POETRY / PODCAST
Chinese Literature / Chinese Poetry
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LOVE
— POEM by
Ma Yongbo
— Recitation by
Helen Pletts
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Loving you across a table;
Across many epochs;
Fresh dreams, receding tides;
Wooden flowers bloom under my fingers;
The real sea stands afar, like planed wood;
Loving you through layers of clothes;
Across the solitary sea.
The roof is higher than our raised heads;
The bright moon is higher than the roof;
I love you from multiple angles;
Through layers of uncleared ashes;
We both belong to this door;
Always on the verge of being pushed into harsh winters;
In the house exists the one and only night;
We are destined to part;
Destined to disappear at a moment’s notice.
Loving you through skin;
Loving you through the night;
Gazing at.
….
(Translated from CHINESE by Ma Yongbo and Helen Pletts)
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Ma Yongbo
Ma Yongbo was born in 1964. He is a Ph.D, 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 9 poetry collections. Morevover, he focused on translating and teaching Anglo-American poetry and prose including the work of Dickinson, Whitman, Stevens, Pound, Williams and Ashbery. He has also recently published a complete translation of Moby Dick, which has sold over 600,000 copies.
Furthermore, Ma Yongbo 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. Also, he is the editor-in-chief of the “Chinese Regional Poetry Yearbook” and the “Northeast Three Provinces Poetry Yearbook”.
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Helen Pletts
Helen Pletts is a British poet based in Cambridge. She is the English co-translator of Chinese poet Ma Yongbo 马永波. She is also a member of the committee for CB1 Poetry, the monthly poetry reading event in Cambridge. Her work has been translated into Chinese, Bangla, Greek, Vietnamese, Serbian, Korean, Arabic, Italian, Albanian and Romanian. Additionally, she and Ma Yongbo are joint creators of the ongoing ‘Ma Yongbo Poetry Road Trip – Summer Tour 2025’, for International Times.IT, currently at Volume 30.
Her poetry has five shortlistings for the Bridport Poetry Prize (2018, 2019, 2022, 2023, 2024) as well; two longlistings for The Rialto Nature & Place Prize (2018, 2022); a longlisting for the Ginkgo Prize (2019); a longlisting for the National Poetry Competition (2022); 2nd Prize in the Plaza Prose Poetry Competition (2022-23), and a shortlisting for the Plaza Prose Poetry Competition (2023-24).
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