Ma Yongbo was born in 1964,Ph.D,representative of Chinese avant-garde poetry,and a leading scholar in Anglo-American poetry.He has published over eighty original works and translations since 1986 included 7 poetry collections.He 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.
Line by line retranslation of Ashbery
Waiting makes time democratic, you just said so
Then a white horse ran by, repeatedly running back and forth
Like a messenger passing straight through various rooms from the front door
Out through the back door, I waited like this for twenty-seven years.
Initially it was the honey of distortion brewed in the rooms distorted in your convex mirror
And that gesture was both an invitation and a refusal
Unfolding for me a moment that fluctuated incessantly
A crack that exists, the circulation of water in the ocean
A ring formed by a self-devouring serpent in motion
In between is the void filled with power
This mirror of others reflects oneself at the same time
Allows all the images of leaves stacked in the depths of the mirror to remain
Like a demon in a bottle floating on an infinitely transparent surface
Longing for the light of your face, symbolic stones
They only stop temporarily in order to focus
Forming some kind of meaning, then they are quickly swept away
By the randomness of a hasty retrospective flood
This is more like a dream that a person struggles with but still cannot wake from
Maybe he doesn't really want to wake up
Finding himself in an uninhabited street
In the silence just as the last bus leaves
In the steam, the taillights flicker dimly
This is a climate without scenery, it is something nameless
Moving, appearing and disappearing, erasing some, and then adding some from the void
Adding something, originally the messenger and the message were one
How to receive the infinite return of the Möbius strip
What you have experienced, you know nothing about
And poetry is an understanding of this pain, and also a forgetting
Whether the reward is a reed flute, or separation of body and head
It will all enter a distilled space
Like bees living in the nest of the sun
And these, whether they are enough for me
Pretending that nothing happened, continue to sing
This may be the barbarian plundering in Rome
Defined safe zone, several temples scattered on hills
Let us continue with determination
Tell others the symbolism, and show the mystery to ourselves
The locked door opens, and the nothing inside is marvelous.
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