Nick Admussen Translating Ya Shi

Anti-Birthday Poem

Using vague pronouns to indicate the needle in the cottonball, 
he, she, it....
If the sentence is nothing but subjective, then please cross it out.
Thick violet medicine is installing a tiny propeller
between half-dream and half-wake, carrying the hum call of bees,
indistinct but steady—
in my city's red-orange outpatient medical tower, 
my discovery is: the noun of central authority,
aided by monkey doctors whose white hands reek of Lysol,
has sprinkled its syrup more or less everywhere.
Of course, what I am saying, it is a kind of memory.
If you are a nurse, please cross it out with a red pen.
(the subject awakens; being collapses like an edifice of sand)
Today, an early morning dripping with cicada song,
my old mother calls, says it's my lunar calendar
birthday, she will celebrate me with steamed pork.
But the isolated god sinks too deeply into his stage drama,
aloneness can be more than the last act...
Even at a play, it's no good to laugh too loud.
Pah, what I mean is: a simpler sentence
has complexity that you cannot control.
When it pierces the vein, will our vanity get crossed out too?

 

反生日诗

​用模糊的代词指称棉球里的针头,
他,她,它,牠 ......
如果只是句子臆想,请毫不犹豫打叉。
紫色药液,装小螺旋桨,
半梦半醒之间,送出蜜蜂的嗡嘤,
隐约,然而坚定——
同城桔黄色门诊大楼的医院里,
我的发现是:集权的名词,
借助猴子大夫弥漫着来苏味的白手,
把药液挥洒得差不多啦。
当然,我说的,是某种记忆。
如果你是护士,请用红笔打上第一个叉。
(主体醒来,存在崩塌如沙)
今天,蝉鸣滴露的清早,
老妈妈就来电,说已到我阴历
生日,她要用粉蒸肉为我庆祝一下。
但神在一出戏中陷得太深了,
孤独不仅是结局 ......
即使看戏,也不要笑太大声嘛。
嗯,我的意思是:一个再简单的句子,
也有你控制不了的复杂性,
当刺破静脉,虚荣心又挨一把大叉?

Nick Admussen Translating Ya Shi

Ya Shi is the author of four collections of poetry and one of prose, including the celebrated collection The Qingcheng Poems and most recently, a special issue of the alternative magazine Blade devoted to his work. He is a winner of the Liu Li'an prize, and has served as the editor of several influential unofficial poetry journals. His work has appeared in English in Poetry InternationalNew Cathay: Contemporary Chinese Poetry, and is forthcoming in the New England Review. A graduate of Beijing University, he currently teaches mathematics at a university near the city of Chengdu.

Nick Admussen is an Assistant Professor of Chinese literature and culture at Cornell University. He has translated the work of Ya Shi, Zang Di, Genzi, and Liu Xiaobo; his original poetry has appeared in magazines like FenceBlackbird, and Sou'wester. He blogs on Chinese poetry in American life for the Boston Review; his first book, on contemporary Chinese prose poetry, will be published with the Hawaii University Press.

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