The News

Ye Hui
Translated from the Chinese by Dong Li

I drive and listen to the newsNow the city drops behind, fields flank the roadIn an instant, pheasants fly off clumsilyFrom dry ditches, like lustful ladies cruising the villageSoft tones on the radioDisasters and murdersNo different than yesterdayThe river distant like a razorbladeWhen politicians standOn the podium made of new materialsI am pastThe dangerous fifteenth mileWhere some of my friends once in a night stormWaited to be rescuedAnd in the gaps of pop musicA few kids are out of danger, elsewhereA fire keeps burningNight drops its curtainBy the lit windowsOn the nameless town, the same life as beforeA gecko in the old atticWatches a spider’s webI, a lover of the quotidianA connoisseur of real honeyRun quickly down the slope, driving slow in the lowlandsAs if in the obscurity of contemplative happinessThe noise grows muffledLike the convergent buzz of lightning and thunderLike another language from antiquity or the Middle EastThis noise reminds me of a faceFlashing before my headlights, in the shadow by the flamesTied in a turban, perhaps not a turbanBut a tattered cloth wrapped around the faceAnd in front of the night curtainIs this face, wherever I saw it, anywhereI beep the horn  新闻我开车、听新闻离开了城市,田野在路边铺开野鸡突然笨拙地从干涸的水渠里飞起,像村上浪荡的少妇收音机里柔和的语调灾难、凶杀和昨天没有区别河流在远处,如一把剃刀政治家站上新材料做成的讲坛时我经过了危险的25公里处在那里,我的几个朋友曾在深夜的暴雨中,等着救援流行音乐的间隙中几名儿童已渡过危险期,但其他地方火势仍然旺盛夜幕伴着亮着灯的窗口到来没有名字的小集镇,一如继往的生活旧房子阁楼上的壁虎关注着蜘蛛网我,一个平凡生活的爱好者一个喜欢真实蜂蜜的人快速冲下山坡,在低谷地带缓慢行驶一如在思想快乐的晦暗之处声音渐渐变得含混如同闪电和呼啸汇集的嗡嗡声像另一种语言,古代或来自中东这声音让我想起车灯前曾闪现过的一张脸,在烈火之外的暗处扎着头巾,或许不是头巾而是裹在脸上的一块腐烂的布在夜晚的黑幕前这张脸,我在哪见到,在什么地方我按响了喇叭

Feature Date

Series

Selected By

Share This Poem

Print This Poem

Ye Hui is an acclaimed Chinese metaphysical poet who lives in Nanjing. His poems in Dong Li’s English translation have appeared or are forthcoming in 128 Lit, The Arkansas International, Asymptote, Bennington Review, Blackbird, Cincinnati Review, Circumference, Copihue Poetry, Guernica, Kenyon Review, Lana Turner, Nashville Review, POETRY, Poetry Northwest, and Zocálo Public Square.

Dong LI is a multilingual author who translates from Chinese, English, French, and German. He is the English translator of the PEN/Heim-winning The Gleaner Song (Giramondo & Deep Vellum, 2021) by the Chinese poet SONG Lin, and The Wild Great Wall (Deep Vellum, 2018) by the Chinese poet ZHU Zhu. His debut collection of poetry, The Orange Tree (University of Chicago Press, 2023), was the inaugural winner of the Phoenix Emerging Poet Book Prize and a finalist for the Poetry Society of America’s Four Quartets Prize.

The Ruins
Deep Vellum

Dallas, Texas

A collection of beautifully resonant metaphysical poems from a singular voice in contemporary Chinese poetry.

Here’s a witch poet walking backward into the future. There’s an architect dispelling illusions and inviting us into communal living. The poems collected in The Ruins rise from a primordial wisdom that resists the quarrels of the marketplace, that keeps company under a leaky authoritarian roof and rubs off its burn, that carves out its own impossible freedom. In Dong Li’s luminous translation of Ye’s first full-length collection, each poem braids myth and mystery, inviting the reader into a liminal space where “echoes of the ancient, the imagined, and the ‘now’ sound off each other” on the page.
—The Cincinnati Review

Poetry Daily Depends on You

With your support, we make reading the best contemporary poetry a treasured daily experience. Consider a contribution today.