POETRY / PODCAST
Chinese Literature / Chinese Poetry
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The Rain Still Falls,
The Rain Converses
With The Dark
— POEM by
Ma Yongbo
— Recitation by
Helen Pletts
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The rain still falls, the rain converses with the dark;
I eavesdrop on their murmurs;
The less I understand, the more I listen;
At times they blur, as if speaking from afar;
Then suddenly raise their voices;
As though to mock me on purpose;
They speak in a forgotten tongue;
Their secrets hold no bond with mine;
So I abandon efforts to decode their whispers.
I know the Yangtze grows darker, vaster now;
Sand gleams on crimson barges;
Lingzhou and Huanzhou in Xuanwu Lake dissolve;
While rain descends on every Purple Mountain path;
Each trail cradles a shadow-self of mine;
A figure stubbornly dissolving into rain.
….
(Self-translation from Chinese)
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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
A British poetess based in Cambridge. But, she is the English co-translator of Chinese poet Ma Yongbo 马永波. Also, she is a member of the committee for CB1 Poetry, the monthly poetry reading event in Cambridge. Until now, 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.
Moreover, 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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