The broad daylight is tormenting the moon in the sky The empty blue of the celestial dome Is excruciating a helicopter My reticence and the colors of a toy crane Highlight this spring its bleakness and brilliance Decadent and nice oh spring graduates From light blue to dark blue and then to inky blue Just like a hypothetical demise The fate of a boy having taken off his mask is He is being indefinitely dragged into the deep water Of a lake abandoned by a white swan last year A deeper blue a kind of spring continuously making A tortured hum and buzz due to the frequent mating Between the helicopter and the welkin A fate containing both compassion and decadency And belonging to the boy Nevertheless I trust this boy and the pacification Of his tempestuous body in the dark blue And believe in the bewilderment he once had After being forgotten by earthly slumbers His tendency towards the inky blue means He is most willing to be dragged down And submerge himself in a truly dark lake Where like facing the final grand finale He aspires for the onset of the bright daylight So as to ask for clean blue from the sky More and denser than the mayflies At the turn of spring and summer Shriving sensually Like a sudden outbreak of cyanobacteria And drooping hopelessly with a tendency to expire Oh blue
Yan An is a most famous poet in contemporary China, author of fourteen poetry books including his most famous poetry book, Rock Arrangement, which has won him The Sixth Lu Xun Literary Prize, one of China’s top four literary prizes. His poetry book A Naturalist’s Manor, translated by Chen Du and Xisheng Chen, was published by Chax Press and was shortlisted for the 2022 Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize, administered by the American Literary Translators Association.
Chen Du is a voting member of the American Translators Association and an expert member of the Translators Association of China with a Master’s Degree in Biophysics from Roswell Park Cancer Institute, SUNY at Buffalo and a Master’s Degree in Radio Physics from the Chinese Academy of Sciences. In the United States, her translations, poems, and essays have appeared in more than forty literary journals. Contact her at of_sea@hotmail.com.
Xisheng Chen, a Chinese American, is an ESL grammarian, lexicologist, linguist, translator and educator. His working history includes: adjunct professor at the Departments of English and Social Sciences of Trine University (formerly Tri-State University), Angola, Indiana. As a translator for over three decades, he has published many translations in various fields in newspapers and journals in China and abroad.
Chen Du's and Xisheng Chen's translation of "How to Transform Into an Urbanite" and "Spring or Blue" by Yan An and eight other poems were longlisted by the 2021 John Dryden Translation Competition.
