Chinese Women’s Poetry

First in a series

My concepts and prejudices about the East have been plenty.  My year in South Korea banished a lot of that.  Recently, I came across a remarkable collection of poetry by contemporary Chinese women.  These poems had been gathered in the early 90s and translated soon after.  I would have expected poems political, some for and some against the regime.  Julia C. Lin, the American-Chinese academic who translated most of the poems, had worked quite openly with authorities in China, making this venture possible.  I am sure that she might have come across some dissenting poems, but for the sake of the anthology kept them from the light. 

The poems are accomplished, sensuous, sharply observed with poignant humanity.  There are deeply personal poems and many poems celebrate nature.  I find the subjects reminding me of Japanese Haiku, but none ventures into that genre.  I have read Chinese poems from the earlier centuries and this brought me an awareness of the millennia of poetry writing that inform these contemporary words.  

I am an apple

I am an apple.

A small bright red apple.

My smile swings on a child’s face,

My sweetness flows into an old man’s heart,

I satisfy the hunger of a sailor on a long voyage,

I quench the thirst of a traveller in the desert,

I restore the health of a patient who has lost faith,

I give the healthy a more delightful life.

I am an apple.

A small bright red apple.

I am the daughter of the sun and the earth,

I am the chorus of the flowers and leaves,

I am the moon and stars that can be plucked,

I am the pearls and shells than can be picked up,

I am the hardened sweat, the frozen dew,

I am the fire of hope and passion.

I am an apple.

A small bright red apple. 

•  Fu Tianlin  (1946 –    )

©  Will

www.willwilltravel.wordpress.com

Bridgewater, Somerset West

March, 2023 

Source

Julia C. Lin:  Women of the Red Plain   An anthology of Contemporary Chinese women’s poetry.  Penguin books. 1991.

 Longing

Hide away from longing,

Throw on a fur wrap and

    Walk out of a quiet lamp-bright house.

Bright moon peeps out on a small path.

A bare branch

    Inscribes its longing

        All over the snow-whitened ground