There’s always a lighthouse, a man, a city — inspired by ‘Deep Autumn’ by Ma Yongbo

BIOs

Helen Pletts www.helenpletts.com @helen.pletts and Ma Yongbo
enjoy translating each other’s poetry. They are currently working on
their first forthcoming bilingual book with Pete Taylor at Open Shutter
Press https://www.instagram.com/petetaylorpoetry/profilecard/?
igsh=MXFhZjNybHlzdmdlbw==

 

 

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 organized by the editorial committee of Introduction to Contemporary Chinese Poetry, the International Poetry Translation Research Center, 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)