(1955– )
Born in Chengdu, Sichuan, Zhai Yongming is a leading female poet in contemporary China. She began writing when working in the fields after high school. In 1984 the publication of her poem cycle “Woman” brought her to national prominence. She lived in the United States for several years and once worked as a coat-check girl. After returning to China, in 1998 she opened the White Night bar and hosted a salon, à la Gertrude Stein in Paris, that has become a center for literary and art events in her native city.
The woman in black appears in the dead of night
And wears me out with one furtive glance
It dawns on me all fish will die this season
And every road cuts across the path of birds in flight
Darkness drags off mountains like a corpse
Barely audible are the heartbeats of nearby thickets
With human eyes
Those giant birds look down at me from the sky
In a barbarous air mum over its secret
Winter heaves with a masculine consciousness of brutality
I’ve been unusually calm
Like the blind, so that I see the night in the daytime
With an infant’s innocence, my fingerprints
Reveal no more proof of sorrow
Footsteps! A voice is growing old
The dream seems to know, inside my own eyes
I see an hour that forgot to blossom
Weighing down the twilight
Moss in mouth, they beg at meanings
That fold smiles tacitly back into their bosoms
As night shivers in spasm, like a cough
Stuck in the throat, I have left this dead cavern.
she tells meone’s life
is sealed
in sleep
her gesturestone of voice
and the whole world’s life
exhaust me profoundly
for a moment
her breath of orchidinto
my pineal gland
dozing off
I see the butterfly from a previous existence
returningor not
the first half of my life
battles in my sleepshe discovers
my soul
has takenthe melatonin of fin-de-siècle
Born in the ’50swe speak
Just this language
Nowadaysit’s become comic routines
Served on platescourse after course
At banquets
Those red flags, leaflets
Violent imagesthose
Belts buckled with clenched fists
And bloodthirsty slogansall stiff and fallen
Those victimizers and victims
Will never return
The love of an entire generation castrated
Will not return
Born in the ’50sbut
We no longer speak those words
Just as we don’t ever again say “love”
All articulations, phrases, and tones
Agile as they age at dinner tables
They don’t understandtheir youthful hair
Sparkling under the sun like soap bubbles
Floating around me
They lower their heads in concert
Thumbs busier than other fingers
TextingQQand a hieroglyphic alphabet:
Born in the ’50s
We too must learnthe language flying in the air
All those lost words
Only lived at certain times
Like grapes, goji berries, and dates
Fallen on our bed, when we draw the curtains
As I murmurword by word
My boyfriend understandsthey
Turn blood-red
(Translated by Yunte Huang)