A Poem Typed into My Mac
Seeing an egret pacing along the shore, I typed:
“The egret walks within its own shadow”
As I pressed the return key, the egret’s slender
neck made a “click” sound
I continued writing:
“Its feet must step upon a small patch
of shadow – in order to move forward”
I softly uttered the two syllables, “Bai-Lu”
the words slid off the screen –
yet the egret remained white and well-rounded
“It needs not to see the shadow;
the riverbank guides it, as if guiding a wave”
It walked away, far beyond my sight,
vanishing with its shimmering reflection
“If I step outside, the riverbank will guide me too,
showing me the wind’s path across the water
The egret and I both have dark pupils”
In this poem, I’ve completed one part of the egret;
The claw-shaped prints beneath its feet remain slightly damp
输入电脑的一首诗
看见白鹭在岸边踱步，我写下：
“白鹭行走在自己的阴影里”
按下回车键，白鹭细长的
脖子发出“咔嚓”的声音
我继续写：
“它的脚掌必须踏在一小块
阴影之上，才能继续向前”
我轻声念诵“白鹭”这两个音节
词语从屏幕中滑落——
白鹭依旧洁白而丰满
“它不需要看见那块影子
河岸引导着它，像引导一朵浪花”
它走远了，远至目不可及
连同身上的反光一起隐没
“如果我迈出门，河岸也会引导我
让我看见风在水面上的路径
白鹭和我都有暗色的瞳仁”
我在诗里完成了白鹭的一部分
它脚下爪状的印记还有些许潮湿
A Moment
Morning, day after day
the grass I pass holds a momentary green
A loaded bus moves through narrow streets;
its point of departure was already in winter
Here, a blackbird
dies in the middle of its flight
I live in every moment the flock take off
If I reach out, I can catch a feather hanging in the air
Because tomorrow belongs to forgetting,
today, I linger long and late in this place
片刻
清晨，日复一日
我经过的草丛有片刻的绿意
满载的客车，驶过狭窄的街道
它的起点已然是冬天
这里，一只黑鸟
在飞行的中途死亡
我活在鸟群起飞的每一刻
伸手就能抓住半空中的羽毛
因为明天属于遗忘
今天，我在此地长久地驻留
Translator’s Note:
Lu was born in 1995 and has been living in a small town in southern China for her entire life. She teaches Chinese at a local middle school. Though she is neither reclusive nor drawn to the Western classical, she often reminds me of Emily Dickinson, or what a Dickinsonian life could be in the modern world – a life of concealment, depth, and clarity of perception – quietly rare, deeply human.
Her language is delicate and restrained, and rich in the sense of “object.” The lines are concise yet directive, often with a precision toward concrete imagery. Her poetry carries a certain “lightness,” say, relaxed, light-handed, and a kind of light suspended in between darkness and brightness. Transitions and movements within her poems typically unfold slowly, almost imperceptibly. She often acts the role of narrator and perceiver, while deliberately diminishing any strong sense of immediate presence. As a result, her work has an anonymous emotional tone.
Both poems here showcase Lu’s poetic style and language characteristics. Thematically, they both revolve around “staying” and “passing,” with birds – the blackbird and the egret – each playing an important role. In A Moment, I focused on preserving the gravity of the instant and its philosophical weight. The original poem moves with a terse, abrupt rhythm, falling without warning – like the blackbird’s sudden death, sharp and unprepared. As a translator, I tried to maintain this tension within restraint, using calm and precise description to approach a deeper sensibility, while keeping the abruptness and suspension of the original, avoiding any over-decoration.
A Poem Typed into My Mac is a poem about poetry itself – a poem about the act of writing. The poet observes the egret while continuously typing, yet the language always trails behind reality. This is a kind of “writing on site,” advancing layer by layer, like a sketch gradually taking shape, forming a rhythm in which writing and observing interweave. The poet’s act of writing is at once an imitation of reality and a separation from it. In the end, the egret walks away, leaving only “claw-shaped prints” that “remain slightly damp,” while the poet completes “one part of the egret.”
The poem is also an immediate reflection on the poet’s observation. In the entanglement of language with time and space, some slides off, while some others remain hidden in shadow – and exist by leaning on that shadow. In translating, I emphasized this interconnectedness between two threads of writing. For example, the sound of “click” can be heard both as from the keyboard and the egret’s neck; I tried to preserve this semantic ambiguity, this interplay of resonance and echo. For the name of the bird, I chose to keep its pinyin form “Bai-Lu,” rather than the English “egret,” although they both happen to have two syllables; so that readers could sense both the phonetic texture and the foreign quality of the original.
This poem, as a self-conscious act of writing, is guided not only by the poet’s will, but also by structure, sound, and image, just as the riverbank guides the egret “like guiding a wave.” In the end, the egret’s movement and the poet’s imagined act of stepping outside mirror each other. Poetry cannot fully possess or represent the egret; what remains is only the trace of its presence within language.
It’s fortunate that I’ve been living in the same place with Lu and get to talk with her a lot about her poems – the external manifestation of her deep perception, awareness of life, and lived experience. As a translator, it’s also delightful that I share a similar tone and style with her in my personal writing, or in this sense, the way we live, the way we contemplate, and the way we observe and sense certain shared objects. While Lu wrote in her poem “I’ve completed one part of the egret”, here I tried, in my translation, to complete another part of it.
Lu Jiateng was born in 1995 in Kunshan, China. She is a poet and teacher. She received the 6th Yangtze River Young Poets of the Year Award. Her poetry has been published in various Chinese journals.
Zhiyuan Mark Ma is a poet and translator in Chinese and English. He is a student at Duke University and Duke Kunshan University, majoring in Creative Writing & Translation. He was previously an editorial assistant at The Shanghai Literary Review. His poems and translations are forthcoming at ANMLY, Poetry South, SAND, and elsewhere. He is recently co-translating and co-editing an anthology of Kunshan contemporary Chinese poetry.
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