Two Poems | Yu Xiang | Granta

Two Poems

Yu Xiang

Translated by Fiona Sze-Lorrain

Love Letter

on a street bench
in a white skirt, with short hair
a girl reads a letter

a three-ton truck drives past her, off from the city heading south

a middle-aged man
who wears flannel comes over
carrying a cello

 

 

 

 

 

In the Delivery Room

in bloodsoaked sun
I open my mouth to devour you
devour
kisses and slaps in the face
tear apart bodies in copulation
wolf down flesh and blood of chaos
devour
erection and suckling
honeyed words undelivered
silhouettes when strolling with someone else
no longer lit by streetlight
like a snail that devours a slug
roots must penetrate cliff cracks like pliers
the Diamond Sutra devours Cioran
Lady Oracle devours Oracle Night
Rulfo devours Páramo devours Vallejo
a centipede devours a grand piano, so
ten thousand fingers
devour Bach
a dictator devours a colony
in the delivery room
O how valid my reason
to devour you

 

Lady Oracle (1976) and Oracle Night (2003) are novels by Margaret Atwood and Paul Auster respectively.

 

Image © The Cleveland Museum of Art

Yu Xiang

Yu Xiang is a key figure of the post-70s Chinese poets and the author of multiple titles, including Poem in a Pocket (2016), Surging Toward Them (2015), Sorceress (2015), and Exhale (2006). Her first bilingual volume I Can Almost See the Clouds of Dust (2013), in Fiona Sze-Lorrain’s translation, was longlisted for the 2014 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. As a visual artist, she has exhibited oil paintings at various venues. She lives in Ji’nan, Shandong province.

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Translated by Fiona Sze-Lorrain

Fiona Sze-Lorrain is a writer, poet, translator, zheng harpist, and editor who writes and translates in English, French, and Chinese. She is the author of the novel in stories Dear Chrysanthemums (2023), five poetry collections including Rain in Plural (2020) and The Ruined Elegance (2016), and fifteen books of translation, most recently Moonlight Rests on My Left Palm by Yu Xiuhua (2021). She lives in Paris.

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