Yi Feng on translating Li Yuansheng

Yi Feng


on translating Li Yuansheng


I love this short poem by Li Yuansheng because it reminds me of my own experience of folding paper cranes for loved ones. This poem also reminds me of Robert Duncan’s poem “Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow” and the novel The Catcher in the Rye. The literary translation of the title “纸鸽” is “paper dove,” but I used “paper crane,” since “paper crane” is commonly recognized as a cultural element in China and worldwide and is most likely what the poem refers to. In China, people used to fold as many paper cranes as possible to pass on as gifts of best wishes or tokens of love to dear friends or significant others. This custom has largely died out due to the fast speed of life. I translated this poem using direct translation and everyday language to reflect its poetic style. Also, in the last three lines, I shifted the original order of the lines and added a proposition “of” in order to connect these lines in meaning as well as to narrow down the gap between the two languages. The last three lines in the original poem are: “The little lovely glassy house (可爱的小小玻璃房子) / When rocks brought by the autumn roll over the roof (当秋天挟带的石块滚过屋顶) / will every piece of glass remain intact (每一块玻璃是否能完好无损)”. Li is a well-known poet in China, but his poetry collections have not yet been translated into English. I hope that my translation will make more people interested in reading Li’s poems.

about the author

Li Yuansheng was born in Wusheng County, Sichuan Province, where poetry is deeply rooted in the local culture and life. Li graduated from Chongqing University in 1983. After graduation, he worked as the general editor for the Chongqing Daily. In 2015, Li worked for the Chongqing Writers Association and became a professional poet and writer at the Chongqing Academy of Literature.

Li began writing poems when he was still in university. He is now the vice chairman of the Chongqing Writers Association and a member of the poetry committee of the China Writers Association. He has published four poetry collections, all of them in Chinese. He has been awarded the People Literature Prize. In 2014, Li was awarded China’s most prestigious Lu Xun Literature Prize for his poetry collection Endless Things.

about the translator

Yi Feng is a scholar, translator and associate professor at Northeastern University, China. She was a visiting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania in 2016. Since then, she has published poems. Her English poems were published in The Penn Review, and her Chinese poems were published in Lotus (芙蓉). Her translation of 12 poems by Charles Bernstein was published by Poetry Monthly (诗歌月刊). She published many academic papers on modern American novels and contemporary American poetry. She was awarded the Hunt Scholarship in 2016. She also won the Bronze Prize with her poem “Future Is Several Songs Written by Poetry” in an International Chinese Poetry Competition in 2017.

photo by Yi Feng