Spittoon Monthly is proud to present the poetry of 昨非 Zuo Fei, a Chinese writer and translator of shadow, spirituality, and imagination. Zuo Fei marks the first feature of our new format; that means we’ve got a little something extra for you. Following Zuo Fei’s three poems is some insightful commentary from the author herself. After that we have a special critical accompaniment, in which our editor Jack Calder expands on the poetry, hopefully communicating with and enriching our own readings of this remarkable work. If you love what you read, you can support Zuo Fei and our editors with a quick share on social media.
The Poems
Letter of Thanks
1
At last those in robes went ashore
and they said: Thanks for creating
the Atlantic for us to cross
and thanks for making the knees
for us to go down on
2
After leaving the crowd for home
she put the holy book under the pillow
wrapped with her apron
At dawn she woke up
and thought of the weight of Christ’s body
One more harsh winter, she mumbled
If still he hadn’t learned to plant potato
he would grow so weak
that even a gust would sweep him away
And if she moved to help him up
ten steps away, he would look the way he should:
Like other sad men, hunger
just made him softer
3
Another villager dead
On the way from the funeral
she sensed her bones
growing hollow
A gust grabbed her cape at the slope
and she, like a blackbird gliding along the current
arrived at the top of a tombstone
4
No agriculture until the third year
For ten miles she walked
to borrow some tools
from a native Indian
The man rose to see her off at the gate
In his eyes flowed a river of mud
and many a falling giant pine, from which
100,000 soldiers could hardly defend themselves
5
Tonight after the dinner
alone she entered the room with a candle
Why wouldn’t the revolving earth
make the wax run up
Why wouldn’t the flame
burn away her night gown
If nothing more occurred—
In 30 years, none of her flesh or blood would be here
In the 30th century where would she be
in what form and on which planet
6
It’s time to give thanks, she said
while taking off her clothes
Oh, sea of sapphire blue, you know
a whale draws a sailor to the abyss
for no other reason but love
I’ve passed the ship a thousand times
Why have I never been struck
by such a secret love
as luck would have it
So this conclusion she drew—
He who survives must be abandoned
by God, with a heart of stone
Now with folded hands, she prayed
Thank you for letting me witness the shame
Translated on the eve of Thanksgiving, 2018
from the Chinese version made on Thanksgiving, 2017
To the Bones of My Own
Alas, let’s not demysticate the sea, for
What holds this behemoth of water is
But a breath or a will, as
What holds my bones is
But one element, calcium.
Anatomists say there are 206 in a body—
They were my crystal palace last night
In the full moon on the Day of the Ghost,
When the dead come back to visit—
They ascended and descended, glowing with a
Blueish cold I’d never seen before,
Wading through the weeds, begging for the
Bones they didn’t have, as they touched their chests,
What a horror it was to find nothing but a void;
And a small gust would make them stumble,
And the emptiness under their feet was
The unbearable lightness that held them back.
While sitting at a candle in an unusual blackout,
Reading a newspaper about riots not far off,
I heard birds flutter on the rooftop,
For they were, too, pretty much stirred.
I said, hush, will all this knowledge I acquired,
And what I observed up till now,
Help me cherish my bones better?
Probably not.
I didn’t know that
Until this morning you said
That you owed me apologies for
Not being receptive to the attempts I made,
“That’s hurtful though you meant to
Be thoughtful”, you claimed.
I felt my bones start to crumble,
Unsure which broke first,
And which by anguish and which by
Smoldering humiliation. I couldn’t tell.
A huge cathedral goes down in the waves,
You don’t know which bolt falls first.
“The fish no longer investigate them for
Their bones have not lasted;
Men lower nets, unconscious of the fact
That they are desecrating a grave,”
Marianne Moore would say in one of her poems.
What a waste, I cursed, if all bones are wasted,
I should have wasted my bones for a nobler cause.
Nay, my love,
Even if you don’t see what the sea is,
I do, from the beginning to the end:
It is but a breath, a will, or both.
Aug. 16, 2019
How to Skin a Lion
1
Before I capture a lion
I always imagine how to skin it
But wild imagination has worn me out
Such a beast, huge but useless
Think how I’d approach its whiskers
As I do dark clouds
To witness how lightning destroys itself
Now the lion reaches out its paw
And almost grips my throat
Just as its eyes of glory
Turn ignoble due to love
I see through this mortal life
And kneel down crying —
I’ve decided to forgive all those that are to blame
At that time, the lion still had its skin
2
Using the pond as a mirror
The lion dons its skin at dawn
Waiting for the sunrise at six
As it patrols to the tenth lake
It suddenly tires of the border of the land—
All the disputes among tribes, the worries of small animals
And this role it’s been playing, to judge
What’s an ideal political system and
What’s art, which
Entertains people but at the same time
Forbids them to cross the line of shame
3
Safari relieves pain
It’s dangerous to live in a coastal city
When you’re forty-five
For you can be looted to another continent
Even a flea travels around the world
Why should he be confined to a Liverpool garden?
There seems to be no reason
Of course he’d choose to leave
Although he’s not sure
If his soul is able to pass the strait
So before his body is ruined
He’ll haul it via vehicle to a place high or low
Where he can watch a great lion
But how insignificant this pursuit is
He feels suffocated simply by thinking about
How he would chase the beast—
When it turns, smells its excrement and moves on
He will probably tarnish his lofty destiny by following
Every step of the fiction he’s supposed to revolt against
Or by coinciding with all that’s in a lion’s mind
4
The most important thing is to get tools
I need special saws and
Knives of various size, inches in difference
Look, they’re displayed on the counter and
The four walls of a hardware store
You might’ve never explored
In such a shop, selling such ironware
The assistants take huge responsibility
But pretend not to care
The pliers are for a plumber to install
A mirror on the ceiling for erotica
The electric generator is for a priest
On a stormy night to decorate his congregation
And this tiny ladder, my dear
I remember you climbed to the top
To replace a bulb in the chamber
The little boots under your skirt
Cost a hide made by slaughter with an axe
And nails a cobbler pushed into the heels
Then you turned around
On top of the ladder, as is said
“Like a hummingbird screaming
On top of a pyramid”
It was at that moment
I decided to dump all this secular life
And go hunting
5
Who dares to say
He’s never been defeated by time?
Over the grassland comes the thunder
Impending is the monsoon
Hurry up, a lion that dies at noon
Must be skinned before sunset
Don’t ask how I acquired the lion
For nobody can explain this mundane world—
How a revolution comes
Or why you’d love to cry in my arms
In despair and delight, under the blade
Here I foresee the birth of a poem
In grandiose summer, beneath the heavens
In a few minutes it’ll be declared dead
Why must I succumb to a mission
Why isn’t it right to waste this life
And feel no guilt?
Hurry up, the flesh of the lion disintegrates so fast
That I have to turn to all human knowledge for skinning—
Anatomy diagrams transferred via cloud computing
The future gadgets of 3D printing
Positioning time and space in countless folds and overturns
My lord, now in your presence
I’ll peel off the intact skin of this lion
You can take all my bones
Including my skull, but
My skin shall be dedicated to none but the lion
And the lion’s skin to none but myself
June 2, 2019
Trans. on June 11, 2019
Zuo Fei on her poems
Zuo Fei on “Letter of Thanks”
In part it’s related to my experience in America more than 15 years ago. I was in Texas. I had some friends there. Purely out of curiosity we went to a church program. I’m not sure what denomination—there were too many different churches there. Maybe a Baptist church. Every Sunday we went there together with some friends. It was a new experience for me. The people danced, the people sang. They celebrated Thanksgiving. Then, on the eve of Thanksgiving I happened to be listening to NPR. And I just heard some amazing stories about the pilgrims. On that program they talked about some real historical discoveries. Narratives about what those pilgrims’ real life was like. I was shocked. It was so different than the depiction in popular culture. It was really harsh. The people of the whole village, they just died. I cannot remember all the details, but it set the spiritual background for the poem that I would write years later.
“Letter of Thanks” was originally put down in the Chinese language. I thought the language should be really simple, minimalistic. And I had this inner theorization in it. It’s like an argument. You set up a premise. And then go to the conclusion. It works like a circle that turns itself. My own theory—okay if you are still alive, you have probably been dumped by God, because God only takes those he loves best. Like in one stanza a sailor is drawn into the deep sea by a whale. The reason is that the whale loves the sailor. And then I was asking myself in that poem, why am I still here? I’m here to witness the shame. The shame of being. So this is the whole theorization.
Zuo Fei on “To the Bones of My Own”
It was written on the eve of Zhongyuan Jie (中元節), the Hungry Ghost Festival. It occurs in the middle of the seventh month of the Chinese lunar calendar. On this day ghosts will come back to earth, and people make something delicious for them to eat. There is a kind of very traditional ritual.
And then at this time, I don’t know what happened, the electricity in my house cut out. I had been reading the news about the violence in Hong Kong and felt very disturbed. So, I was thinking about death and other issues. Also, because some of my friends have passed away in the past couple years. I wrote three elegies for these three friends, but I haven’t put them into English. This topic of death usually occurs in my poetry. But I like poetry that’s fictional or imaginary more than poetry that’s realistic or related to mundane life. It’s also related to this system of fictional theorization I used in “Letter of Thanks.” At the beginning of the poem I raise a question, and then by the end I answer it.
Zuo Fei on “How to Skin a Lion”
I really like to experiment. I get bored with my own style. Like this one with the lion, I got inspiration from a Victorian era book by Claire Cock-Starkey. It’s filled with suggestions to people about their daily life. Usually about small things. For example, one chapter that inspired me to write a poem was “How to Quiet a Bee.” I didn’t read the article until after I finished the poem. I just opened the book, saw the title and got really interested in how to quiet a bee. Another title was “How to Skin a Lion.” Because those Victorian people of the British Empire, they went on safari to Africa. But again, I didn’t want to read the article first. I got halfway through the poem and then read the article. Actually, it’s about how to skin the lion as quickly as possible because the savannah is very hot. Otherwise the lion will just rot away. There is a reference to this near the end of the poem. But mostly, it’s all my wild imagination.
Critical Accompaniment
Sophie’s poetry is characterized by a constant process of hollowing out. A man grows so thin from hunger that “even a gust would sweep him away.” The dead touch themselves to find “nothing but a void.” The constant movement in Sophie’s work is from vitality to decrepitude, to absence.
This absence is most palpable in the traditional objects of poetic praise. Wild imagination ends up only wearing us out, and rather than calling for some aesthetic reappraisal of life, Sophie’s narrator laments: “Why isn’t it right to waste this life / and feel no guilt?” For Sophie, this process of hollowing out means we are rarely anything but skins. Our insides—dreams, needs, desires—come to nothing in the end. “All bones are wasted.” And at most, we can thank God only for “allowing [us] to witness the shame.”
It is easy to dismiss such a depiction of the world as the product of cynicism. It is equally easy to search for some redemptive moment throughout the poems; perhaps the soothing image of “a breath [and] a will.” But such a reaction only covers over what Sophie seeks to hold open.
Make no mistake, these are negativepoems. Not just in the sense that they leave us with feelings of futility and despair, but moreover that they attempt to express what shouldn’t be, and nevertheless is. Such depictions of a wrong life find no internal reconciliation. If they point to anything, it is beyond the page and to a world that doesn’t yet exist. This is not tragedy, where there is always some Horatio to justify the dead to the living. These poems are somehow silent in their speaking, like the indecipherable murmur of “riots not far off.”
Such poems pose an enormous problem for the average attitude towards poetry today. How many breathy, unctuous words have you read on the back of poetry collections, paying homage to the victorious overcoming of pain? How would these readers and editors grapple with Sophie? Would they not immediately begin searching for a triumphant note, anywhere? One imagines an editor spreading a human skin on his wall, searching how to compliment its luster at his next cocktail party.
For this is what much of contemporary poetry reading has become: the more or less difficult reaffirmation of the world as good. When there is pain in poetry, we expect to find in one and the same place its palliative. You can see a little of the infantile wish this sort of reading fulfills. We demand of poetry that it mother us.
But Sophie is something else. For her, “Nobody can explain this mundane world.” What is, is, whether it coheres or not. Hence the hurried concatenation of images, the dissolution of any syntactical connection between lines, and the surging undercurrent of violence. It is not for us to sew Sophie’s poetry back together, piling offal upon bone in hopes of recreating life. Perhaps the correct response to Sophie’s poetry is only to fall apart ourselves.
Zuo Fei 昨非, a resident of Beijing and university English teacher, runs a WeChat platform (外国诗歌精选) that introduces foreign poetry to Chinese readers. She writes poems and essays. In 2004 she started making poetry in English, but it was not until 2016 that she was actively involved in translation. She got an MA degree from Beijing Foreign Studies University in 2000.
Cover art by David Huntington
Interview conducted and edited by Deva Eveland
Critical Accompaniment by Jack Calder