Han Bo [China]

 

Modernity Organ 

The contemporary: Sometimes, she
lives in the temporary. Modernity
means Greenwich Mean Time
locked in its tracks, anxiety,
tea nipping at cup walls. Sometimes,
she demolishes fabricated Modernity,
lives in the ​​self-immolation of the thought
of the contemporary: black smoke pouring
toward Russia, progress
awaiting dead things beyond demolition.
 
        (2011/7/3 Shanghai)
 
(Translated by David Perry)
(From “China Eastern Railway”)

 
 
Red Army Street
 
Harbin: crowds boil with commotion, fat boils white in daylight.
Russian trains rendering White to Red, students of Russia
devoured, more night than ever, electrified, hand-in-hand
neon and Stalin forging students of Russia.
 
Eating nothing all day broke poets await white daylight,waiting,
waiting for a juan bing, rail-thin country mother
tightly bundled in from who-knows-where, embittered cursing fathers,
neon and Stalin forging boiling fat just keep waiting
 
poet eating nothing for half a lifetime, a leftover juan bing
haphazardly wrapped: haphazardness does not distinguish, daybreak’s white
haphazardness fattens thirty hours, time’s next round of punishment
waiting for a derailed train to depart en route to yet more waiting.
 
        (2011/6/18 Harbin; 7/12/2011 Shanghai)
 
(Translated by David Perry)
(From “China Eastern Railway”)

 
 
New District
 
The weather report persuades the weather
to obey reality’s ideology: the red deer
obeys the maze of deer trails. Thundershowers
hurl plastic bags to earth behind
the transfer station, the new district resembling
half a box of leftovers, hissing exhalations
add vinegar and oil. The ideology of
rapid growth: do away with datong, the Great Community,
ship off the old society and assemble the new and different.
 
Suburban fields, insomnia weather:
railways pump it out like photocopiers
leaving little space in which to live, light sleep
always sometimes already occupied by plastic bags
swimming with people, shoving, pushing back, seizing ground.
 
The hermit heads into the city, compares himself to a waste bin:
a camera obscura capturing the unfortunate, each and every fate suspended within.
Wastepaper insomnia, to copy datong
insomnia is to be unable to copy wuwei or perhaps even the Tongzhi Emperor.
 
Washed ashore in a plastic bag Buddha
sheds his swimsuit really
it’s just underwear: the elastic band’s bitten deep
into his fat impressing its mark: the old villages
the sole ground of memories come and gone.
 
     (2011/6/20 Manzhouli; 2011/8/5 Shanghai)
 
(Translated by David Perry)
(From “China Eastern Railway”)

 

 
Author’s Bionote:
 
*Han Bo (China, 1973) is a poet, artist, novelist, playwright and curator with a background in international politics and mass communication. He is an honorary writer of the University of Iowa of USA. Han Bo has published Chinese poetry collection  "Borrowing Deep Heart"，"The Western Days ", "Temple of Arrival and Departure" and "Shanghai Wall", English poetry collection "The China Eastern Railway", Russian poetry collection "A banquet of knots", German poetry collection "China box", novel "A life or suite with three bedrooms, one living room and one dining room", and 7 travel literature books including “Following in the footsteps of Dionysus” and “Saints and Graffiti : Travel through heterotopia”. He won the Liu li’an Poetry Award in 1998, the DJS-Poetry East West Awards for Chinese & International Poets in 2012 and the international literary translation award of “Asymptote Journal” In 2019. He lives and works in Shanghai, China.