Translation Notes
余秀华 (Yu Xiuhua) is one of the most widely read contemporary poets in China. Born with cerebral palsy, Yu struggled with speech and mobility, but found her voice in poetry, sharing her poems on an online blog. She became a sensation when her poem, “Crossing over Half of China to Sleep with You,” went viral. Part of the charm is how candidly she writes about topics like sex, but it is not just shock factor that led to her popularity. For me, her appeal lies in the strangeness of her imagery. That strangeness often lies in mundaneness. In one poem, she writes of underwear hanging on the balcony, gutter oil, melamine, the banalities of living that are rarely the subject of poetry.
When watching the documentary “Still Tomorrow” (摇摇晃晃的人间, also the name of the book these poems come from), I found myself in a rural town much like the one my father grew up in, where the strenuousness of life fed arguments and discontent. The documentary captures Yu’s family life, her struggle with disability, her fight for divorce from her husband of twenty years (in a country where it is still seen as taboo and affects one’s children’s chances of marriage), her mother’s illness, and the companionship of poetry. She denies knowing anything about joy or love but writes with longing for the kind of physical and emotional love that she sees as marking the success of a life. My life is a failure, she says, as fame has not brought her alleviation from loneliness, though it has given her financial freedom and a readership for her words. Still we see moments of joy and humor from her as she continues to endure, continues to write of love, and continues to not give up on what she sees as giving meaning to her life.
Her poems often swing between longing and annihilation. There is a desire to live, to experience love, but that desire is also something that consumes her energy. In the first poem, the woman compares herself to an apple that has endured the autumn, while voicing an argument against enduring. The phrase “千山万水” (thousand mountains, ten thousand waters) in the first line of the last stanza is an idiom which refers to significant hardship. In the context of this poem, it made sense to translate it as “fires and torrents” to parallel the earlier stanza in which a star or burning apple (perhaps referencing a red dwarf)1 stands after others around it have gone silent. In the last stanza, “the one who walks coolly over” mirrors the apple or slow burning star which has endured with seeming ease, in contrast to the woman who claims, “I’d rather this tree wither, this fragrance fade.”
1 From Sky & Telescope magazine: “The smallest stars in the universe have exceedingly long lives — in fact, none have faced their end yet. Red dwarfs, stars with less than 0.4 solar masses, burn so slowly that they might live to 100 billion years old, much longer than the current age of the universe.”
—Jingyu Li
Endured the autumn —
She who looks up at the sky and does not dare cough up blood
“I’d rather this tree wither, this fragrance fade.”
Countless nights
the woman stared up at the apple:
Out from the silenced stars, this brilliant burning fruit
She tears
her clothing into shreds, dead-
knots her wrists behind her back
“There is always one like that
who walks coolly over
through fires and torrents,
through many people
caging you in a large silence.”
She’s never paid attention to politics. Nor where on rainy days
a fish carries an island, so she cared neither for geography
Outside the village, the sun rises from another vantage
So long as she can find Lover’s Lane #54
she’ll not attend to one man’s body, nor when the tide recedes
the dead fish left behind
She cares less about death, the increasing cost of grave plots or being
unable to reach the underwear drying on the balcony
And so she doesn’t care about illness until she can no longer move her body
She pays no attention to eating habits
the pesticides on her vegetables, gutter oil, melamine
It’s lighter than a real sadness
And what can you do to me? It’s like asking an expired love
why do you care? He asks unrelentingly —
Looking down, she sees scrap paper in the trash, some bits of color
some words scribbled
then wrinkled. As if never
once white
The one clutching the lamp in their arms
sits on stalks of wheat, the village
is bitter and heavy
The horses came in the morning,
no one unloaded
the moonlight or salt
The one in torn clothes, soul-worn, passes
in front of the shrine
head bowed
The one sitting cross-legged above water
reads his scriptures, leaking water
she who unveiled to him her breasts
is half submerged
A clap of thunder stuck in the stomach.
When does a tree bear buds, from where can a snake snatch rainlight
—wind runs through
midnight’s hour: everything doubles over
How many cries and conspiracies are passed over in a single stroke?
—And my finer sadness
as if fulfilling the night’s prophecy
Often I feel unspeakable delight, as if inexhaustible in a lifetime
Passing through the woods behind my house, I fall into a vast wilderness
Only occasionally I see a few flocks of sheep, a young girl or
an elderly man
At this time, the sky is clear, the wind moves the few cloud silhouettes
At that time, we were sitting on a boat on the vast earth rocking gently
If dusk comes, and the crows fly low, the dark clouds dipping toward us also,
I know then the sky itself will bend over, the seat of god dipping in and out
My entire secret will have been intercepted —
As if I too discovered the place where lightning pools before it’s seen
At this time, a hope of lasting happiness will swirl in my heart
I would let go the friends who have walked this earth with me
If only to be claimed by this wildness
Acknowledgements
Image credits: Jean (Hans) Arp (1886-1966). Dada Brush and Ink Drawing, Torn and Arranged According to the Laws of Chance (1928). Medium: Ink, paper, and cardboard collage. Dimensions: 11 x 133/8 in. The Hyde Collection, Glens Falls, NY, The Feibes & Schmitt Collection, 2021.5.93. : © Photograph by Michael Fredericks. Artwork © 1928 Jean Arp / ARS, New York.
Like the rest of the Dadaists, Arp liked to harp about how art had to be freed from human presumptions. Arp liked to work with chance in his compositions (needless to say, chance never got a cent of the royalties).
There was something fragile and delicate about this composition that reminded us of Chinese brushwork.
Translator | Jingyu Li
Jingyu Li (李静雨) is a poet and translator born in Beijing, China. She immigrated to the states at the age of three and grew up in Wyoming. She studied computer science and mathematics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is currently pursuing her MFA in poetry at The University of Texas at Austin. Her work can be found in The Adroit Journal, The Margins, Sundog Lit, Rust & Moth, and others. She has two small kittens and a metaphysical dog named Doug. Her favorite food is hotpot which she eats on a weekly basis. [Text source: Jingyu Li ]
Author | Yu Xiuhua
Yu Xiuhua (余秀华) was born to a family of farmers in rural Hengdian in Hubei Province, China. She was born with cerebral palsy, the difficulties of which prevented her from attending university. She spent most of her days doing farm work and immersing herself in poetry. Love, loneliness, and living with disability are often subjects of her poems. She is the author of poetry collections, The Moonlight Rests on My Left Hand (月光落在左手上), Still Tomorrow (摇摇晃晃的人间), and other works. Yu Xiuhua was recipient of the Hubei Literary Prize in 2018. [Text source: Jingyu Li ]
