First International Youth Poetry Festival

—Special Session for BRICS Poets to Write a Poem Together

 “This Poem Is Dedicated to Us.”

Birds sing at my window

Pectoral movements guide their flight

She begins to hunt for a direction

Dragon song still reverberating in her ears

Everyone swaps positions on the chessboard

Captivated by the gravity of words

I look for words unused by poets 

How many times I have been a white rice paper

Creating new sounds from words each time

I choose to light up the paper

You make an easy form

Our stories produce parts interlaced

Women are the descendants of the sun

As a poem brims with meaning

This poem is dedicated to us

To my father, who is greater than the world

Far and far away, obscured by the noise

Giant root system of the plant hides great passion

Nothing to ask for but this extensive peace

The boat gliding through the middle

I travel an endless life in fantasy

I use only torches to clarify the vowels

Worth standing on the summit of a poem

Please come together, dear star

When I jump at you like a child

Embracing under the extensive starry sky

I drink you from the honey of a smile

In the glimpse of twilight

Pave the way back

In the shoes of a river

I can finally sleep in peace

In the face of this profound world

The childish me inspires the middle-aged me

I pray for another me to fall

Don't turn on the light, your eyes will guide me

Across seaside hills, bushes and elephant land

To reach the edge of a mountain

When time-warped memories fall 

You are the last fruit left on a crooked branch

For the unknown reader, finder or seeker

Touch the ever soft air

The fire of history closes its doors behind us

All things shine into our hearts

Every dawn, every dusk

And the plain in the distance overlooking us

Street lights come on one after another

Open the door to another life of light

As coming out of a grand light

I will return to you in the form of a river bed

Burning words, bells

Almost everything that can be seen is reborn

I am an ignorant student in this infinite space and time

Let us reunite to be born again

Let us invite the whole world to fall in perfect snow

Listen to the snow falling into the urn of time

Recite to an invisible audience

Sometimes gifts speak for us

The moon stuck high in the sky

Love swims in her abandoned garden

Floating on a boat with no name

Please respect my traditional orientation

The light before dawn

Over the faint flames

Here is an oud, no one playing

A million words hidden in the sand

Take your seeds and your faith

Write another line after many years

Until one day, thoughts like waves

Praise the water in a girl's eyes

Happiness gets shape in sharing

The melody sounds softly and sets the mood

It plays for every moment of my life

(English translation: Hai An & Jin Jin)

This poem is jointly composed on the same topic, each poet writing down a sentence. The authors in turn are as follows:

  Cida Pedrsa

  Rodrigo Vianna

  Nagat Ali

  Ana Rüsche

  Alaa Hassan Fouda

  Júlia Hansen

  Ahmat Zakaria

  Fang Shiying

  Rawan Talal Al-Nmeari

  Zhao Hanqing

  Hu Sang

  Liu Kang

  Luiza Romão

  Prithviraj Taur

  Feben Fancho

  Kianoosh Khan Mohammadi

  Ivan Alekseev

  Sang Zi

  Hassan Amer

  Alfred Schaffer

  Amal Alsahlawi

  Elizaveta Kheresh

  Wang Erdong

  Evgeniia Uliankina

  Sharif AI-Shafiey

  Ma Jiwen

  Mohammad Hossein Bahranmian

  Zhang Xiaomo

  Lubi Prates

  Mangaliso Buzani

  Maksim Khatov

  Wang Dandan

  Yu Tui

  Feng Na

  Huda Almubarak

  Vonani Bila

  Hatem Al-hehri

  Xiong Yan

  Edrees Bakhtiari

  Aditya Shukla

  Jiang Ting

  Mxolisi Nyezwa

  Yang Biwei

  Tsegaye Girmay

  Sultan Aldeet

  Liang Shuzheng

  Maksim Dremov

  Tan Xiao

  Hafez Azimi Kalkhuran

  Viacheslav Glazyrin

  Xiao Shui

  Zhang Ergun

  Seife Temam

  Dai Weina

  Li Xiaoyang

  Fatima Badr

  Nian Weiyang

  Alireza Ghazveh

  Ahmed Yamani

  Hassan Alnajjar

  Enock Shishenge

  Andrei Cherkasov

  Thiago Moraes

  Shaikha Almteiri

  Lu Shan

  Feben Fancho

  Nikhilesh Mishra

  Parvathy Salil

  Mohamed Elmotayam

  Lü Zhouhang

  Gaireyah Fredericks

  Gautam Vegda

Background Information:

“The Youth Poetry Festival” and First International Youth Poetry Festival

“The Youth Poetry Festival” is the most influential long-term poetry activity in China, founded in 1980 by China's largest circulative and most influential magazine Poetry Monthly. “The Youth Poetry Festival”, basically held once year after year, has become the cradle of Chinese young poets growth. The poetry festival has played an important role in promoting the prosperity and development of contemporary Chinese poetry, exploring and cultivating excellent young poets, promoting excellent poetry works and optimizing poetry ecology. Since its inception, more than 570 outstanding young poets from various regions and ethnic groups have participated in the festival, many of which have extensive international influence and written into the history of contemporary Chinese representative poets. “The Youth Poetry Festival” has a wide influence overseas, and many foreign poets and sinologists regard the festival as an important window to understand and explore the trend and change of Chinese poetry.

Poetry is the pearl on the laurel of literature. Poetry belongs to generation after generation of young people. History is like a long river, but poetry is always young, poets are always young. In 2024, Poetry Monthly will hold the 40th “Youth Poetry Festival” in Kaifeng (called Bianliang in ancient times), a cultural city with a history of over 4,000 years. In order to further convey the poetry of youth through poetry as a medium, promote international cultural exchanges of poetry, build a community of shared future for mankind, and especially enhance in-depth interaction and mutual learning among young poets from different countries, the Chinese Writers Association (CWA) will hold the first International Youth Poetry Festival - Special Session for BRICS Countries in Hangzhou and Beijing in July 2024.

"A bosom friend afar brings a distant land near."

On July 18, more than 70 influential young poets from 10 countries will participate in the poetry festival. Through a series of activities such as theme forums, poetry recitations and cultural visits, the poetry festival will promote the friendship among international poets, promote the growth of international young poets, and deepen the understanding of China's excellent traditional culture and the culture of the new era. The first International Youth Poetry Festival - Special Session for BRICS Countries will certainly make positive efforts and exploration to further promote the international poetry exchange.

Bios of English Translators——

      Hai An (海岸), poet, translator, member of Literary Translation Research Center of Fudan University/ Center for Creative Writing in Chinese and Foreign Languages , expert member of Translation Academy of CIPG, Executive director of Shanghai Translators Association. Publication books: The Centennial Collection of Chinese and Western Poetry Translation (funded by the Shanghai Cultural Development Fund in 2007), Dylan Thomas: A Critical Reader (nominated for the 2022-2023 Shanghai Book Award). Representative translation books: The Frontier Tide: Contemporary Chinese Poetry, Point Editions, 2009), Beckett's Complete Works: Collected Poems (co-translated, 2016), Don't Go Gentle Into That Good Night: Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas 1934-1952 (2022), etc. In 2023, he was the winner of “Poetry Travels Thousands of Miles - The First International Bilingual Poetry Award - Translation Achievement Award”. Now he serves as the chief editor of English and Chinese Medical Dictionary (4th edition), College of Foreign Languages and Literatures, Fudan University.

      Jin Jin (今今) is a poet and artist from Shanghai, her inter-disciplinary work birthed from poetry, realizing itself in various forms of docu-poetics: unheard soundscapes, unspoken memories, the taboos in our most intimate relationships, the tensions between mothers/daughters. Her work moves between poetry, experimental film, sound Installations, and performance — seeking to hear what lies beneath ordinary reality, creating a poetics of witness through echoes and stutters and dialect. In 2017, she traveled for a year as a Thomas J. Watson Fellow recording docu-poems with women dislocated cross nine countries. She taught as an adjunct professor at NYU, where she was a Lillian Vernon Fellow and received the Art of Future Imaginations Grant. She is the 2020 winner of the Poetry Society of America's George Bogin Memorial Award and was named by Forbes as Top 100 Most Influential Chinese in 2023. Her research art project "Percussion" is now on display at Hao Art Museum in Shanghai.

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