information is colour—for Yongbo 致永波：信息即色彩

 in response to an image of him standing by a graffiti wall in CIQKOU, Ancient Town, North Song Dynasty 回应他站在北宋古镇磁器口涂鸦墙旁的一张照片 

information is colour.

Information in scrawl
is like a series of red bolts
holding the wall together,
lines interconnecting,
like edifices swallowing trains.
Whole phrases merge
with built up dynamics.

Flat becomes a thru-path,
letters stack
in the shortage of space,
like squashed up houses
on a tilted urban hillside;
green lost voice between the grey.

We are living in all the spaces,
they are all slowly turning red;
green is a slowly shrinking silence.

The poet is a thought-battery
charging on daylight,
descriptors of energy
flow through him,
then back into the wall
like a red beam

11th May 2025

Response Poetry By Helen Pletts 海伦·普莱茨

Response Poetry Translated by Ma Yongbo 马永波

致永波：信息即色彩 information is colour—for Yongbo

回应他站在北宋古镇磁器口涂鸦墙旁的一张照片 in response to an image of him standing by a graffiti wall in CIQKOU, Ancient Town, North Song Dynasty

信息即色彩。
潦草的文字信息
如一道道红色闪电
将墙体维系在一起，
线条相互交织，
仿佛楼宇吞噬着列车。
完整的语句
与累积的动感融合。

平面化作通透的路径，
字母在空间的匮乏中堆叠，
如同倾斜的城市山坡上
挤作一团的房屋；
灰色之间，绿色失去了声音。

我们栖居于所有空间，
它们全都在慢慢变红；
绿色是一片缓缓收缩的寂静。

诗人是思想的电池
在日光下充电，
能量的描述符流经他，
随后返回墙中
如一道红光

2025年5月11日

Helen Pletts海伦·普莱茨 : (www.helenpletts.com) Shortlisted 5 times for Bridport Prize, twice longlisted for The Rialto Nature & Place, longlisted for the Ginkgo Prize, longlisted for The National Poetry Competition. 2nd prize Plaza Prose Poetry 2022-23. Shortlisted Plaza Prose Poetry 2023-24. English co-translator of Ma Yongbo. Ma Yongbo is listed among the 100 famous contemporary Chinese poets since the 1920s. He is the main poet-translator of Western postmodern poetry on the mainland, including Dickinson, Whitman, Stevens, Pound, Williams and Ashbery.

Ciqikou Ancient Town – As the largest ancient town in Chongqing’s urban area, Ciqikou best preserves the traditional Bayu-style architecture, folk customs, and cultural heritage. Both ancient and vibrant, Ciqikou boasts a thousand-year history.

Short video footage:
3aa6f26b-8aa8-464b-ab07-69dea7b6c7e7

The man in red is reading 红衣人读书

The leaves are falling,
the man in red is reading,
he knows that the leaves will fall faster and faster.
Occasionally, he looks up from the page
and looks around blankly.

As long as he reads,
the leaves will continue to fall,
in the surrounding messy background
the streets, benches and buildings will gradually emerge,
unifying all their minute differences with brown.

He keeps reading,
he keeps growing taller and bigger like a mountain.
He keeps reading until all the leaves fall,
until the snow starts to fall,
and if you pat his shoulder at this time,
he will melt like a snowflake.

2000

By Ma Yongbo 马永波

Translated by Ma Yongbo 19th December 2024

红衣人读书 The man in red is reading 马永波

树叶在落
红衣人在读书
他知道树叶会越来越快
他时而从书页上抬头
茫然四顾

而只要他阅读
树叶就会继续落下
周围凌乱的背景中
就会逐渐呈现出街道、长椅、建筑
用褐色统一起种种微小的差异

他一直在阅读
他像不断长高的山越来越巨大了
他一直读到树叶落光
一直到雪开始落下
而如果这时你拍拍他的肩膀
他就会雪花一样融化

2000

Introducing Ma Yongbo 马永波   interview by Pat Nolan

PHOTO: Ma Yongbo, Nanjing, 2008

Poet Ma Yongbo   was born in 1964 in Heilongjiang Province, China. As a poet, he is representative of Chinese avant-garde poetry. He is also a leading scholar in Anglo-American postmodernist poetry. Since 1986 Ma has published over eighty original works and translations. He is a professor in the Faculty of Arts and Literature, Nanjing University of Science and Technology. His studies center around Chinese and Western modern poetics, post-modern literature, and eco-criticism. His translations from English include works by Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, John Ashbery, Henry James, Herman Melville, and May Sarton among others. Notably one of Professor Ma’s early projects was the translation of Up Late, American Poetry Since 1970 (1987) edited by Andrei Codrescu.

What first drew your interest to literature, poetry in particular? (Were you introduced to it in school or through recommendations from friends?)

My interest in literature probably has several origins. In elementary school, one of the books from my father, who was a colonel, left the deepest impression on me—it was the Philosophical Dictionary compiled by the Soviet scholar Rosenthal Yudin. Then there was a box of classic foreign literary works that my eldest brother Yongping (also a poet) brought back when he left the army. There were also the literary magazines subscribed to by my elder sister, who was a middle school Chinese teacher. These were my earliest enlightenment. In the third year of middle school, my Chinese teacher transcribed my essay on the blackboard with chalk, constantly encouraging me. From then on, I became the best student in the school, and by high school, I was the best in my grade, especially in Chinese and English. In the first year of high school, I started writing novels, plays, and poems, receiving further encouragement from my Chinese teacher. When I took the college entrance exam, my essay received a perfect score—a rarity. In 1981, I was admitted to Xi’an Jiaotong University, ranking first among the 25 students the university recruited from Heilongjiang Province that year. However, after entering university, I wasn’t very interested in my computer software major, so I picked up my love for writing poetry again, essentially trying to find a pillar for my sense of self-worth. In my university English class, I translated several African American poems as an exercise and received encouragement from a beautiful female teacher (if she hadn’t been beautiful, things might have been different). This planted another seed of curiosity about the world. During university, I was fortunate to find a community—I joined the “Sparks” literary society on campus and met a group of campus poets, some of whom became lifelong friends. One such friend is the poet Tong Xiaofeng, who later concentrated on film screenwriting, directing, and production in the 1990s. He is the  compiler of my four-volume Complete Collection of Poems.

These seem to be external reasons. The internal reason, as I now look back, should be the intense confusion about life and death that I felt around the age of six. These ultimate questions have been at the core of my thinking throughout my life. At the age of 11, I had an experience of “spiritual vision” that is difficult to explain in words. I suddenly found myself within the “totality of existence,” directly perceiving the entire universe. The linear separation of time no longer existed, and everything from the past, present, and future appeared simultaneously. Such a mystical experience rarely occurs in the Chinese language, and those few seconds were indescribable in words. It was similar to Gary Snyder’s realisation of the interconnectedness of all things when he returned a book to the shelf in a Kyoto library, or Mary Austin’s childhood “encounter with God” under a chestnut tree… I believe that all my literary and intellectual pursuits to this day have been an attempt to return to that Edenic state of unity with all things that I experienced at 11. From the beginning, my goal has been not just the pursuit of literature itself, but something intimately connected with transcendent existence—though I didn’t even rationally realise this myself until I was in my thirties.

At what age did you seriously consider writing poetry? (Who were your influences?)

I started writing poetry in the first year of high school, in 1980, when I was 16 years old. At that time, I also began to submit my work to publications, but none were accepted until 1986, when I was about to graduate from university. That was when my so-called “debut work” was published—a long poem. I still remember that the payment I received for it was equivalent to two months of living expenses. Starting in 1981, when I entered university, I devoted myself entirely to writing poetry. The reason was that I encountered some setbacks in my studies. I had been the top student in middle school, but in university, my grades only ranked in the middle, which was a bit disheartening. So, I turned to writing poetry. After all, one has to find a path in life, and at that time, I had a vague sense that if I couldn’t become a poet, I wouldn’t be able to accomplish anything else. It seems that Borges had a similar feeling.

When I first entered university, I voraciously read Tang and Song poetry, transcribing and memorising them, competing with fellow poetry enthusiasts to see who could remember the most Tang poems. I memorised the Lì Wēng Duì Yùn and other classical poetic forms, and I even wrote verses following the set structures of traditional Chinese poetry. Though these classical poems were full of clichés, I filled up two notebooks with them. Once, in a moment of impulse, I gave those notebooks to a girl. As it turns out, I can’t even remember her name now.

When were you exposed to Western poetry? (And which authors? And were they only English language?)

In middle school, I mainly liked Byron, Shelley, Goethe, Pushkin, Tagore, and Gibran, among others. In university, I encountered poets like Yesenin, Mayakovsky, Neruda, Reverdy, Apollinaire, Rimbaud, Keats, Wordsworth, Dickinson, Whitman, Eliot, Dylan Thomas, Ginsberg, and more in the library… It’s impossible to list them all. Here, I can highlight a few poets I particularly liked during my university years: Neruda’s The Heights of Machu Picchu, Mayakovsky’s A Cloud in Trousers, Keats’s Bright Star, and Ginsberg’s Howl.

Aside from poetry, Indian philosophy also had a significant impact on me during my university days, especially the Upanishads and The Life Divine. I consider them to be truly great poetry. These poets and works fundamentally changed my perception of the world and led me down the path of modernism, moving away from the traditions of romanticism and realism. Around 1983, I began to delve into the heart of modern poetry. This is a steep and narrow path, but as Dante said, it is the “right road,” and I consider myself fortunate to have found it.

What led you to specialise in US poetry?

Although I read a lot of American poetry during my university years—Longfellow, Dickinson, Whitman, and others—I don’t know why, despite recognising their greatness, they didn’t truly resonate with me at the time. Reading Dickinson made me feel stifled, as if I were trapped in a narrow berth on a ship; reading Whitman, on the other hand, left me overly excited, unable to sleep, so I read him less. It wasn’t until after I graduated from university, as I grew older, that I gradually began to understand them. Eventually, I even translated and studied their works, publishing two books of Dickinson translations: a bilingual poetry selection and a collection of her poems and writings. As for Whitman, I published a small poetry collection for children, which was just over 40 pages, and the most comprehensive collection of his prose currently available in Chinese. Some experiences only occur after reaching a certain age. Similarly, a deeper and more accurate understanding of certain poets only comes with age and the corresponding life experiences.

In 1985, Fredric Jameson came to China to give lectures, and his lecture notes were published in Chinese in 1986 under the title Postmodernism and Cultural Theory. This coincided with my university graduation. His book was quite popular in the reading circles of the 1980s. At that time, Chinese cultural and intellectual thought was still largely rooted in the Enlightenment tradition inherited from the May Fourth Movement, immersed in the admiration of modernity. But Jameson suddenly introduced a group of postmodern theorists like Foucault, Hassan and Lacan, bringing postmodern theory to the forefront. This book had an impact on me, but due to the scarcity of translations of postmodern works, especially poetry, in Chinese at that time, I could only get glimpses through the fragments quoted in theoretical articles. In the early 1990s, due to limited resources, it was difficult for me to obtain original English poetry collections. I need to photocopy them from libraries or had them mailed from the United States. A poetry friend from my university days, Gu Yifan, who was studying in the U.S., sent me The Collected Poems of W. H. Auden, an English Bible, and The Contemporary American Poets:American Poetry Since 1940 edited by Mark Strand. By the early 1990s, there were quite a few translations of postmodern theory and novels in China, but still no entire collections of postmodern poetry.

Starting in 1990, I began extensively reading and translating British and American poetry, along with some novels, and I’ve almost never stopped. It’s been about 35 years now, and I’ve published or I am awaiting the publication of around a hundred translations. Among those published relating to American poetry are The Contemporary American Poets:American Poetry Since 1940 (511 pages), The American Poetry Since 1950:Innovators and outsiders (744 pages), The American Poetry Since 1970:Up Late (717 pages), The Sellected Poems and Letters of Emily Dickinson (395 pages), The Selected Poems and Essays of Ezra Pound (1218 pages), The Selected Poems and Prose of Wallace Stevens (407 pages), Paterson by William Carlos Williams (402 pages), Selected Poems of Amy Lowell (410 pages) and The Selected Poems of John Ashbery (a three-volume bilingual edition totalling 831 pages). Among these, I spent eight years translating Contemporary American Poets:American Poetry Since 1940 and The American Poetry Since 1970:Up Late, which were the first anthologies titled “Postmodern Poetry Selections” in Chinese. These anthologies are primary influences on postmodern Chinese poetry. Besides introducing these large anthologies in whole book-length, I have conducted specialised studies on several major American poets from modernism onward—Whitman, Dickinson, Stevens, Pound, Williams, Bishop, Ashbery, and others. Next year, I plan to translate Charles Olson.

Why am I so obsessed with American poetry? Initially, it was mainly out of curiosity. I wanted to understand what postmodern poetry was really like. It’s undeniable that America is the birthplace of postmodern poetry. As I delved deeper, I became drawn to the strong experimental spirit of contemporary American poetry, its broad absorption of experiences, and its tremendous vitality born from heterogeneous mixtures. Compared to the elegance and refinement of European poetry, I prefer the openness and inclusiveness of American poetry. It seems that anything can be written into a poem, as if Whitman’s democratic ideals have given birth to a truly diverse and unconstrained aesthetic community in American poetry—something I don’t see in Chinese poetry.

Were there any other modern movements that caught your interest? (Surrealism, structuralism, Dada?)

My interests are quite broad, encompassing the various currents of the overall modernist movement, such as Symbolism, Imagism, Futurism, French Surrealism, German Expressionism, and Latin American Magical Realism. Dadaist art, in particular, tends to captivate people’s interest. Despite many Chinese poets having been exposed to Dadaist and Surrealist poetry, it’s curious that these movements did not give rise to a Surrealist school within Chinese poetry. Surrealist elements in Chinese poetry are often diffused throughout individual works rather than forming a cohesive movement or group. This is similar to the fate of New Criticism in Chinese literature, which is largely confined to university classrooms and the writings of so-called academic critics, with most poets and readers not adopting this method of reading poetry. I speculate that Surrealism did not take root in Chinese literature due to the constraints of the Chinese literary tradition, whose two most powerful traditions are lyrical expression and moral sentiment, roughly corresponding to Romanticism and Realism, both deeply entrenched. While Chinese poetry has absorbed the Surrealist exploration of the unconscious, its “exquisite corpse” and automatic writing have never really taken root in Chinese.

I’m also interested in the various schools of American poetry after World War II—the Middle Generation, the Confessional poets, the Beats, the New York School, the Black Mountain poets, Neo-Surrealism, Language Poetry, Performance Poetry, and some unclassifiable poets. Among these, the Confessional poets, the New York School, and Neo-Surrealism have had the most significant impact on contemporary Chinese poetry. For instance, Plath’s influence on Chinese feminist poetry, Ashbery’s impact on intellectual writing, and Neo-Surrealism’s influence on Southern poets. The Beats’ rebellious stance attracted the attention of many Chinese poets, but due to cultural constraints, the spirit and attitude of the Beats—marked by a disregard for convention—are hard to find in Chinese poetry, just as the openness of the Black Mountain poets and the broad inclusiveness of Pound are lacking. Neo-Surrealist poets like Bly and Wright are popular in China because their works often relate to nature, elevating images and thoughts from the context, which resonates with the unity of heaven and man in classical Chinese poetry. Their poetry is refined and comfortable to read, so it’s more widely appreciated.

The spirit of the Beats and the Black Mountain poets, however, is not easily transplanted into Chinese poetry, as the cultural environment doesn’t nurture it. Even if some individual poets are drawn to these movements, they find it difficult to gain momentum and become mainstream. Chinese poetry tends to favour and embrace works that are gentle, elegant, and moderate, avoiding extremes. The core of Chinese culture is the doctrine of the mean—balance and impartiality—which leads to a rejection or disregard for anything radical, experimental, or exploratory. Personally, I believe that the lack of grand, vigorous, and dynamic poets in Chinese literature, akin to Whitman, Pound, Williams (the Williams of Paterson, not the Williams of The Red Wheelbarrow), Ginsberg, Olson, or Jerome Rothenberg, is why the avant-garde spirit in Chinese poetry has struggled to establish itself. Even in the new century, in the era of internet poetry, the exploratory spirit of the 1980s and 1990s has severely declined and become lethargic. What Chinese poetry lacks is not refinement and elegance, but the vitality of life and the pioneering spirit of bold experimentation.

Tell me something about contemporary trends in Chinese poetry (And it’s relation to a “pan-poetics” of world literature).

It is very difficult to summarise the overall trends in contemporary Chinese poetry, as each poet may have their own perceived trends and directions. However, I am still willing to take the risk of offering my personal summary: objectification. Since the era of Tang and Song poetry, there has been an overwhelming tradition in Chinese poetry—lyricism. The vernacular language revolution of the New Culture Movement severed Chinese New Poetry from the classical poetry that adhered to fixed patterns, which is similar to how English modern and contemporary poetry abandoned the constraints of meter. From the mid-1980s to the present, I believe the greatest advancement in Chinese poetry has been the strengthening of narrative elements, using experiential poetics to correct the overly dominant lyricism. However, poetry has not abandoned lyricism; rather, it expresses lyricism through narrative. The stance of the lyrical subject has shifted from the traditional solipsistic self-expression to a voice that identifies the subject as an ordinary member of the universe. To draw an analogy, the previous form of lyricism was akin to the relationship between an actor on stage and the audience below, whereas now, the actor and the audience are mixed together, the stage has disappeared, and the consciousness of the speaker in the poem is merely one of many subjectivities, similar to Bakhtin’s concept of the “polyphonic novel.” I am not sure if this description conveys my meaning. If I were to use a more precise term, it would be that contemporary Chinese poetry places more emphasis on intersubjectivity rather than the old human-centred subjectivity. This is clearly related to concerns of ecological holism and also to the phenomenological “return to the life-world.” Chinese poetry, long known for its subjectivity, is now turning towards objectification, shifting from expressing the self to presenting things.

The history of Chinese vernacular poetry is just over a hundred years old, beginning with Hu Shi’s The First Collection of Experiments in 1920, and its development has always been inseparable from the catalysis and nourishment of European and American influences. Various “isms” have been adopted to serve the real situation of Chinese culture. I cannot elaborate on the specific influences of various schools of thought here, so I will only briefly mention a few: the influence of Romanticism on Guo Moruo, the influence of Existentialism on Feng Zhi, the influence of Anglo-American Modernism on Mu Dan and others, the influence of Russian Silver Age poetry on the Misty Poets, the influence of various contemporary American poetic schools on the Chinese Third Generation poets to which I belong, and even the clear traces of specific influences in the works of many important poets.

So, here a sharp question arises: where is the originality of contemporary Chinese poetry? This question has always troubled me. Classical Chinese poetry inspired the Imagism of Ezra Pound and Amy Lowell, and Chinese Zen Buddhism influenced some American poets. But when I read the works of these American poets,  I feel a sense of familiarity and can appreciate them, but when I translated Pound and Amy, I didn’t translate Cathay or Fir-Flower Tablets. What interests me in American poetry is not its Chinese elements or perhaps the fictional “Chinese imagery” (which may be just a fantasy), but those aspects that are lacking in the Chinese language. Conversely, I have never been able to fully understand what aspects of contemporary Chinese poetry interests American poets. Perhaps what is effective in Chinese becomes ineffective in English? I don’t know. Perhaps true poetry can withstand the test of translation—what is excellent in Chinese can still be seen as excellent when translated into English—but this, too, I cannot be sure of.

As a scholar, you have specialised primarily in US literature (North American English), what are the most difficult aspects of translating an idiom rich language that relies so much on the vernacular?

Cultural differences do pose a significant challenge in translation, especially when I was translating contemporary English and American poetry in the 1990s without access to the internet. Reference materials were scarce, and I was always living and working in non-English environments, which made the task incredibly difficult. The translations of American Poetry Since 1940 and American Poetry Since 1970 were truly laborious endeavours, navigating through uncharted territory and overcoming numerous obstacles. After the advent of the internet in 1999, things improved considerably; much of what I didn’t understand could be looked up online. So, most of the cultural barriers can be overcome.Another challenge is translating puns, which often lack equivalent expressions with the same meanings in Chinese.

I was the first to translate John Ashbery into Chinese, and to date, I started translating his work in 1990, and it wasn’t until 2003 that they were published. His poetry is inherently obscure, and there were no annotations available. At that time, the lack of resources was a major issue; since I was the one introducing his work into Chinese, there was no one else I could discuss it with. Nowadays, the problem of reference materials is largely resolved—there’s an abundance of e-books available.

Another interesting aspect is the use of verb tenses in English, which doesn’t exist in Chinese. So, concepts that require complex expressions with various tenses in English become very simple and concise in Chinese. The word count ratio between English and Chinese texts is about 3:1, meaning that 3,000 words in English translate to about 1,000 words in Chinese. As a result, what would be a several-hundred-page tome in English becomes just a slim little book of around a hundred pages in Chinese.

Also, because of the range of US poets you have translated, what trends or themes do you find in US poetry that surprise you or disturb you?

I have indeed read a substantial amount of American poetry. In fact, the reason I have worked so diligently to translate these works is that I wanted to gain a deep understanding of them. Translation is close reading—no one reads a poem more carefully than the translator. If I don’t record in Chinese what the original English poem is saying, I would forget it after reading it. So, I refer to my translations as “recording” the poems in Chinese. However, to be honest, there are many poets I haven’t had the time to study in depth—my energy is limited. The poets I’ve made an effort to research thoroughly are generally those I’ve translated. I’m accustomed to translating by hand, and through this process, I experience a certain imagined joy of intellectual exchange by reading the voices of minds from a distant land, though of course, it’s a one-way communication. To compensate for the limitations of my personal energy and interests, I came up with a more efficient method to understand American poetry: conducting a series of interviews with American poets. Through their responses, I can quickly grasp their ideas, poetic journeys, and the key achievements and focal points of their poetics. I am also planning to conduct an interview with you and am currently preparing the outline.

What surprises me about American poetry? One thing, for example, is the mixed evaluation of Ashbery. There are quite a few accomplished American poets who have reservations about his “deliberate ambiguity.” In fact, I’ve grown a bit weary of him myself. Reading too much of his poetry can become tiresome—it’s enjoyable to read a few poems occasionally, but too many at once can be overwhelming. Another aspect that unsettles me is the excessive colloquialism in some American poetry, such as that of O’Hara and Bukowski. I can appreciate their work, but I can’t truly love it, even though I’ve translated several of their poems. Colloquialism, while it has its appeal and can incorporate a wide range of everyday, mundane subjects into poetry—even to the point where “nothing is unfit for poetry”—can easily result in a lack of depth and a superficiality, much like Andy Warhol’s diamond dust shoes. In contrast, Van Gogh’s “A Pair of Shoes” is more captivating to me—it carries behind it a vast, meaningful world, just as Heidegger once analysed.

Since last year, I have gradually developed an interest in new narrative and new formalist poetry in American literature, which had previously received little attention from Chinese poets and scholars. For instance, I translated a selection of poems by Rosanna Warren, who doesn’t seem to belong to any postmodern school. Her poetry has a strong narrative element, which bears some resemblance to my own practices in Chinese poetry.

Another phenomenon that perplexes me is the sheer number of poetry awards in the United States. Apart from a few, it’s hard to distinguish which ones are truly authoritative. What’s more, I’ve noticed that some poet laureates and award winners produce work that isn’t as strong as that of poets who haven’t received any major titles or awards. Am I misunderstanding poetry, or is the evaluation system for American poetry, like that in China, plagued by serious issues? I honestly don’t know. In China, for a true poet, receiving an official poetry award is not an honour but a disgrace.

What aspects of US poetry, formally or stylistically, affect your own poetry in Chinese?

I respect all forms of artistic experimentation, but I am not very interested in extreme formal experiments like visual poetry or concrete poetry. To be honest, there is no space in Chinese for such extreme experiments. Official publications always feature uninspired and inconsequential poetry, while underground publications have a very limited reach, circulating only among a few friends. As for stylistic influences, it’s hard for me to pinpoint because Chinese and English are fundamentally different languages. I have invested effort in translating the works of Ashbery and Bishop, with Bishop’s collection translated at the beginning of the century, but it still hasn’t been published. Their work has had a potential impact on my poetic ideas. For example, Ashbery’s meta-poetry and Bishop’s painterly attention to detail have both been inspiring. My primary interest lies in the poetic philosophies of American poets. I have never imitated anyone’s specific language style, nor could I, as we are working with two different languages. What I study are their ideas and techniques, which help me address my own Chinese experiences. Despite my fondness for foreign poetry, I am fundamentally Chinese. I believe that my poetic form and philosophy grow from my concrete life experiences. This is not to deny the importance of foreign influences, but rather to say that if foreign influences remain at a technical level without being organically integrated with one’s own awareness and experiences, the outcome might not be positive and could even be detrimental.

Tell me how you learned of UP LATE and what led you to translate that particular anthology of late 20^th century US poetry?

In the early 1990s, I made a copy of this poetry collection, edited by Andrei, from the Xi’an woman poet Zhao Qiong and cherished it dearly! At that time, Chinese literature primarily introduced postmodern theories and novels, with figures like Jameson, Roland Barthes, Lyotard, Nabokov, and Borges. Before I began translating American postmodern poetry, there were certainly other collections of American poetry available, but none were explicitly focused on “postmodernism.” My translation of American Poetry Since 1970 was driven mainly by curiosity. At the time, I was just a computer software engineer at a century-old railway vehicle factory, with no university background in English or Chinese education. By chance, I began a journey that I couldn’t stop, and as a result, I have been translating for over thirty years! This book was published in the late 1990s, a turning point in the transformation of Chinese poetry. Objectively speaking, it provided fresh material that was rare at that time, and various postmodern experiments in Chinese poetry are more or less related to it. Unfortunately, due to limited conditions, I was unable to obtain the poetry collections of the poets included in this book, so I couldn’t continue my in-depth research.

In the spring of 2023, I had a sudden idea and tried to contact these outstanding poets I translated when I was a young poet under 30. As a result, I spent that year immersed in a kind of blissful state. I was able to get their poetry collections and even chat with them occasionally!

Introducing Ma Yongbo’ was first published on the 6th September 2024 by Pat Nolan at The New Black Bart Poetry Society

https://thenewblackbartpoetrysociety.wordpress.com/2024/09/06/introducing-ma-yongbo/

CHINESE version here 中文版在这里

https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/1_I7GpSaNQEuY2LeEh1Clg

Photo : PAT NOLAN

PAT NOLAN was born in Montreal, Canada in 1943, but has lived most of his adult life along the Russian River in Northern California. He is a poet, translator, editor, and publisher. His poetry and prose have been published in numerous magazines, among them Rolling Stone, The Paris Review, Big Bridge, New Magazine, The American Book Review, Otolith, and Exquisite Corpse as well as in literary magazines in Europe and Asia. His work has also appeared in various anthologies including UP LATE, Thus Spake The Corpse, Out Of This World, and More Poetry Comics.The Random House Book of Twentieth Century French Poetry and Poems for The Millennium, Vol. I, include his translations from the French Surrealist poet Philippe Soupault. Pygmy Forest Press published a selection of his translations of Soupault’s early work entitled Where The Four Winds Blow in 1993. He was also the editor and publisher of The End, a 70’s literary mimeo magazine. He was the founder of The Black Bart Poetry Society, and co-editor and publisher of its newsletter, Life Of Crime in the 80’s. Poltroon Press issued the collected newsletters of The Black Bart Poetry Society, Life Of Crime, Documents In The Guerilla War Against Language Poetry, in the fall of 2009.

All images of Ma Yongbo and China copyright ©  poet Ma Yongbo

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Photo: (right to left) poet Ma Yongbo with poet and filmmaker Tong Xiaofeng, the poetry road trip wound up making a surprise visit to Xiaofeng, in Xi’an, who plans to make a film called ‘Travelling in Words’ about Ma Yongbo and his poetry.

Video: Ma Yongbo, reading poetry during a meal with his long term poet and best friend Tong Xiaofeng and other poetry friends

Ma Yongbo, Tong Xiaofeng (his best friend from all the way back to university days), reunion with poetry friends from Xi’an Jiaotong University where Ma Yongbo studied in 1981.

Waking Up in Early Summer in Chang’an  在长安的初夏醒来

Waking up in early summer when locust trees line the streets of Chang’an
In an inn called “Imperial City Post”
No couriers, no horses for relay
Not even a bony, knife-sharp donkey
No misty rain that soaks the clothes

I wander alone, trying to recall
The name of a certain street. Children
Wear uniform blue-and-white school uniforms, heavy schoolbags on their backs
Only they no longer recite my poems
Nor is there a white screen wall for me to write verses
Regardless of drunk poet friends who once splashed ink upon it

This ancient capital where I spent four years of bitter youth
Has completely erased my memories
Like footprints in water
Swarms of mayflies gather and disperse on the water’s surface
Who was I, and who was once me?

If I keep walking, out of any city gate
I will meet my 18-year-old self
With tangled hair, clutching a flattened wine flask
Perhaps, a scroll of blurry poems hidden in my sleeve
Just awakened from a embrace that has grown cold

Written in the morning of May 13, 2025, in Xi’an (ancient name: Chang’an)

By Ma Yongbo 马永波

Translated by Ma Yongbo 马永波

在长安的初夏醒来 Waking Up in Early Summer in Chang’an 马永波

在长安满街槐树的初夏醒来
在一座叫做”皇城驿”的旅馆
没有驿卒，没有可供替换的马匹
甚至没有瘦骨棱棱锋利如刀的蹇驴
没有沾衣欲湿的雨

我独自游荡，试图回忆起
某条街道的名字。孩子们
穿着统一的蓝白校服，书包沉重
只是他们不再朗读我的诗
也没有一处白色影壁让我题诗
毫不顾忌有哪些醉酒的诗友曾经泼墨于上

这座我度过四年苦涩青春的古都
竟已把我的记忆彻底消灭
如同水中的脚印
大群蜉蝣在水面时聚时散
我曾是谁，谁又曾经是我？

如果一直走，走出任何一座城门
我就会遇见十八岁的自己
乱发纠结，怀揣一只压扁的酒壶
也许，袖子里还藏着一卷字迹模糊的诗
刚刚从某个已经变冷的怀抱中醒来

2025年5月13日晨于西安，西安古称长安，马永波

Chinese link here https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/uIXWWlKIYGSTuQzRK_ShIg

Helen Pletts www.helenpletts.com responded with a poem for Ma Yongbo to celebrate his reunion with his university friends:

Helen Pletts works closely with Ma Yongbo on bilingual poetry translation and response poetry. Her poetry has been translated into Chinese (by Ma Yongbo), Greek, Vietnamese, Bangla and Italian.

meeting friends in a golden light—for Yongbo 与友相聚于金光之中——致永波

evening breeze beside the inn,
resting in the warm blush of a red lantern,
has found grace
in its own reflection.
And laughter rises in a golden spiral,
the breeze is too unhurried to untangle.

13th May 2025

by Helen Pletts 海伦·普莱茨

Response Poetry translated by Ma Yongbo 马永波

与友相聚于金光之中——致永波 meeting friends in a golden light—for Yongbo

客栈旁的晚风，
憩息于红灯笼温暖的红晕里，
在自身的倒影中
寻得恩泽。
而笑声升起金色的螺旋，
风太过从容，无法解开。

海伦·普莱茨 2025年5月13日

Ma Yongbo was born in 1964,Ph.D, 马永波 @mayongbopoetry https://mayongbopoetry.wordpress.com/ ,representative of Chinese avant-garde poetry, and a leading scholar in Anglo-American poetry.He has published over eighty original works and translations since 1986 included 7 poetry collections.He focused on translating and teaching Anglo-American poetry and prose including the work of Dickinson, Whitman, Stevens, Pound, Williams and Ashbery. He recently published a complete translation of Moby Dick, which has sold over half a million 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.He is the editor-in-chief of the “Chinese Regional Poetry Yearbook” and the “Northeast Three Provinces Poetry Yearbook”.

Baidu Encyclopedia entry,”Ma Yongbo has greatly promoted the postmodern transformation of Chinese poetic language in his creative practice, and has long been committed to the translation and research of modern and contemporary British and American literature. He is the main poet-translator of Western postmodern poetry on the mainland, filling the gap in the research of British and American postmodern poetry, and was the first to translate Ashbery, the most famous American poet after Eliot, into China.”(https://baike.baidu.com/item/马永波/10787276)

Baidu Encyclopedia entry on the history of the development of modern Chinese poetry，Ma Yongbo ranks among the top three poets of the 1990s(https://baike.baidu.com/item/现代诗歌发展史?fromModule=lemma_search-box)

Baidu Encyclopedia entry on outstanding contemporary poets, Ma Yongbo is listed among the 100 famous contemporary Chinese poets since the 1920s(https://baike.baidu.com/item/当代杰出诗人/14719125?fr=aladdin)

Read his full Bio in Chinese here https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/ozCYBwEEyGeJ5wRbL6Sdow

Ma Yongbo

Art and literature department
Nanjing University Of Science & Technology
Xiaolingwei 200#
Nanjing, Jiangsu Province
China

Email:[email protected]

Poetry Collection:

Red Bird (Hong Kong Wen Guang Publishing House, 1991)

Summer Played at Two Speeds (Tangshan Publishing House, Taiwan, 1999)

Journey in Words (Huacheng Publishing House, 2015)

Geography of the Self (Zhejiang Gongshang University Press, 2018)

Untied Boat (China International Broadcasting Press,2024)

Collected Poems of Ma Yongbo (four volumes, Eastern Publishing Centre,2024)

Essays:

Desolate White Paper (Beijing University of Technology Press, 2012)

Snow on the Hedges (Commercial Press, 2013)

Academic Monographs:

The Nine-Leaf Poetry School and Western Modernism (Eastern Publishing Center, 2010)

Exploring the Origins of Chinese and Western Poetics (Eastern Publishing Center,2024)

Translations:

Contemporary American Poets: American Poetry Since 1940;

American Poetry Since 1950:Innovators and Outsiders;

American Poetry Since 1970:Up Late;

The Selected Contemporary English Poems;

The Selected Poems By John Ashbery (two volumes)

The Selected Poems By John Ashbery (billingual,three volumes);

Poets on Painters;

The Selected Prose of Walt Whitman;

The Selected Poems & letters By Emily Dickinson;

The Selected Poetry and Prose of Wallace Stevens;

Moby Dick(Sales have exceeded 500,000 copies);

Gulliver’s Travels;

A Little Tour in France By Henry James;

Italian Hours By Henry James;

Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan By Patrick Lafcadio Hearn;

Recovering &After the Stroke By May Sarton;

Chopin In Paris;

The Habit of Being By Flannery O’Connor;

A Wonder-Book By Nathaniel Hawthorne； 

Tanglewood Tales By Nathaniel Hawthorne；

Blue Bird By Maurice Maeterlinck；

The Treasure of the Humble By Maurice Maeterlinck； 

Wake Robin By John Burroughs;

Signs and Seasons By John Burroughs;

Ways of Nature By John Burroughs;

Riverby By John Burroughs;

Pepacton By John Burroughs;

Lost Borders By Mary Austin;

The Land of Journeys’ Ending By Mary Austin;

The Mountains of California By John Muir;

The Story of My Boyhood and Youth By John Muir;

Travels in Alaska By John Muir;

The Bible According to Einstein By Jupiter Scientific; 

Palestinian Walks By Raja Shehadeh;

The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft By George Gissing;

The Medici:Godfathers of the Renaissance By Paul Strathern;

A Moveable Feast By Ernest Hemingway;

The Selected Prose By Pasternak;

The Selected Prose By Rudyard Kipling;

Paterson By William Carlos Williams;

The Selected Poems and Essays By Ezra Pound;

The Selected Poems By Amy Lowell;

The Selected Poems  By Rosanna Warren;

Reading Poetry with Children;

The Selected Poems  By TR Hummer;

etc.

Editor-in-Chief

Annual Anthology of Poems Most Suitable for Middle School Students (2008, 2010)

Northeast Three Provinces Poetry Yearbook (2005 Edition, 2006-2007 Edition, 2008-2009 Edition, 2015-2017 Edition)

Chinese Regional Poetry Yearbook (Shanghai Oriental Publishing Center, 2017 Edition)

21st Century Chinese Classic Poetry Series (Zhejiang Gongshang University Press, 2018 Edition)

Titles and Awards

In 2018, awarded the First Prize of the Translation Award at the 5th China Contemporary Poetry Prize. In the same year, elected President of the Xi’an Jiaotong University Alumni Literary Association.

The China Contemporary Poetry Prize is a large-scale award organised by the editorial committee of Introduction to Contemporary Chinese Poetry, the International Poetry Translation Research Centre, and the World Poets magazine in hybrid language. Established in 2010, the event has received active participation, support, and attention from millions of online readers, as well as poets, critics, translators, and scholars. The citation for the award reads: “Ma Yongbo is dedicated to both poetry creation and translation, and his translations complete the transformation of poetry across different cultural contexts and languages. In his own poetry, he speaks for himself, and as a translator, he speaks through others, thus enriching the texture and voice of his poetry, between the two banks of the river of language. He states that his goal is to be a dutiful ferryman.”

In 2012, elected Vice President of the Jiangsu Province Chinese Poetics Research Association.

In 2004, his translated work Kiss and Confession won the Third Prize for Outstanding Social Science Research Achievements in Heilongjiang Province.

In 2002, his translated work Contemporary American Poets: American Poetry Since 1940 won the First Prize for Outstanding Translation Achievements from the Heilongjiang Province Translators Association.

In 2001, he won the First Prize in the Poetry Forest magazine’s “The Heavenly Questions” Poetry Award.

In 1998, won the First Prize at the 6th China Railway Literature Awards.

Poets and scholars’ evaluations of Ma Yongbo’s poetry

Writing a few good poems in a lifetime is not difficult; what is difficult is dedicating all one’s days to writing poetry. Yongbo’s steadfast devotion to contemporary Chinese poetry, akin to martyrdom, has elevated him to a unique spiritual pinnacle. Both of us have once staked everything on poetry, defying the tides of the mundane world, but reaching the shore is clearly beyond human effort, let alone claiming the high ground. I have come to believe that a higher spiritual essence, beyond human comprehension, has chosen Yongbo, enabling him to consistently create unique texts that the ordinary world cannot construct—what we call “Ma Yongbo’s Poetry.”

— Gu Yifan (Founder of Blue Ocean Television, Poet, Ph.D., Professor)

From being confined to fixed positions (ideological centrism, enlightenment, deconstruction) to constructing a poetry oriented toward the essence of things, this marks the most significant turning point in contemporary Chinese poetry. As a representative figure driving this transformation, Ma Yongbo’s greatest contribution to Chinese poetry is his use of diverse linguistic experiments to create complex structures, leading the traditionally simplistic Chinese language toward self-reference and self-reflection. This enables Chinese poetry to not only articulate the world but also introspect. This revolution in Chinese language, driven by the revolution in Chinese poetry, will inevitably alter the way Chinese people think.

— “Poetry Oriented Toward the Essence of Things” (Wang Xiaohua, Ph.D., Professor)

From the distant northeast comes a resonant, dark, cold, and unrestrained chime, echoing in all directions. Ma Yongbo’s poetry stands in stark contrast to the cultural styles of regions like Qi and Lu, Jing and Chu, Ba and Shu, Wu and Yue, and Taiwan and Fujian, carving out a unique and distinct path.In Ma Yongbo’s poetry, one can feel an insatiable hunger for exploring the true essence of existence—no trace of luck, no longing for redemption. The harsh reality of life without room for alteration has forged in Ma Yongbo the courage and determination to confront existence head-on. Through layers of revelation and internal and external reflection, his polyphonic writing penetrates darkness and silence, illuminating both death and life, all while exuding an incomparable, bone-chilling coldness.His poetry is austere and magnanimous, with a robust spiritual presence and a vast magnetic field, imbued with the crisp and clear essence of the northern cold lands. It has opened up an immeasurable and mysterious poetic realm for Chinese poetry.

— “The Secret of Polyphony—An Analysis of Ma Yongbo’s Poetic Art Through Multiple Perspectives” (Huang Liang, Poet, Critic, Taiwan)

All images copyright ©  poet Ma Yongbo