flowers and distant planets on our windows, and a hot penny pressed against the frosted glass giving us a look out on our snow-covered fields.
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Lovely, Rose Mary. Thank you.
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excellent poem.
I love reading your poems in the morning.
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Winter Poem
Outside the window
a doe bends to the grass,
opens her mouth,
bites the cold, brown grass
waiting there for Spring.
I want to say I’m waiting too,
waiting for Summer,
waiting for the days
like no other days,
but those are lost somewhere,
lost in memory,
a locked room.
The doe hears me
behind the window and looks up.
Her eyes see me, see everything.
She turns her head and moves
further down the hill.
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beautiful poem, John. Thank you.
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Thanks for reading it.
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Spellbinding! VP overflows with great poetry every day enriching our lives, as if we dwelled beside a great river. We are water people now, tapped in and fully alive!
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Sean, I look forward every day to your comments in VP. Thank you!
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”How can I keep from singing?…”
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lovely poem about frost here, Michael! You do such an amazing job, every single day! Jane Mc
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Thanks, Jane. Love your work.
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