For Whom Are Poems Written
Early risen travelers, sweepers of snow,
mothers departing sickbed-ridden lives,
mountaineers who find wisdom in the wingbeats of a moth.
The tramp leaning on a tree thinks suddenly of a guitar twanging at home.
To fell a tree in winter, someone else must pull the rope,
a singular work
to make the wood into boats, into vessels
for food, well water, crematory ash,
using the profits to bribe a callous hitman
who, however, finds himself in a hesitation like love.
A reader of poetry mistakes the poet’s meaning.
Each gropes for the world’s switch amid her own darkness.
诗歌献给谁人
凌晨起身为路人扫去积雪的人
病榻前别过身去的母亲
登山者，在蝴蝶的振翅中获得非凡的智慧
倚靠着一棵栾树，流浪汉突然记起家乡的琴声
冬天伐木，需要另一人拉紧绳索
精妙绝伦的手艺
将一些树木制成船只，另一些要盛满饭食、井水、骨灰
多余的金币买通一个冷酷的杀手
他却突然有了恋爱般的迟疑……
一个读诗的人，误会着写作者的心意
他们在各自的黑暗中，摸索着世界的开关
Birthplace
People always bring up my birthplace，
a cold Yunannese place with camellias and pines.
It taught me Tibetan, and I forgot.
It taught me a tenor; I have not yet sung
in that register, hidden somewhere, hard as pine nuts.
There are Muntjac in the summer
and fire pits in winter.
The locals hunt, harvest honey, plant buckwheat
because it’s hardy. Pyres are familiar to me:
we don’t pry in Death’s private affairs
or those of comets striking ruts in the earth.
They taught me certain arts
so that I might never use them.
I left them
so they would not leave me first.
They said that people should love like fire
so that ashes need not burst back to life.
出生地
人们总向我提起我的出生地
一个高寒的、山茶花和松林一样多的藏区
它教给我的藏语，我已经忘记
它教给我的高音，至今我还没有唱出
那音色，像坚实的松果一直埋在某处
夏天有麂子
冬天有火塘
当地人狩猎、采蜜、种植耐寒的苦荞
火葬，是我最熟悉的丧礼
我们不过问死神家里的事
也不过问星子落进深坳的事
他们教会我一些技艺，
是为了让我终生不去使用它们
我离开他们
是为了不让他们先离开我
他们还说，人应像火焰一样去爱
是为了灰烬不必复燃
Terror
Reach my hand into a bag my terror has hair
reach my hand into ice water my terror is a fishbone
reach my hand into night my terror is the the entire night
what I cannot touch or can touch but cannot feel
or can feel but cannot touch
恐惧
把手放进袋子里，我的恐惧是毛茸茸的
把手放在冰水中，我的恐惧是鱼骨上的倒刺
把手放在夜里，我的恐惧就是整个黑夜
我摸不到的，我摸到而感觉不到的
我感觉到，而摸不到的
Translator's Note
In the sixth months or so since I met Feng Na, our correspondence has touched again and again on how to resist an alluring but also vulgar tendency: to be the Chinese poet Euro-American readers want. I could, for example, have really emphasized the Tibetanness of Na, cited her book on Tibet, which spent more than a year being “processed” before it was released, but the book was a travelogue. Moreover, Na is not Tibetan but Yunnanese (her hometown is close to the border, and to Tibet), and does not speak her parents’ language, nor does she write “ethnic” poems. The treatment she receives from critics in China, many of whom describe her as the best poet—qualified by the words young and woman—writing in China today, frustrates her, and many of our conversations are not so much about a glass ceiling, which we do not dispute, but how high it is in our respective countries. I’ve assured her that things are bad and worsening in the U.S., though in different ways. Readers can look to Rifle for a sort of metaphor: the speaker does not have the civil liberty to mass murder people. Above all, though, Na is a poet of displacement, migration, and transformation. Look to her figures and see.
