Poem by Yang Lian

Translated by Mabel Lee

                 Winter Garden

                                  1

Trees frozen red in snow as if wearing tattered wind jackets

Snow crunches underfoot

As night rushes by with newly soled shoes

Goats fear the loneliness and for their own ears

Transform their bleating into wailing

On the road a cow has just given birth

Is covered in whip marks and lies panting in mud and blood

Streetlights are on early and lovers dark like rocks

Stand there with hazy faces against a metallic spiritual bed

The field mouse is a weary nurse and furtively

Sneaks through a wound in the garden to dream

Flowers pale red flesh preserved underground

Like when a child dies there is always a young ghost

Stars not fully formed lock us behind an iron fence

                                  2

Those who distrust language the most are poets

In white snow roses wilt at birth

And flames are far away from a pair of chilly hands

Winter is busy like a hardworking editor

I am snipped by the sunlight

And bend to smell the worsening stench of my corpse

In the north wind of one person the garden died long ago

Existing for ghosts and finally returning to ghosts

Blue music of tree and tree arises from the sheer loneliness

So the same big snowfall twice falls from my shoulders

Covering the garden I am forgotten

Trudging up to the road I become a mistake

And like a hoarse throat in the light of the deserted street

Chant withered words bearing witness to many years

                                  3

Those with a fetish for corpses love to stroll in the winter garden

Those with a fetish for ruins enjoy

Plotting to drown a kitten in a ditch

Crushing its head like smashing a walnut

They must have been children who had come into the garden

Children excel in trampling flowers

Even the last day is false a scorched wooden post

Pokes slanting out of the ground like a crocodile’s snout

Sky dark as if asleep during the day

Fish skeletons spewed up by the sea stab at us

In dream the fish being scaled alive are stabbed

Are alive under a moving blade

Each body of flesh sinks until too weak to look back

Touch everything tangible does not exist

Yet a malignant cancer deep within grows imperceptibly

A pregnant black woman envelops a raped springtime

A sea of eyes split tree trunks asunder

Swans’ necks arch into stark white underwater traps

Fragmenting the world through the cracked compound eye method

We all become blind ghostly silhouettes in white snow

And exposed to icy winds

Suffer the pain of bones sprouting

Until the garden is shamed into bright colors 

It will be thrashed all life by an undiscriminating season

Bio of the Author:

Yang Lian was born in Bern (Switzerland) in 1955. The year 2012 saw him win Nonino International Literature Prize. In 2014, he won The International Capri Prize. Now he lives in Berlin.

            Click to read the Chinese version