Translation Notes
Lu Jiateng is a contemporary Chinese poet from Kunshan, in the Jiangnan region. It is a landscape shaped by waterways and ancient towns, and her work grows directly out of this environment. She pays attention to minor sounds, overlooked images, and the small textures of ordinary life. Both of these poems are about time and memory, about life and details that are intensely specific and private, yet rendered hazy and indeterminate through the repetition and hesitation within the lines.
In October, as the poet “walks down the path,” the only apparent thread seems to be thought and sound. Perceptions and recollections of October drift down like falling leaves: wild berries, osmanthus blossoms, the waterside at dusk, and, now and then, the traces and stirrings of stray cats. “Perhaps it is an illusion of time / that has impaired my sight”, as time passes, experience becomes blurred through repetition. The poet can no longer clearly distinguish the stray cat’s colors and stripes, a confusion at the level of perception that also signals a cognitive uncertainty. The poet does not locate the source of the problem, offering only a tentative “perhaps.” Within this uncertainty, there remains a restrained, self-questioning acuity.
In Think about Those Mornings, the fragments of past mornings are composed of repeated, everyday actions that feel entirely real. “Those mornings” themselves gesture toward a cyclical sense of time. In the very act of thinking about them, what comes into focus are brief and simple moments: a bird’s sudden dive, grabbing beans and dashing outside, a simple syllable called out, leaves blurring across the window. Yet these images ultimately give way to an even swifter forgetting. The poem comes to rest in precisely this realization or revelation.
—Zhiyuan Mark Ma
If I keep walking down this path,
I will never know whether the osmanthus
has fallen, or which part of October we are in
The little grove I pass is charred black
I cannot tell what kind of trees they are,
cannot recall the numbers I once gave them
I used to gather maple leaves
in a basket, replacing their names
with numbers. No one can help me remember
More than once I’ve come across
stray cats on the path
To avoid me, they flee and crush the leaves
making a crackling sound
Their gray stripes don’t look much different
Perhaps it’s one illusion of time
that has impaired my sight
I walk toward the water’s edge at dusk,
from where wild berries fall;
but I cannot see a single cat
neither yellow nor white
Think about those mornings, when all you noticed
was the way a bird flew
It dives toward you from the wire,
rustling the air,
but it would never hit you
Think about those mornings, when you left behind
half a bowl of porridge,
grabbed a fistful of broad beans and dashed outside,
over the stream you crossed each day and night
shouting simple syllables
The smell of wild grass knocked your forehead,
fried beans crackled between your teeth
You hopped into a car,
watching the leaves blur across the window
and in a blink, forgot all about that bird
Acknowledgements
Image credits: John Francis Murphy. October Mist (1902). Dimensions: 22 × 16 in | 55.9 × 40.6 cm. Materials: Oil on canvas. Image source: New York State Museum.
There are several paintings by Murphy that have to deal with mist. There also seem at least two paintings titled “October Mist”. In one, the tree is foregrounded so that it appears in front of the fog, but in the other–the one we reproduced here– the tree is in the background. This technique of the foreground placement of the nebulous & transient against a background of the solid & persistent is found in the poem as well. As Elaine Scarry explains in Dreaming by the Book:
The glide of the transparent over the surface of something underneath is only one way of achieving solidity, but it is such an important way that Proust, Hardy, Huysmans, and Hayao Miyazaki rely on it at moments when the fictions they are composing are very fragile.
The similarity in themes and treatment made this version of Murphy’s October Mist a natural choice.
Translator | Zhiyuan Mark Ma
Zhiyuan Mark Ma 马志远 is a poet and translator in Chinese and English. He is a student at Duke University and Duke Kunshan University, majoring in Creative Writing & Translation. He is a finalist of the 8th “00s International Poetry Award.” His poems and translations have appeared or are forthcoming in Washington Square Review, Poet Lore, ANMLY, SAND journal, Poetry South, and elsewhere. He recently translated and co-edited an anthology of Kunshan contemporary Chinese poetry.
Author | Lu Jiateng
Lu Jiateng 陆佳腾 was born in 1995 in Kunshan, China. She is a poet and teacher. She received the 6th Yangtze River Young Poets of the Year Award. Her poetry has been published in various Chinese journals.
