In the third verse of a poem by Hai Zi, another translator has decided on ‘snow cumulus and maple leaves’. I look back to my own interpretation: ‘snowy buds and maple leaves’. The poem’s narrator, hospitalised by sick- ness, laments the passing of the year and all the days from April to October he will never live out.

I was born in Anhui province where it may or may not snow in April. I was born in Preston before moving on to Glasgow.

In each of our renderings, the April ‘snow’ becomes an image with the potential for something else: a loosened white space. Where the other translator sees white clouds passing over, I see the accumulation of snow as Spring overwhelmed, a manifestation of white flowers – a sky of crape myrtle, sweet osmanthus or white wisteria.

(‘Ma jeunesse ne fut qu’un ténébreux orage’…) From an earlier life of this translation I instinctively ended the poem with the image of ‘two flowers / of pain’, referring back to the two months which repeat in the original. April and October are like two horses, are like two sisters, are like two flowers.

I know as much about the weather in Anhui as I do the weather in Stornaway or Dumfries.

Although ‘Misfortune’ or ‘Unfortunate’ are more literal translations, I first titled the poem with the placeholder ‘Blow’, as in to be struck by a blow, as in for the clouds to blow over, before settling, in the end, on ‘Cruelty’. ‘April days / the best days / October days / better days / than those in April’. I must have had the opening of ‘The Waste Land’ (‘April is the cruellest month’) on my mind: I cannot unlearn this rattling English. It is often said that Pound invented Chinese poetry in the English language, yet the European Modernists also had a reciprocal, sparking effect on Modernism in China. Why are people surprised to learn that translation moves in multiple directions?

The dead poet is unable to tell me if he has or has not read ‘The Waste Land’.

‘Cruelty’ is a short poem on the cusp of transformation; its borders are soft and tender, its sense of normalcy shifts in my mind. ‘Two horses fly over the mountain,’ is the only borderline our two translations agree upon word for word.

The green cliff then falls from the shepherd’s embrace. I think I will revise my line to: ‘The green cliff falls outwith the shepherd’s embrace.’

With every draft these translated lines are reformed — between lines, between worlds, between cultures. To work in that linguistic displacement is to cross at the doubled border through, as Rosemarie Waldrop describes it, an act of exploring ‘slidings, the gaps between fragments, the shadow zone of silence, of margins’.

Does the translated poem ever make that passage from one place to another? A poem dies when it has no place to go but I am more interested in the processes, not the end result. Translation cannot be a nation-state with policeable borders. We slip through its gaps, its margins, those moments of complex misunderstandings and ambiguity.

Are you really from Anhui? Are you really from Scotland?

Chinese-English, English-Chinese, April-October. The hyphenation is a little like a character stroke, like the line in the poem: ‘two horses driving one cart’. Which directions do these horses pull me? Where are you really from?

I was once asked if I felt I had a duty to convey ‘urgent truths’ as a poet

of colour. I have no wish to become a contemporary seer. ‘Pull me up onto my sickbed’. I have no interest in proving I am human; I would rather be writing lies with the monsters from the margins.

After I put my pen down, I wanted to ask this poet, is it possible to translate a future where you did not place your head on the railway tracks somewhere in Shanhaiguan on your twenty-fifth birthday?

I always worry my own childish Chinese script will never be clear enough to read.

Jay Gao

Jay Gao is a poet from Edinburgh, Scotland, living in New York City. His recent books include: Bark, Archive, Splinter (Out-Spoken Press, 2024) and Imperium (Carcanet Press, 2022). He is a PhD student in English at Columbia University. 

© Jay Gao