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Helen Pletts is a British poet based in Cambridge, whose work has been translated into Chinese, Bangla, Greek, Vietnamese, Serbian, Korean, Arabic, Croatian, Italian, and Romanian. She is the English co-translator of Chinese poet Ma Yongbo.
Helen's poetry has garnered significant recognition, including five shortlistings for the Bridport Poetry Prize (2018, 2019, 2022, 2023, 2024), two longlistings for The Rialto Nature & Place Prize (2018, 2022), a longlisting for the Ginkgo Prize (2019), a longlisting for the National Poetry Competition (2022), 2nd Prize in the Plaza Prose Poetry Competition (2022-23), and a shortlisting for the Plaza Prose Poetry Competition (2023-24).
Her three collections include the illustrated 'your eye protects the soft-toed snow drop', with Romit Berger (2022, ISBN 978-9-657-68177-0, Gama Poetry) and two early collections ‘Bottle bank' (2008 ISBN 978-1-84923-119-0), and ‘For the chiding dove' (2009, ISBN 978-1-84923-485-6) published by YWO/Legend Press with Arts Council support. Her prizewinning prose poetry features in The Plaza Prizes anthologies, and her eco-poetry appears in anthologies from Open Shutter Press and Fly on the Wall Press. Her work is widely published in international journals such as International Times, Vox Populi, Ink Sweat and Tears, Aesthetica, Orbis, The Mackinaw, Cambridge Poetry, The Fenland Reed, Poetry on the Lake, Polismagazino.gr, europeanpoetry.com, Verse-Virtual.org, Magique Publishing, Primlore.com, Deshusa.com, Verseum Literary, Stigmalogou.gr, Area Felix, sindhcourier.com, www.cnpnews.co.kr. In Chinese translation by Ma Yongbo —New World Poetry, Literary World, Prose Poetry, Silver, Poetry Reference.
Ma Yongbo 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, making contributions that fill gaps, the various postmodern poetry schools in Chinese are mostly guided by his poetics and translation.
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, Rosanna Warren, and Peter Gizzi. He published a complete translation of Moby Dick, which has sold over 600,000 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.
Belinda: Helen and Yongbo, I would like to hear more about your story…when and how you met…which one wrote a poem to the other first and began your poetic responses to each other. And Helen, were you learning Chinese before you met Yongbo or did that start afterward so you could translate his poems? You mentioned a book of translations of your poetic responses to one another. Will that be published in both countries?
In the vast sea of people, it is extremely rare for individuals to meet, then get to know each other, and eventually become friends. We Chinese call this "serendipity". I met Helen on the website Voxpopulis. At that time, American poet Deborah Bogen translated three of my poems, which were published there .
Helen's enthusiastic, sincere, and thoughtful comment aroused my favourable impression, and she said:
”When I read the phrase ‘I’m like a child, or like God, who when startled carefully counts his treasures, then calms down’ I am filled with emotion; this happens particularly when I read translations of Chinese Poetry. I can not find anywhere a book containing an english version of a poem my father once copied out from memory for me: Winter’s Night by Chia Dao (779-843 AD). I read this poem every day. It speaks of ‘bare-willow wind’ and ‘cold mountains’, ‘the cries of two or three wild swans’. An empty cook pot and ladle as the weary traveller is far from home. I think this is the poem that most influences my own writing. I just love it so much. How lucky you are to have such a joyful time translating poetry together. I hope that you will post more. In my heart I am part of all things universally, poetry connects us all....poetry is my life. It’s how I connect with everything in order to appreciate the world around me. What drew me to Ancient Chinese Poetry is that it feels as if you are stepping into a brilliant moment, mostly poignant, especially mournful, appreciating nature especially. Living in much more urban environments nowadays, compressed lives, we have a need to understand the immediacy of our lives in relation to others and the remnants of the natural world around urban developments. But that ‘small window’ is my own compass point in life. Ancient Chinese Poetry gave me a sense of the value of mesmerising over the smallest detail and I found this very inspiring. I was once criticised for writing short poems. I ignored this criticism and stayed in my ‘small window’. I am glad to be alive, to be happy, to be mournful, to feed my deer and the black squirrels in my garden. Just now, the wild plum trees are showing their white blossom, our garden is a remnant of old monastery land and has some strange plant varieties.”
What she wrote about the deer and squirrels in the garden particularly arose my interest. This marked the beginning of our correspondence, and thus, everything that followed. Here, I must sincerely thank Deborah. Without her groundbreaking work, my exchanges with the international poetry community through English would likely have been delayed by many years. Around 2023, while wandering online reading poems, I stumbled upon her personal website and was drawn to several of her prose poems. In truth, liking someone’s poetry also requires a kind of "fate". Having translated, researched, and taught Anglo-American literature for over 30 years, and having translated numerous poems by American poets, it is rare for a completely unfamiliar American poet to excite me immediately. Shortly after connecting with Deborah, she happened to buy a copy of the contemporary Chinese poetry anthology Push Open the Window. She happily wrote to tell me about it and even personally typed the poem of mine included in it into her computer and sent it to me, which deeply moved me. I wouldn’t have even known the book existed if she hadn’t told me—it was the first trace of my presence in the English-speaking world. The anthology claims to feature some of the most outstanding contemporary Chinese poets. While judgments of "outstanding" or not are subjective and vary from person to person, I still felt a sense of comfort. As someone who has published over 60 translated works, it is truly surprising that my own poems appeared so late in English. This was also one of the reasons Helen decided to help me translate my poems.
The call-and-response poems between Helen and me began with Helen’s piece “No Hesitation before translating poetry with Yongbo”, which embodies a spirit of understanding, equality, and selflessness. After that, our collaboration grew closer, our understanding deepened, and we became close friends who could talk about anything, affectionately calling each other "Kitten" and "Bear." Building friendship can be difficult at times, but at other times, it comes naturally. I think shared temperament and mutual appreciation are crucial—people with different values can hardly be friends.
From what I know, before meeting me, Helen only enjoyed classical Chinese poetry in English translation. She grew up in a family rich in artistic atmosphere: her father, Mike Bannister, is a quite influential British poet; her mother was a gifted painter; even her son has published writing, and her daughter is a vibrant painter. I believe Helen started learning Chinese to facilitate our translation collaboration. She is extremely diligent, and I sometimes demonstrate pronunciations to her on my phone. My Mandarin pronunciation is very standard—I am a member of the Jiangsu Reciters Association and have frequently performed on stage since my college days. Helen is exceptionally intelligent, so we communicate without any barriers. After 18 months of collaboration, she can already translate some of my poems independently without needing a draft translation from me in English. In the future, I will leave more of my poems for her to translate on her own, without any interference or revision suggestions from me. I fully trust her!
Speaking of the publication of our bilingual collection Night-Shining White, I feel somewhat ashamed. Due to the publishing situation in mainland China, I am unable to publish our book here. For now, it can only be published in the UK by our friend Pete Taylor’s press, which will limit the spread of Helen’s poems in Chinese. However, Chinese readers overseas can purchase our book on Amazon, and for readers in mainland China, I have been publishing my translations of Helen’s poems extensively in print journals and online publications to help her gain an audience. And as long as readers and poets have basic aesthetic ability, they will appreciate the ethereal spirit, unique style, and quiet, inner voice of Helen’s poetry.
Precisely because publishing translated poetry collections in mainland China is so difficult, I currently collaborate with foreign poet friends to publish books: I take charge of the Chinese translations and the initial English drafts of my own poems, while the collaborator arranges publication in their own country. I believe this approach is the fairest, a win-win situation, and avoids the troubles of cultural import and export. It is a rainbow bridge built together by poets of different languages. We warmly welcome foreign poet friends who share this vision to join this meaningful project.
Belinda: Yongbo, when did you learn English? I’ve been wondering if you learned it when you were very young or much later? When did you first read English poetry and it spoke to you in a special way? Were you always interested in poetry? When did you first write poems in Chinese?
Since primary school, foreign language has been a compulsory course for students and one of the three main subjects—Chinese, mathematics, and foreign language. The foreign language is basically English, though in some places it is Russian or Japanese. My journey of poetry translation began in my university English class. At that time, I was curious about what foreign poets were really thinking, so I translated several poems by Black poets. I can’t remember exactly whose works they were. My female teacher came to my desk and noticed I was translating poetry. She picked it up to read and praised me for having a good sense of language. Since this female teacher was very young, only a few years older than us students, and extremely beautiful, I felt honoured to receive encouragement from a beauty, which greatly boosted my enthusiasm for learning English.
After graduating from university in 1986, I returned to Harbin from Xi’an and worked as a computer software engineer at Harbin Rolling Stock Works of the Ministry of Railways, a century-old factory. I was the only college graduate specialising in software in the computing centre and a technical leader. At that time, software manuals were all paper booklets, and I often had to translate them and train my colleagues, which was also a kind of practice. I worked as an engineer in this factory for 18 years and held a senior professional title. I already loved foreign languages, and coupled with work needs, I delved into English books. After all, writing and my main job were two different things. When at work, I couldn’t read literary books, but reading foreign language books was fine—leaders wouldn’t criticise me because they didn’t know what kind of foreign language books I was reading. Haha, so I had a lot of time to immerse myself in English readings. I even translated a book “Brief History of English Literature” as an exercise, and my earliest translated novel was Isaac Singer’s “Spinoza of Market Street”, but all the manuscripts have been lost.
In the early 1990s, I started translating a large number of English literary works. By chance, I got hold of American Poetry Since 1940 edited by Mark Strand and American Poetry Since 1970 edited by Andrei Codrescu, which I cherished like treasures! After eight years of hard work, I published two volumes of translations with Beijing Normal University Press in 1999, with 511 and 717 pages respectively, filling the gap in the translation and introduction of foreign post-modern poetry. These two books of mine were the earliest "post-modern poetry anthologies" in Chinese. At that time, Chinese poets had just started to access the Internet, and my translations inadvertently broadened the cultural horizon for Chinese poetry, directly or indirectly giving birth to almost all Chinese post-modern schools. In the 1990s, translations of post-modern theories and novels had already been published, but there were no translations of post-modern poetry. This unintended achievement led me to accidentally become a "master." For example, it took me 23 years to finally publish the Chinese translation of John Ashbery’s works, making me the first person to systematically translate him, which has had a very extensive impact on Chinese poetry writing. In the late 1990s, just when the modernist impulse in Chinese poetry was gradually declining and no new direction could be found, my translations, as well as my own poetic practice, came at the right time, providing an indispensable reference for Chinese poetry. It should be said that they played an irreplaceable role in the post-modern transformation of Chinese poetry.
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Throughout the 1990s, I persisted in studying English with Zhou Zhinan, a professor of English at Harbin Institute of Technology. She was a linguistics expert, not in literature, but the positive influence she had on me remains unforgettable to this day, and I have always respected her as my teacher. I believe that the key to foreign language proficiency lies in practice and application. I once taught a translation theory course to graduate students, using In Other Words as the textbook. I realised that theory is theory and practice is practice—they are two different things. True knowledge comes from practice. Starting from 1990, I almost never stopped reading and translating poetry and other works. I have endurance and diligence beyond that of ordinary people. Of course, the driving force behind this is still my love for poetry. Although translation takes up a considerable amount of energy, its rewards are abundant: it broadens my horizons, hones my language skills, and calms my mind. This last point is especially valuable in this impetuous era, where all kinds of temptations come flooding in. Translation, however, allows me to calm down, because those unfamiliar characters (referred to jokingly by those who don’t understand foreign languages as "hooked characters") require word-by-word interpretation of their meanings. In the process of repeatedly pondering, exploring various cultural connections, and experiencing the subtle essence of poetry, my mind naturally becomes calm. Calmness breeds wisdom, just as still waters run deep.
In 2004, when I was 40 years old, I finally got the opportunity to study for a doctoral degree in literary theory at the Department of Chinese Language and Literature. In the first year, there were also English courses in the basic curriculum. While pursuing my PhD, to support my family, I worked as a planner and translation editor at Harbin Publishing House, where I came into contact with English materials every day. My major was modern Chinese literature, with a specific focus on modern poetics, but I paid more attention to Western literary theory. As a result, my doctoral dissertation was on a comparative poetics topic: The Nine-leaves School of Poetry and Western Modernism. For my postdoctoral research, I studied ecological literature, mainly focusing on American writers such as John Muir, John Burroughs, and Mary Austin.
When was the first time I read an English poem that touched me in a special way? It should still be during my university days—John Keats’ "Bright Star." That should be one of the English poems that touched me the most, so much so that years later, I translated it myself and included it in an anthology. During my university years, the foreign poetry I came into contact with was still mainly in Chinese translations. I liked Ginsberg and Eliot at that time, and also read Dickinson and Whitman, but I truly understood them in the early 21st century. Surprisingly, I translated and published works by both of them, and I am currently the most authoritative expert on Whitman’s prose in mainland China!
In my early years, I read more poetry in French, German, and Russian, but in the 1990s, my interest in British and American poetry gradually took precedence. Since primary school, my Chinese and foreign language grades have been significantly better than my mathematics. After entering junior high school, my overall grades were always the first in the county. My compositions were often copied on the blackboard by the Chinese teacher as model essays. When I was young, I was quite competitive. I participated in regional (a province has several regions, and each region has several counties) Chinese competitions and always came first. Once I got second place, I cried for several days and no one could console me. I don’t remember this incident myself; it was my sister who told me about it. How funny! In both the preliminary and final college entrance exams, my composition scores were full marks, which is very rare!
I started writing at the age of 16, when I was a first-year senior high school student. At first, I wrote novels and scripts, and started submitting them for publication around the same time, but they were never accepted, so I mainly turned to writing poetry. When I entered university, I initially wrote classical-style poems, filling two notebooks. Once, on an impulse, I gave them to a girl, and I suppose they were long thrown into the trash. I can’t even remember the girl’s name. Later, I started writing free verse and actively participated in the school’s student drama troupe and literary society activities. The early to mid-1980s was a golden age, when university students generally loved ideas and literature, almost like a second enlightenment movement. I was fortunate to be part of that era and felt like a fish in water. Although I have a wide range of interests, I have indeed always focused on poetry. It seems that Borges once said that if he couldn’t be a poet, he would be nothing. I feel the same way.
Belinda: Helen, I read somewhere your father was a well-respected poet. Did you grow up reading and writing poetry? Around when did you write your first poem?
My father Mike Bannister’s poems have appeared in The London Magazine, Envoi, Other Poetry, Brittle Star, The Interpreters House, Long Poem Magazine and a number of anthologies. His poem ‘Satin Moth’ appears in Best British Poetry 2011 (Salt Poetry).
He was Chair of the Suffolk Poetry Society from 1997-2002. He was awarded the George Crabbe Memorial Prize in 2009 for ‘The Second Scrivener’. He was Chair and Convenor of ‘Cafe Poets’ in Halesworth, Suffolk: a platform and a listening-post for working poets across Norfolk and Suffolk. In 1992 his poem A Fourth Warming was short-listed for the Housman Society’s Poetry Prize.Yongbo has translated ‘A Fourth Warming’ which is also my favourite poem by my father. He has six poetry collections, Greenstreet Fragments (2003, Orphean Press), Pocohontas in Ludgate (2007, Arrowhead Press), Orinsay Poems,(2012, Orphean Press), The Green Man, (2014, Editura Pim), Nine Days, (2019, Orphean Press), The Heart’s Affections, (2022, Orphean Press).
I enjoyed both my parents’ artistic influences but we did not have a great deal of spare time or income, and so it is amazing when I realise that early immersion in art and creativity was very fortunate. My parents were both hardworking teachers, in Bridgnorth, Telford, London, Bradford, my relationship to both of them was influenced by both poetry and art.As an artist herself, my mother had a great love of vibrant colour, in her choice of furnishings in all the houses we/they lived in, the selection of colourful plants in all her gardens, which she lovingly tended to. My father’s books took over the living rooms of every house we/they lived in, books on every poet you can think of. He loves Moby Dick by Herman Melville—Yongbo’s own translation of Moby Dick has sold over 600,000 copies.
My mother’s parents, my grandparents Florence and Harold Howard, would always take my sister and I into Art Galleries as children in Manchester, these galleries were free to visitors and these vast art collections could be explored while it was raining. I was very highly influenced by creativity from 5 years old as a child, dancing, acting, singing, performing whenever I could. I played the piano, flute, tin whistle and guitar. Folk singing in my teens at my father in law’s folk club at a pub called The Meadow, Ironbridge, Telford. I acted as Jenny in Bertolt Brecht in a school production in my late teens. My sister was at art college in London and Manchester so I would go on to visit her and go to Art Galleries, Surrealism and the Pre-Raphaelites were particular favourites. I am particularly sensitive to art and creativity. After my mother’s death, I realised that because I had stopped meeting her at galleries I was losing a great deal of my creative energy without her spontaneity, arranging visits to exhibitions. The last exhibition we saw together was Bonnard, at the Tate Gallery, London, Autumn 2019. My own creative journey is largely just reactive to nature and other creativity, I am very independent in my thinking. As a small child, about five years old, I used to hang around in my mother’s art room and just enjoy the art and her presence, in later years she was my art teacher, in Junior School and later in Secondary School, where she was Head Art Teacher at Madeley Court Comprehensive School. I grew up immersed in art. I can remember sewing the spine of an early writing notebook, with my mum, drawing the pencil lines on a blank page and writing an early poem in it - about a polar bear. I made a poetry book for my father in my late teens, glued an image from The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam onto a plain ledger for him. We encouraged each other to write, but I had my first job at fifteen, I have never had enough time to concentrate on writing. I only started to do this in 2005. In 2006, I was longlisted for The Bridport Poetry Prize. It did make me think I should be more serious about writing. I love the detail in everything around me, I don’t really sit down to begin to write, I am writing in my head before I sit down, so the response poetry to Yongbo’s existence is very natural to me. The detail of Yongbo’s life is now part of my world.
Belinda: Yongbo, you are/were a professor for many years and taught English poetry and novels like Moby Dick? How well is English literature received in China? Is it only read by some or by the masses?
I graduated with a doctoral degree in 2007 and went on to teach at Nanjing University of Science and Technology. My first course was “An Introduction to Western Culture”, which focused mainly on literature, philosophy, and art. The second course was “Appreciation of Modern Poetry”, and the third was “Postmodern Art”. These courses were largely centred on Western literature and art. My lecture notes were filled with insights I gained through my own translation work, and I also needed to compile a great deal of materials. Although I came from a background in the Chinese Department, my interests primarily lay in English literature, especially American poetry. Therefore, my poetry courses covered a large number of English-
Belinda: Helen, were/are you a teacher/professor? If so, do you teach literature?
I used to be a teacher, but I wasn't a professor. Before Yongbo and I worked together, I worked closely with graphic illustrator Romit Berger, who was a creative writing student of mine in Prague, where I taught creative writing voluntarily to other expats, whilst I was living there between 2004 to 2010. All the group became close friends and Romit went on to illustrate my poetry for ten years, publishing as Word & Image by Pletts & Berger on Ink Sweat and Tears
We published a collection together of our ten year collaboration in 2022, the illustrated your eye protects the soft-toed snow drop (2022, ISBN 978-9-657-68177-0, Gama Poetry) as a limited edition hardback. I would still love to produce a soft-back, pocket sized version.
I was very happy when I started working closely with Yongbo because although Romit and I remain very close friends, we stopped creating Word & Image together when our collection was published. I had missed this creative close working and once I became aware of Yongbo’s poetry on the 12th February 2024, I became very inspired and I wanted to help him to translate more of his poetry into English. This year, Romit sent me this lovely personal note “Dearest Helen, your wonderful poetic wings are flying high and wide what a fantastic project you have initiated with Yongbo” (Romit Berger, WhatsApp Friday 18th July 2025) Gradually, Yongbo and I became engrossed more and more in translation of his poetry. He had also translated five of my Word & Image collaborations with Romit and posted these together with their new Chinese versions on the Wechat Poetics platform in 14th April 2024 and Weibo’s Micro-Poetry Magazine and these had over 18,000 viewings.
Kate Birch, Editor at Ink, Sweat and Tears, the well-known poetry UK based webzine, has always followed my poetry and her father in law, Charles Christian before her. He sadly passed away in 2022 and I remember him very fondly because he was the first Editor to publish my poetry back in 2007. All my early poetry and Word & Image is archived with Ink, Sweat and Tears. So when Kate heard that I was working with Yongbo she was very interested to see some of our translation together. We submitted our work and our first co-translation was published on March 21st 2024, World Poetry Day . This translation is very early and there was some assumption on my part regarding the phrases. Back then, I thought that a Western nuance in translation was inevitable but after much more training with Yongbo, I realised that, with care and patience, a completely word for word translation can be closely created in English. This is the standard that we aim for, to hear each other in each other’s language as closely as possible. I must have started working up to 12 hours a day, and I flooded Yongbo’s email box with my attempts, which were sometimes so hopeless that he did not even bother to reply. Then we had a breakthrough with a poem called ‘Autumn Moth’, we’re into tens of successive attempts and suddenly he replied, why did you keep changing it, it was ok. I had lost count of how many and track of which version it was that he was referring to. But it never bothered me, I was hooked on unraveling Chinese, and I had a very strange positive result. My stubborn PTSD tinnitus suddenly stopped after two years, brought on after my mother’s illness and death during Covid in January 2021. I suddenly heard the birds singing through glass and I stopped because it was a sound that I had thought that I would never hear again.
After having my hearing tested back in 2021, I refused antidepressants, just sinking in front of the TV watching Korean Dramas and eating chocolate with our rescue dog Sasha from the Ukraine. My two prose poems date from this era 'the motherless club' published by Ink Sweat and Tears and 'The Mackinaw' and 'the night sea defeats my PTSD tinnitus' (Shortlisted for the Plaza Prose Poetry Prize 2024, published in The Plaza Prizes Anthology two) both of which have now been translated into Chinese by Yongbo.
Translation with Yongbo was so absorbing that my brain finally relaxed from the trauma I had experienced. Yongbo had lost his close elder brother Yongping, suddenly back in January 2020 and these two deaths, a year apart had unsettled us both. We talked about the loss and the missing, Yongbo also misses his mum dreadfully, although he lost her decades ago, which is agonising for any son. So together, we were, in fact, our own motherless club.
So it was no surprise when Kate Birch went on to accept some of the Word & Image republished, complete with Yongbo’s Chinese translations 'Calypso' and 'the plane tree entertains the circus of doves'.
At some point, we had a disagreement and I assumed that Yongbo would not understand a reference to Yeats, so I glibly wrote to him that he was behaving like an angry ‘tattered coat upon a stick’ ('Sailing to Byzantium', W.B.Yeats). I actually expected nothing in reply. We are both very strong willed. But he sent me a picture of himself at college and said he looked like an angry black bear, and I was delighted. I live for my sense of humour and he had one too. Somehow, it seemed appropriate to write a poem about it. So I did.
No Hesitation before translating poetry with Yongbo
In early moments, we’re over oceans with Homer, breaths later
we emerge on the banks of the Ganges, dipped garments
in red mud, these same garments might yet be cleansed
drifting the streams of consciousness with Alighieri Dante
already, my father’s aged words ring in my ears, read the Divine Comedy
Helen, read it, breathe it, but I stuck my head in Euripides,
it’s a solace for a solitary poet, the ancient scrapping apart of bodies
it’s the thrash of poetic-loneliness that hoped for
longed for drama, life in unshifted gears. So when in the first on-line
tussle you choose Yeats, as your hero to to bring your mirror image down
how shocked are you, that with relative ease he says he already
knows he is ‘a tattered coat upon a stick’ and then you, continue
to code crack, wisecrack ever-present, how the words flow, bridge
imaginary voids to outwit convention, jokes of the deepest joy,
mirror us through all the past and present poets, we convert them
in our heads, the relativity is endless, if communication fails us,
it’s momentary, it’s as annoying as Ashbery, shaking the dictionary
from the roots upwards to join the sky, to wait for us to ‘meet as far
from the world, as agreeing with it’.
11th April 2024, by Helen Pletts
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We had been translating his Chinese poems written during the years he had been translating John Ashbery and Yongbo’s poems themselves were almost as complex. Yongbo is the primary poet-translator of Ashbery on the Chinese mainland, besides Williams, Dickinson, Whitman, Stevens, and Pound. I had to read some Ashbery, I suddenly realised that as an English poetry reader that I had maybe only possibly read part of ‘Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror’, so I read ‘Some Trees’ and I really enjoyed that poem. My English education was based around English poetry and I did not meet any American poets until 2010, when I was fortunate to attend, by sheer chance, a few of Peter Gizzi’s poetry seminars at Cambridge University, when he was there as the ‘Judith E Wilson Fellowship’. Gizzi introduced me to the work of Alice Notley and in fact she came over to Cambridge to read during his time there. I was not a University student, I had just gone to hear Gizzi read one evening and signed up for the seminars thinking it was open to anyone. It wasn’t but they decided it was permissible for me to attend to. I was extremely grateful.
Belinda: Yongbo and Helen, how do you feel this deep connection between you too, in spite of great cultural differences and political divisions, has expanded your understanding of the world?
I have only ever seen myself as a part of the whole world; one place. Maybe sitting on the sofa watching the images of earth from the Apollo space missions in the seventies gave me a view of where I lived. The earth, the sun, the same moon, the same solar system, the same weather system—Yongbo and I share these with billions of others, with thousands of species of plants and animals. Yongbo and I are are both aware of each other’s kindness and concern about anyone or anything vulnerable; our concerns go beyond ourselves. We are aware of the way the world is, we do not have a naive view of things but we can focus on our writing and hope that people will take some enjoyment from that. We matter to each other and the rest of the world matters to us both. Friendships like ours exist all over our world. Sharing the existence of ours is possibly the greatest statement we can make right now because when this kind of support is there from just one person it makes a difference to your creativity, your view of yourself and it gives you the courage to be a part of everything else, even though some of the things we both learn about the world on a daily basis are very difficult to hear. Yongbo is quoted of having once said “We can’t change the world but maybe we can change the way we see it”. We can certainly encourage people all over the world to write and share their poetry and sharing poetry allows us to make more friends across the world. Yongbo has introduced me to the world of international poetry, my work can now be read in Chinese, Romanian, Greek, Arabic, Vietnamese, Italian, Serbian, Croatian, Korean, and Bangla and this has happened because the poet/translators have often worked with Yongbo before they approach me. We hope to continue to work together lifelong and have as many poets/translators join us on this quiet and peaceful journey.
Hi, I am Yongbo. Helen's words perfectly echo my own thoughts. I have always believed that poetry is an important way to overcome the Babel. Because while preserving individual experiences, poetry appeals more to the universal experiences and concerns of humanity—such as the relationship with nature, the destination of the soul, family, friendship, love, social justice, world peace, and so on. Perhaps it is these shared concerns that allow poets of different languages to truly meet in words, which is more meaningful than meeting in physical space. Here, I would like to conclude with a line from one of your own poems, Belinda. I have just translated this wonderful piece We Are Poetry: poetry "sends the tremors of peace through the stratosphere, all the way to the highest heavens." I really love the word "stratosphere"!
Please provide links where we can read more of your work together:
International Times.It, with grateful thanks to Editor Claire Palmer
https://internationaltimes.it/?s=ma+yongbo+and+helen+pletts
Vox Populi, with grateful thanks to Editor Michael Simms
https://voxpopulisphere.com/?s=ma+yongbo+and+helen+pletts
Sindh Courier, with grateful thanks to Editor Nasir Aijaz
https://sindhcourier.com/the-combined-poetic-dialogue/
Cambridge Independent, with grateful thanks to Culture Editor/Senior Journalist Adrian Peel
MasticadoresUSA, with grateful thanks to Barbara Leonard Harris
https://masticadoresusa.wordpress.com/2025/01/03/moment-by-yongbo-ma/
Chewers by Masticadores, with grateful thanks to Nolcha Fox
https://chewersmasticadores.wordpress.com/2025/03/05/4-poems-by-ma-yongbo/
https://homouniversalisgr.blogspot.com/2025/03/yongbo-ma-china-poetry.html
https://rochfordstreetreview.com/2025/03/03/ma-yongbo-6-poems/
https://synchchaos.com/poetry-from-ma-yongbo/
https://synchchaos.com/poetry-from-ma-yongbo-2/
https://livemag.org/issue_21/ma/
https://lothlorienpoetryjournal.blogspot.com/2025/01/three-poems-by-ma-yongbo.html
https://chewersmasticadores.wordpress.com/2025/03/05/4-poems-by-ma-yongbo/
https://chewersmasticadores.wordpress.com/2025/06/11/5-poems-by-ma-yongbo/
https://medusaskitchen.blogspot.com/2025/01/mobilizing-for-spring.html
