Yau Ching
trans. by Chenxin Jiang
Two POEMS
Ethical Reasoning Directed at a Steak
If
I had to choose between
eating you and
loving you
I think
loving you would be the better bargain
because not eating you takes less work
than eating you
but love
works
the
other
way
round
Dissolve Into WInd
If you gripe about humanity all the time
and humans decide to off you
that’s only fair
(Traveler to monk: aren’t you lonely?
Monk: by lonely do you mean
tired? Aren’t you tired?)
There’s nothing lonelier than death
I’ve never been afraid of loneliness
so why would I fear death
it’s just a thing that
has to be
The last, after all the other
things you do
(But you don’t know how to be weary
Passing by, you fell in love with the stones by the wayside
you’d forgotten that stones speak of tiredness, dissolve into wind)
It’s just that
it’s over
no debrief
no following up
no explaining yourself
there’s a something that
while being completed
can’t be improved accumulated
inherited revisited
momentarily
can’t blame history
Born in Hong Kong, Yau Ching has worked as an editor, a screenwriter, a reporter for Chinatown newspapers, a translator for transnational corporations, and a curator for queer film festivals. She has taught in Michigan, Hong Kong, and London. Her collections of poems in Chinese include The Impossible Home (2000), Big Hairy Egg (2011), and Pre-historic Documents (2021). She currently teaches at the National Central University in Taiwan.
Chenxin Jiang is a PEN/Heim-winning translator from Italian, German, and Chinese and a member of the Third Coast Translators Collective. She’s currently translating a book of poems by the Hainan-based poet Jiang Hao. Chenxin was born in Singapore, grew up in Hong Kong, and now lives in Denver. She is the president of the American Literary Translators Association.