The Poet:
Shuguang Zhang was born in 1956 in Wangkui County, Heilongjiang Province, China. He is a poet, translator, and a retired professor of Chinese at the School of Literature, Heilongjiang University. Zhang’s poetry collections include The Clown’s Gown, The Snowfall in the Afternoon, Zhang Shuguang’s Poetry, and Haunted House, among others. His more notable collections of translated poetry are Divine Comedy and Czesław Miłosz’s Poetry. Zhang was awarded the first Liu Li’an Poetry Award, the Poetry and People Poetry Award, the “Poetry Construction” Master Award, and in 2019, the Su Shi Poetry Award. His works have been translated into English, Spanish, German, Japanese, Dutch, and other languages.
Translator:
Yi Feng is a scholar, translator, poet, and associate professor and researcher at Northeastern University, China. Her English poems have been published in The Penn Review, Model Minority, and Voice & Verse Poetry Magazine, and Venti：Air, Experience, and Aesthetics, etc.. Her Chinese poems have been published in Lotus (芙蓉) and Chinese Poetry Website. She has translated Chinese poets and American poets, including Shuguang Zhang, Susan Howe, Rae Armoutraut and Charles Bernstein, among other poets. Her translation of poems appeared in journals in China and the US, such as Poetry Monthly (诗歌月刊) in 2019 , DoubleSpeak in 2020 and Anomaly (2020). She was awarded the Hunt Scholarship in 2016. She has won the Bronze Prize in an International Chinese Poetry Competition in 2017. She lives in Shenyang, China, P.R.
Beauty is a…
Beauty is a subversive force that can even
collapse an entire building.
I hear the click of a box.
The playground is drenched, as clouds’ sprinkler trucks
slowly drift by. Children run.
Yellowed posters on the walls，mock
time and the old order. It builds
new orders and then wreck them.
Imaginary terrorist, with a smile on his face.
It hides itself in all things.
Fire hydrants, chameleons, flower beds,
picture frames, and the blank A4 printing paper.
Scaffolds erect, over oil wells.
Bad weather gets metal fatigue syndrome.
I read A Brief History of Mankind. In a grass skirt
dancing is joyous. The grass grows taller than human.
I pillow my sleep on the wind. Apples down.
Wittgenstein
You beat your students’ asses
with an angry poker，
which pleases me. I’ve had my fair share of bad students,
but I lacked your confidence and courage，
especially your talents. In your presence
I would look like a fool. (would you also
punch me?) Couldn’t climb up to your steep ladder
(What’s up there ? Clouds, rainbow candy
or nothingness?) Anyway, it’s high and
wide enough to have a good view, but it’s definitely cold
enough to be wrapped in a mysterious gas
and right next door to God
and the students you’ve beaten up probably
won’t know what they were missing until they die
I’m a little giddy. I’d lean against your ladder and smoke
(imaginatively) and tell people passing by
about the beauty of the view up there
and they ‘d laugh blankly or scornfully,
looking at me, like fools and
leave without looking back.
“The World Is Like…”
The world came into my life like a racket.
On the playground of the small school, the children were wet with dew.
Their faces were all turned to one side. If trees were allowed to wear school uniforms
would things get better? Who broke the ground glass?
Along with the landscape from the window, it shattered.
Logics comes from the (moulded) mind? It ends childhood and quarrels.
Is it a gift from God or a product of ourselves?
The caterpillar moved to a new home. It chose birds as neighbors.
I have never been to the Caribbean. But I’ve known Knightley for long.
She isn’t Omar. Through the tarot card, do you
see the landscape of the doom day? In the fish tank a shoe is swimming.
This is left from the last winter. The snow is kidnapped.
No one knows where it goes. A sculpture
lying at the corner of the room, is fully covered with raindrops and chocolate.
